and crud i don’t want to be too defensive either but …
i can’t see how this was unbalanced in an unfair way (i think all games when it comes to monday morning quarterbacking can be kind of looked at). shoot if hardly reveals and then does’t peruse the forbidden thread and story comes back and does what he said he was going to do it’s a town slam dunk.
i don’t think poor play means a game is unbalanced.
To be fair, the pointing instructions explicitly mention power combinations and how they need to be accounted.
Overall, I agree though. JSP is a starting point.
storyteller’s games are very difficult to balance because they are so non-typical. JSP doesn’t cover it adequately. Balancing those takes much time and thought about different combinations and what-if scenarios.
I would still give the moderator discretion as to accidental versus deliberate actions. Discretion that does not depend on game state is tolerable.
I have no compunction against punishing an entire team for a single player’s actions. That’s part of being a team–receiving both benefits and penalties from others.
And I am not convinced that being denied a personal victory is enough disincentive to a player on a team. While I would not provoke an intentional mod-kill (too close to cheating), I would sacrifice a personal win if I could guarantee a win for the rest of my faction (although I’m not sure what sort of game mechanism could produce that).
But it would have been a slam dunk because Town caught two scum on the first two lynches. In other words, Town caught two scum with no use of powers at all. Despite all the “bad play,” town was playing optimally for the first two lynches. The only reason the game was as close as it was is because Town got those first two lynches correct. Had town gotten one wrong (which would have been normal operating procedure), what do you think would have happened?
It’s tough to tease these things out, but a possible 5th scum plus an investigator and a roleblocker plus an extra-night is a very strong scum team. I don’t see how town was balanced for that.
ETA: Given that scum were lynched on the first two lynches, I think you have to acknowledge a modicum of “bad play” by scum, yet they WON.
and sach i guess we are going to have to agree to disagree. in the last couple of games i have played town has been on a streak of getting scum early. maybe it’s pure luck. but if we assume that there is some “logic” to this game then i don’t think random accounts for all of it. or if it is purely random then why participate at all.
so they get one of the first two wrong. maybe the other mason participates. maybe the town power role uses his/her powers differently. maybe that person doesn’t do whatever. maybe story comes back and votes like he suggested. shoulda/woulda/coulda is a whole bunch of responsibility to place on the mod.
i agree that scum had a lot of fire power in this game, coupled with the potential extra member but that does not negate the reality of this game after Day 2. town should have coasted at that point. and with a “free agent” floating around at that point i would be betting that they would be signing up town. and people are going to do what they are going to do and that is fine but it seems to me that ultimately what cost town this win was just some poor late game play.
ymmv. just my two cents. and i have been known to be wrong more often than not.
Even for a mostly-vanilla game, it’s also highly dependent on the number of players. I’ve been working on a game-balance rubric of my own, but it’s not easy figuring out how to model power roles.
Mahaloth, I’m not saying that you did a bad job of balancing. You used the best information available to you. It’s just that I think the best information available is flawed. I made the same mistake in my game, too: I put in one more Scum towards the end of the design process, because it looked, from the conventional wisdom, like it was biased towards Town (this was unfortunately before I did my own work on balancing rubrics).
No, the Town had a mechanism to temporarily remove Town players from the game. The existence of the Cracker role made it effectively impossible to use the Brig against a Mutineer. Sure, that was a one-shot, but the game was small enough that there wouldn’t have been time to use it a second time.
I agree that the basic ruleset would have been pretty well balanced in a larger game, but as it was, we had one genuine mis-lynch on Day 1 (when a mislynch should be pretty much expected), then we had one Day where we flat-out lynched a Scum player, and then we had another Day when we used that “extra lynch” ability that we thought we had and nailed one Scum and one Town. That should be pretty good for Town, but that left us in a position where we were powerless to lynch the remaining Scum.
Come to think of it, I think one reason we as a group have such a hard time balancing games is that we like to tinker. To really know if a particular setup is balanced or not, you’d have to run many games with that setup and look at the record. But nobody ever seems to want to re-run the same setup: We’re always coming up with clever ideas for new roles and new game mechanics.
I’ve often thought it would be really fun to pull one of the old games out of idlemafia or whathaveyou and rip off the old color and replace it with something else and run the game again as something new, both to see if anyone would notice and also to see how they shake out a second time.
I disagree. Inblourious Gasterds was perfectly balanced.
Of course, everyone was a SK and the “killing” mechanism was little more than a hidden lynch, but every single player had an equal chance of winning going in. And it’s the only game where every player could have shared the win equally had they not decided to get too clever.
4 Millers, 3 Detectives, 1 Godfather, and 1 Goon that I ran on Idle’s board was also perfectly balanced. (Essentially a glorified 3-hand.)
But I don’t think you were referring to Bastard Mafia in your statement.
I never rely on Jsexton points. Never, ever, ever.
I brought Jsexton in because I don’t rely on his points and wanted to get his view. His view is what lead to me pulling back a bit on the town side because I was worried that the game leaned town.
Jsexton suggested that the true mason role was slightly higher than his point system may allow for, which I agreed with.
His idea, which I loved, was also to provide ONLY three polyjuice potions for scum, even though we had 4 scums.
There are a lot of little things in this game I loved.
My biggest frustration was quiet town, high quitting town, and having to mod-kill twice.
I’ve never mod-killed before.
I think Hardly deserves another shot and I’m sure he’d be open to advice on how to play generally.
I should add that Hardly openly PM’ed me to tell me he read the thread after he mentioned the snitch possibly being a tie breaker(which Chronos had said in the forest).
I did not even have to initialize the inquiry. He wrote me first and apologized.
Also, remember to **PM me **to pre-sign up for the next game.
One more thing you may not realize. Snape was my favorite role.
He had no allignment, but had to choose his allignment after the 4th death. If he chose scum, he could only win if Dumbledore died.
It died unused, but was a neat role. I hate unique roles/allignments usually, but I caved when this one was thought up.
hey, maha if you want to blow of some travel frustration come play poker with us tonight. meeko and moi will be there so you have a real good chance of not finishing last.
add in the fact that skeez will be there and you might get a top 10. and if mental shows up you have an even chance of a single digit finish.
Oh, yes, my first ever game with this bunch of players. Lynched day one as town. An ignominous start to my career.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, I play a lot at another site (actually it’s expanded to three now) with a very different culture in many respects. It’s still mafia, but lots of things would be unfamiliar to people used to playing here/at idlemafia/at the Giraffe Boards. One thing that is emphasized very strongly here and there hardly at all is balancing. And I’ve in fact played in some rather horribly balanced games over there. But a surprising number work out amazingly well – coming down to three or four-handed even with multiple scum factions, recruitment, bizarre roles, all kinds of nonsense going on. And pretty much bar none, the GMs are giving the idea of balance little more than a lick and a promise. There’s certainly nothing mathematical going on. (I don’t mean to denigrate their skills or their dedication, because most of them put a ton of effort into their games, but still.) It’s an art form, IMO, in all but the very simplest games. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and often things work out despite themselves.
For all the weirdnesses, this game came within Chipacabra’s nap or Storyteller’s power outage of going to an exciting 3 on 1 endgame, and that’s as “balanced” as you can get.
I appreciated the town play on the last day, btw – despite the last-minute accidents, it was nicely done.
Actually, there were rather a lot of double-kills and missed kills in the mix, considering how fast the town power roles died. The 3rd party player was targeted for a kill on the night he took off and escaped, for example, and I deliberately skipped a kill on the second to last night in order to set up false expectations among the town and SK. There were two other single-kill nights as well, IIRC.
Oddball game, and strangely enough I think the death miller was the least of it.
That reminds me: Much as I’d like to take some sort of credit, I do think that you won that game for us, Normal. The skipped kill in particular was brilliant, as well as your play in-game.