I’ve taken to playing a lot of Mafia/Werewolves offline, in real life, using playing cards. Numbers for townies, Aces for mafia, Kings for cops, Queens for docs, and so on. I’d like to improve on that. Now, there are a couple of commercial products for this. I picked up Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow, and it’s atrocious. The cards don’t even have rolenames or rules text, just abstract pictures. There’s also Ultimate Werewolf, which looks okay, but I think I’d like to go my own way.
So here’s what I want to do. I want to make a variety of cards, enough to allow a good variety of setups, but not so many that games get bogged down in complexity. I want to assign points to the card in such a way to allow novice mods to create balanced setups. I’m basing all this off of the point system that I brought to the SDMB a while back, but I started by doubling all values in an effort to eliminate all the .5s that crop up. Vanilla town are worth 2, vanilla scum worth -5.
Here is the link to the work in progress. I’m looking for feedback on roles (anything obvious missing? Anything obviously broken?) and on point values. I entered a bunch of 7-15 player scenarios that I’m sure are balanced, and managed to get a balance value of 0 or close to it.
Here is a quick and dirty layout of what the cards will look like. I’ve put the values and categories (but NOT the rolename) along the top, so that mods have the ability to create random-but-balanced games, without knowing precisely what roles are in until it’s ready to start. I also am working on a scoresheet, one that allows the mod to list the players and their roles, track votes, and monitor night actions. Then the cards can go in binder pages, and the whole works can go in a 3-ring binder. If the binder has a white plastic front, you can use a dry-erase marker on it to aid in communicating to players at night.
If you get much more complicated than a very basic setup, then Night actions are going to be a pain. “OK, everyone but the Doctor close your eyes. Now Doctor, point out your target. OK, everyone but the Detective close your eyes. Now Detective, point out your target. OK, everyone but…” and so on for Vigilante, Serial Killer, Scum, and anyone else who has a Night action. And you’d have to either call out every role in the deck every Night, or have the game setup be open.
Also, be very, very careful about the point-ranking. The relative values of various roles depends a lot on how many people are in the game. Your original point system was designed for online games where you usually have 15-25 players, but most in-person games are going to be much smaller than that. I still haven’t gotten around to finishing my calculations with power roles, but I can give you the probability of winning for various compositions of vanilla game when I get home (off the top of my head, 8 Townies vs. 2 Scum is almost exactly balanced).
Oh, also, you’ll need to complicate the pre-game a bit to accommodate the mason(s). If the moderator sets up the game semi-blindly, he might end up with a game with only one mason.
That’s essentially how we do it now. You don’t necessarily have to call every role, though, just sprinkle in some red herrings so no one know the true composition. Alternatively, you can have each player open their eyes in turn and take their action, vanilla players just smiling and doing nothing.
This is not true. The points stay consistent with the number of players. It is true that certain abilities blend together well enough that they need more points, but that’s pretty fringe.
The classic balanced C9 setup was 4 possible arrangements, each with a 25% chance:
Cop, Doc, 5 town vs 2 scum
Cop, 6 town, vs 2 scum
Doc, 6 town, vs 2 scum
7 town vs 2 scum
The first gives an edge to the town, the latter gives and edge to the scum, and the middle two are balanced. 8 town vs 2 scum is balanced, as you say. In fact, they’d each get 18 points using the system in the spreadsheet I linked to.
Ah, but this is why I put categories on each card, to help mitigate against a game with all info roles or something. And, of course, the mod can certainly create a setup non-blind. I’d also include a number of known balanced setups for each number of players in the instructions.
I don’t see why you have to have to announce the rolls at all. Write down the rolls on a piece of paper, and hold up that sheet. Or, maybe even include cards for the moderator to use. Night can be conducted completely silently.
I might even consider PMs: having every player have a piece of paper where they can take notes, with the power roles also writing down their target stuff. It adds some cool bluffing, and gives the scum a way to discuss strategy instead of the silly pointing and sign language they usually use.
I’d think that would make a good alternate setup, at least.
But on the other hand, 16 Town vs. 4 Scum is 36 points each, but massively biased towards Scum.
Quoth Pleonast:
If you put that explicitly into the rules, at least. Of course, that also removes the possibility of the Scum mason false-claim (which, yeah, is really rare, but still happens occasionally).
I agree with the view that realtime games are better when more simple. Then again, it isn’t as if anyone would be forced to use the extra roles. Personally, I’d start with the basics and add a few extras to help with the balance for when the number of players make vanilla versus vanilla unbalanced. I would discourage putting too much stuff into one game. Would drive me bonkers. Online moderators have trouble keeping everything organized. I can’t imagine having to keep track of several powers each night LIVE. What I mean is, it is fine to have a large library of roles but with the caveat that only a small number (like 1 or 2) of the power roles should be used at a time.
I also feel that pointing in real life is VERY different than pointing for online games. Finding a liar in real life is MUCH easier than online. Body movements, tone of voice, general skittishness are all extra info that is not available online. I think the 2:9 ratio for vanilla versus vanilla is off. I think a balanced game is something like 2 scum to 7 vanilla.
I don’t understand why the ToughGuy is -8 when standard vanilla is -9. ToughGuy should be significantly more powerful than vanilla as he is essentially vanilla scum that must be lynched twice.
I’m not sure it needs to be explicit, but you bring up a good point. Games balance differently, depending on how much the players know and/or expect about the available roles.
A toughguy shouldn’t be twice as valuable as a vanilla Scum, either, though. You have to spend two lynches to kill him, but you don’t have to find him twice.
Two points, here: First, while face-to-face has the possibility of body language etc., there are also advantages to a message board that aren’t found face-to-face. Folks here are much more accountable for what they say, since it can be quoted back verbatim, and there’s a lot more time for analysis. I don’t know which actually ends up helping Town more, on net, since I don’t have enough experience with the face-to-face version, but it’s at least not trivial.
Second, it makes a big difference whether the number of players is even or odd. In textbook-ideal-land (where body language etc. doesn’t matter), 7 Town to 2 Scum favors Scum, but 9 Town to 2 Scum also favors Scum. Increasing from 8 Town to 9 does not increase the number of mislynches, but it does make it easier to accidentally hit a Townie. This is part of the reason the “suicidal Townie” role can be useful, because it can be used to even out the numbers.
