Upcoming zorbees games redux, and rant on mafia getting stale (incoming TLDR)

zorbees

Chwa for no reason!
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
I posted a thread about my upcoming games a while back, and haven't hosted anything since. This is an update/new version of that thread.

1) My next game, which I plan to host after at least 2 of LotR/BassGame/Space War end, is a flavorless FFA game. The main feature is that everyone has the same exact capabilities and win conditions, barring one little thing. The Win Condition is to be one of the last X people surviving (haven't determined the number yet, but it will be somewhere around the 2-5 range). The actions are determined via a credit system, where you can use different actions at different costs. The game features an interesting way of formulating and breaking hard alliances, of which the main feature is that you cannot be attacked by an ally. I think this game should test player skill pretty well, considering everyone is pretty much the same role.

2) I was thinking about doing a revival of my Survivor Forum Game, and/or making a Big Brother Forum Game, if there is a good amount of interest. I have some ideas to completely rework how the challenges work. What I was currently thinking about, is, before the game starts, each player has 30 Stat Points to distribute among 5 categories, with each category being used in the challenges like they were before. There would be a minimum of 1 and maximum of 10 for each stat category. I like the customization better than just getting your stats in a Role PM. Additionally, each player would start with 100 Willpower Points. During the Challenge Phases, players would use any number of Willpower Points depending on how much they want to win the challenge. The Willpower Points would then be multiplied by the Stat Points applicable for that challenge, and the highest value would be the winner. For example, if you used 80 Willpower Points, and had a Strength of 8 and an Endurance of 7 for a challenge that uses 1x Strength + 1x Endurance, your total would be 80x15=1200. The key to Willpower points though, is that they only regenerate at a certain speed (undetermined as of yet), so you will not be able to use the maximum in every challenge. For Survivor, the idea is that Willpower points would regenerate faster for players who have won reward challenges, while for Big Brother, Willpower points would regenerate slower for Have-Nots. The other aspects of the game, such as the vote-offs, jury, etc, would work the same way as they do on the respective shows. I was thinking about removing the mafia-like abilities that I had in the last game, I felt like they were kind of forced to make the game more mafia-like, and I like having everyone on a level playing field.

3) I still do have some of the games I had worked on before, but I haven't really liked a lot of them on the second look, or they aren't that close to being finished. I'm always working on new ideas though. If anyone has any interesting raw ideas, and are struggling on polishing up and making it ready to play, I'm always interested.

I like the ideas of the Survivor/Big Brother games because they involve making and breaking alliances, social politics, etc, kind of like FFA mafia games do. They are also not stale yet, and I feel like they could be kept fresh via inserting twists, and changing the players, to be used multiple times. I feel like I would much rather host one of these than a Wayne Brady-type FFA, no offense to that type of game and the people who host them, but I feel as if they get rather stale after a couple iterations.

I believe mafia gets stale simply because of the lack of interaction between players. The main thing I want to point out is the village leader system. While it is fun to lead the village, it takes a lot of interaction out of the game. For example, in a 21 man 2v1 game with a village leader, you have 20 people who pretty much only talk to the village leader, and their mafia teammates if they have them. But in a 11 man game with an open format, ideally each player should talk to each other, leaving each player to have 10 conversations with the players besides themselves. I'm not saying every game should be FFA, because I don't believe that. But I think there should be a good way to encourage communication among many players. Where my creativity drops off is figuring out how to implement that in a good manner while keeping the common village vs mafia format that we are all so familiar with. This is why, for now, a lot of my ideas are FFA.

Comments on either my upcoming games, or inventive ways to keep mafia fresh, are welcome.
 
How well does NOC work for keeping things fresh and preventing village leadership? I remember a couple of good NOC games being held here before.

The other thing I've noticed is that VT tends to be a terrible fakeclaim due to everyone and their mother having a PR, which is one of the chief reasons why you have a Village Leader, to keep track of all the crazy stuff that's flying around everywhere. Maybe it's worth dialing back the PRs a little so every game isn't solvable by spreadsheet?
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
Vanilla is a bad fake claim because watcher and tracker hard counter it. Even in games that have legitimate vanilla they are suspected.

Many older users on Smogon don't like playing NOC as it is much slower and very different from how we play OC. But they complain about village leaders all the same.

As for zorbgames I am not a FFA fan so I won't play the format, but I think other people enjoy being more proactive in their own WCs to a point. However the problem with FFAs is the chappy alliances that get set up and either exclude people or break down due to salt and so on. So there is still a tendency to flock to a leader/organizer to help ensure your WC. Anyone with a stronger role will be carried to their win by the alliance leader utilizing it for a while. Or lose due to a stab/not being proactive enough. So FFA still has the same reliance problem.
 

zorbees

Chwa for no reason!
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
I think my next game will prevent the follow the leader that many other FFAs have, for the most part. If only 3 guys can win together, eventually alliances are going to break up and stab each other. And if you intend on stabbing, you're going to get help from someone outside of the alliance, because you're probably not going to be able to do it yourself. Additionally, no one with a strong role will be able to be carried, because everyone will pretty much have the same role. Not being proactive enough is a good reason for losing, if you don't take the proper steps to secure your win, then you probably don't deserve to win.

The facets of mafia I like the most are the information trading, negotiating, alliances and stabbing, etc. While I think FFA games are best suited for these aspects, I feel like it is possible to implement it to a lesser extent in 2v1s. I made Chaotic Mafia because I believed that the recruitment and other chaotic elements would lead to more distrust and less follow-the-leader; of course, the players didn't play it that way. The way I envision my ideal 2v1 games is people privately communicating with each other, sometimes exchanging information, building trust, etc. Like I said in the OP, I don't exactly have lots of solid ideas for this type of game, so I posted so the minds of circus could brainstorm. I think a lack or strong limiting of information roles (watch/track are probably fine because they can be played around, but stuff like inspector is what leads to follow the leader and playing by roles) would help.

But yeah, I like to hear what people have to say so we can try to improve our games.
 
How well does NOC work for keeping things fresh and preventing village leadership? I remember a couple of good NOC games being held here before.

The other thing I've noticed is that VT tends to be a terrible fakeclaim due to everyone and their mother having a PR, which is one of the chief reasons why you have a Village Leader, to keep track of all the crazy stuff that's flying around everywhere. Maybe it's worth dialing back the PRs a little so every game isn't solvable by spreadsheet?
NOC is very different to OC; it's the OC nature that makes village leader systems consistently the most efficient and generally the most effective. But a lot of the fun of Smogon mafia is held in outside communications (the strengths zorbees mentioned), which simply can't function correctly in an NOC setting.

Vanillas have been pretty much removed as a tradeoff for player engagement. Vanillas pretty much idle, and nobody wants to read 'hi you have no role have fun winning the game', so it's also bad for the game to throttle villagers even further. Villagers will never be trusted unless inspected, so you might as well give them roles that allow them to have some hope of getting info at some point. Vanillas are simply incompatible with the leader system in my opinion and even if we managed to shake that up I would still rather avoid them because they cause so many problems.

I have no comment as yet on multifactions or FFA except that I think they are typically one or of both boring or unrewarding in how they play out except in the few cases we've actually had well-designed win condition chains, but I disagree that information roles are strictly a bad thing; I think they are necessary for the health of the game. Without information roles there exist virtually no threats against people who look like they are / probably are idling because all you can really do is lynch them, and idling affects the town rather severely.

Honestly I thought the best 'solution' so far was the mason faction (and the street justice system, which could perhaps be improved a little) in the game that did not happen, because all host-implemented strategies to discourage village leader strategies have been played around; the mason faction basically accepted that there was gonna be a village leader and circumvented the whole 'new players never get in the village circle' thing by putting them there. Additionally, we could recruit masons, although only a select few people; the preselected lucky ones was a flaw of the system but only insofar as you consider village leaders unpreselected, because people will usually only follow players they see as equal to or better than them and certain roles almost cannot lead the village. But it still obviously didn't fix the rest of the village and was super powerful as well.

When was the last time we had a lynchpin game / thought on those? I haven't played lynchpin since RTMs were popular.
 
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i've played around with the idea of everyone being the same role of vanilla, but instead they have to team up in order to take part in an action, for instance, 4 players to inspect a different user etc which is fairly similar to your idea for 1. so what i'm getting at is the same idea as 1, except in mafia v village format. this sort of format forces everyone to be active because there is no centralization of power - a village leader may help, but he can't run the game for you, participation from everybody is needed in order to coordinate properly.

i would also love another survivor game, i was actually really enjoying the last one save for the inactivity towards the end. i think having the players distribute their stat points makes the game a lot more interesting than if points are preassigned - customization i think makes players connect more with the game and feel like they themselves actually have a lot of control over how well they do rather - the only other thing i have is how big do you plan to make the survivor? i think 21 people may be a bit ambitious and starting smaller may be a better way to go in terms of getting players who will be consistently active (although i think inactivity is interesting in terms of a gameplay dynamic - choosing to vote off "weak" members of the tribe ie the inactives vs maybe stronger strategical players). anyways, i feel like 16 players may be a good start size, but 3 tribes of 6 would also work well too i feel (and have the upside of being more interesting with three tribes)

yea i love survivor so would love to see that happen
 

zorbees

Chwa for no reason!
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
I have no comment as yet on multifactions or FFA except that I think they are typically one or of both boring or unrewarding in how they play out except in the few cases we've actually had well-designed win condition chains, but I disagree that information roles are strictly a bad thing; I think they are necessary for the health of the game. Without information roles there exist virtually no threats against people who look like they are / probably are idling because all you can really do is lynch them, and idling affects the town rather severely.

I've tried to design the FFA above to solve the problems of past FFAs, but if you could explain what you mean further on boring/unrewarding, I'd like to hear.

I agree that information roles help against idlers. But in alias games, you can't do anything to idlers anyways. The way I envision it, not talking to anyone would be seen as scummy because you aren't trying to find any scum, similar to NOC. Obviously this can get tricky because someone will always have IRL issues that take priority over mafia. This is why I want feedback though, you pointed out a solid issue.


Honestly I thought the best 'solution' so far was the mason faction (and the street justice system, which could perhaps be improved a little) in the game that did not happen, because all host-implemented strategies to discourage village leader strategies have been played around; the mason faction basically accepted that there was gonna be a village leader and circumvented the whole 'new players never get in the village circle' thing by putting them there. Additionally, we could recruit masons, although only a select few people; the preselected lucky ones was a flaw of the system but only insofar as you consider village leaders unpreselected, because people will usually only follow players they see as equal to or better than them and certain roles almost cannot lead the village. But it still obviously didn't fix the rest of the village and was super powerful as well.

I strongly disagree. All it did was make it be an oligarchy instead of a dictatorship. The masons 99% acted as a unit. I think a mason group with spies could work; I've talked about this in the past but have yet to implement it. With all of the masons being 100% clean though, all it does is increase the number of people in the village leadership. If I can find it, I think I had an RTM ready for my spies idea, maybe I'll host that soon.

When was the last time we had a lynchpin game / thought on those? I haven't played lynchpin since RTMs were popular.

Lynchpin is interesting to me in that you have people that change from being your allies to being your enemies. Still, it usually has a village leader, but yes, the lack of trust in the lynchpin faction is an interesting part of the format. I've also never liked the balancing for the lynchpin. They either need to survive and have the village win, which is usually pretty tough, or they can die and have either side of the lynchpin win, which is an easier win condition than either of the two sides.
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
jumpluff last lynchpin may have been MAGMAfia which was still a very long time ago. I don't remember anything after. People tend to mindlessly complain about lynchpin format because tricky/hard/op mafia and so on.
 
I strongly disagree. All it did was make it be an oligarchy instead of a dictatorship. The masons 99% acted as a unit. I think a mason group with spies could work; I've talked about this in the past but have yet to implement it. With all of the masons being 100% clean though, all it does is increase the number of people in the village leadership. If I can find it, I think I had an RTM ready for my spies idea, maybe I'll host that soon.
At that point, you usually have to call it a neighborhood, and not a masonry. Masons are mod-confirmed as being not mafia.

Hmm... You know, that's actually an idea. NOC, but everyone is part of multiple neighborhoods with daytalk. You get interaction between people, information exchange, and naturally you can't pool all of the info onto one person because they're not part of everyone's neighborhood. Mafias have daytalk.
 
At that point, you usually have to call it a neighborhood, and not a masonry. Masons are mod-confirmed as being not mafia.

Hmm... You know, that's actually an idea. NOC, but everyone is part of multiple neighborhoods with daytalk. You get interaction between people, information exchange, and naturally you can't pool all of the info onto one person because they're not part of everyone's neighborhood. Mafias have daytalk.
(We were talking about an OC mafia where a faction was specifically named The Masons. not the NOC role, sorry for the confusion.)
 

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