[OLD] Open Setup Ideas and Discussion

[Kaiveran]

Not going to be here for the rest of the night, but before I leave I'm gonna drop a crazy idea I came up with yesterday.

C18++

[REDACTED]

Pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. I wanted there to be a generative Multiball setup but was convinced it was impossible until I had a late-night epiphany after waking up from a Mafia-related dream.

Unlike C9++, it is a Modular Open setup, particularly with respect to the town roles.

I can identify two main issues at present:

1. No considerations for inter-scum balance. There could be the issue of little to no power rolled to one team, and lots rolled to the other. While both scumteams will be balanced with the town since the power roles only work against one faction at a time, it's possible that one scumteam will be much more powerful and curbstomp the other. I have a couple preliminary ideas. One is creating power tiers for the scum, where if one scumteam ends up on a higher tier than the other, the less powerful team gets (a) helpful role module(s) depending on the difference. Another is biasing the selection of Traitors somehow.

2. Multiball games are not known for their stability, but this setup seems particularly swingy. Just look at that second game and its absolutely loaded town (particularly note the OP Mason pair of a Tracker and Seer). One of the more important roles or combo roles dying can be a huge hit to the hunting efforts against a particular scumteam. It seems that the best way to alleviate this is to add more townies and expand the setup, but I'm not exactly sure how many to add and how to balance the game for the increased number of townies. I basically copied most things whole sale from other generative setups, so any input on that front from people more experienced designing these kinds of setups would be appreciated.

So leave comments on the doc regarding any suggestions, concerns, or confusions you may have and I'll address them in-thread in the coming days.

(EDIT: Back and going to sleep...just realized on a check that

I forgot to allow comments on this document, that's fixed now.

)

[Kaiveran]

Reopening my

C18++

setup for consideration.

It is an experimental multiball setup based on C9++. Unlike that setup though, it is Modular Open, particularly with respect to the town roles.

To people who saw the original

, sorry for endlessly fucking around with it earlier and not allowing anyone who was trying to review the chance to meaningfully comment. Most of the changes I instituted were a disaster anyway so I've pretty much scaled things back to the way they were. I can assure you it's staying like it is right now.

The main issues I want solved:

1. The swinginess seems strong with this one. Look at how loaded the town can get with powers in those example setups. One of the more important roles or combo roles dying can be a huge hit to the hunting efforts against a particular scumteam. It seems that the best way to alleviate this is to add more townies and expand the setup, but I'm not exactly sure how many to add, and subsequently how to balance the game for the increased number of townies. I basically copied most things whole sale from other generative setups, so any input on that front from people more experienced designing these kinds of setups would be appreciated (if any of them are still around, that is.)

2. I've been trying the properly balance the Universal Roles for a long time, but never have come across something satisfactory. In fact, I don't think anything will ever mitigate the OP possibility of Power Roles in a Masonry. Something tells me it'd be best to just excise that portion of the game, but then it's just a pure Twofold offshoot. It could help with the swinginess, though. I'd like some input from the community as to what option is best.

[Kaiveran]

So, I had an idea regarding the townsided Popcorn Mafia setup.

Make whoever shoots the gun automatically die regardless of who is shot, scum get a day to decide who gets the gun next. That way, scum go out 1 for 1 rather than 1 for none.

Would that probably make it less townsided?

Depends, not exactly understanding what you mean. Do you mean the scum still get to choose a new gunbearer if a townie is targeted, or does the transfer still take effect?

Also is my setup really so horrible as to not even deserve consideration

[Kaiveran]

I will look over it more later.

Your original one was interesting and makes use of two things that tend to be popular in opens (C9++ and Multiball) but was a little... over the top. Was still trying to make notes on it.

Yeah, just stopping by to say thanks a lot.

And I'm sorry for making it bad for you the flurry of changes and stuff. It wasn't ready to present back then and I shoud have realized that before I posted it.

G'night!

[Kaiveran]

What is a spy

Role from the original incarnation of C9++ (wolf equivalent is Shaman). He could seer a "Role Class" of any player; for example, if he investigated a Cop, he would get a C (or "Investigator") result, if he investigated a Doc, he would get a D (or "Protector") result, etc.. In this game I would also have him detect opposing scum, perhaps at some other price, pending the commentary of reviewers. Speaking of which...

@LlamaFluff: How's the review going? Anything I could do to make it easier?

So, I had an idea regarding the townsided Popcorn Mafia setup.

Make whoever shoots the gun automatically die regardless of who is shot, scum get a day to decide who gets the gun next. That way, scum go out 1 for 1 rather than 1 for none.

Would that probably make it less townsided?

Depends, not exactly understanding what you mean. Do you mean the scum still get to choose a new gunbearer if a townie is targeted, or does the transfer still take effect?

Also is my setup really so horrible as to not even deserve consideration

Transfer if town is shot.

Yeah, that seems the most balanced to me. I'd be willing to participate in a trial run of this.

[Kaiveran]

@LlamaFluff: How's the review going? Anything I could do to make it easier?

Sample roles since you are using a lot of terminology that I think I know what they are but need to be sure before I would say that it seems like a good idea.

Confirm following terms for me:

Wolf Master
Wolf Stealth
Wolf Shaman
Stalker
Strong Will

It looks like a beyond role madness setup... but still kinda interesting and less breakable than C9++ is for town.

Master Wolf = Godfather
Stealth Wolf = Ninja
Wolf Shaman = aforementioned Spy role
Stalker = short for Wolfstalker, from two-fold C9, a Tracker who can only track wolves.
Strong Will makes a player immune to Roleblocking.

[Kaiveran]

So tracker fails against wolf and stalker fails against mafia? Both are successful against town?

Yes, following the Two-fold C9 model, both can track town.

Also do they only fail against the kill or do they fail against a roleblocking role as well? Like if Wolf gets RB, blocks X and kills Y while being targeted by the tracker, what happens?

On every other site I've been to with Mafia/TWG style games, I've only seen this kind of mechanic once, and in that game the factional Trackers failed against any action, so that's what I had in mind. This means that in your example, the Tracker wouldn't see his target go anywhere.

Either of these points can be tweaked for balance. I feel like it might be a good idea to have only the kills untraceable.

Also the main reason I wanna get rid of the universal powers is because of the possibility of Power Roles being Masons with eachother, which seems way OP to me. It would also help the "role madness" factor. If it is going to be kept though, Masons should probably go.

[Kaiveran]

Ka

i

v - If tracker fails against any wolf, and stalker fails against mafia I have a problem with the setup because those roles are suddenly exceedingly powerful. Lets say tracker gets "Targeted X" from their result. They basically have a "confirmed not wolf" result at that point. They become more of factional specific cops than anything else.

I could maybe see a "tracker is unable to track wolf kill, stalker is unable to track mafia kill" but I more like them being both "trackers" but named differently so town can piece together what was rolled, which is one of the strongest powers the town has in C9++, figuring out the setup so they can catch fakeclaims.

Thanks for pointing this out. I personally do like the idea of them only failing against kills but I want to trust your judgement.

[Kaiveran]

Given that this seems to be "not sure if srs" season in this thread, I will have to point out that that this is, in fact, srs

DON'T CUT THE RED WIRE 2: ELECTRIC BLUE-WIRE-GALOO

Bigger, badder, and having absolutely nothing to do with the original.
12p.

2 Mafia A Goons

2 Mafia B Goons

1

Red

Bomber

1

Blue

Bomber

1

Red

Wire Cutter

1

Blue

Wire Cutter

4 Chocolate Townies (50/50 Bombproof OR Bulletproof)

Town cannot no-lynch, Scumteams cannot no-kill.

Pregame, and every night phase in-game, the Red and Blue Bombers can choose to attach their colored bomb to a player. Anybody who has a bomb on them is publically announced at the start of the Day. During the Day, the Red Wire Cutter can choose to detonate the Red bomb, and the Blue Wire Cutter the Blue Bomb, to kill those players.

[Kaiveran]

Only the Wire Cutters will know which bomb is THEIR color.

[Kaiveran]

I feel like I should know the answer, but

Bombers have unlimited bombs

, right? They can do one each cycle, not once per game?

That was the idea. Can't decide if its townsided or not. Of course it's gonna be swingy cause vigilante kills basically. But I'm thinking in terms of current small multiball setups. (BTW, I don't understand how 2:2:9 mountainous is considered balanced at all, next to F&E&E.)

[Kaiveran]

Given that this seems to be "not sure if srs" season in this thread, I will have to point out that that this is, in fact, srs

DON'T CUT THE RED WIRE 2: ELECTRIC BLUE-WIRE-GALOO

Bigger, badder, and having absolutely nothing to do with the original.
12p.

2 Mafia A Goons

2 Mafia B Goons

1

Red

Bomber

1

Blue

Bomber

1

Red

Wire Cutter

1

Blue

Wire Cutter

4 Chocolate Townies (50/50 Bombproof OR Bulletproof)

Town cannot no-lynch, Scumteams cannot no-kill.

Pregame, and every night phase in-game, the Red and Blue Bombers can choose to attach their colored bomb to a player. Anybody who has a bomb on them is publically announced at the start of the Day, but it is not stated which colors the bombs are (Wire Cutters are privately told which bomb is their color). During the Day, the Red Wire Cutter can choose to detonate the Red bomb, and the Blue Wire Cutter the Blue Bomb, to kill those players.

quoting and updating to counter the bottom-of-page curse

[Kaiveran]

Want to hear what people think of this concept. Obviously the powers would have to be tweaked for balance but I'll think this is a good basic idea.

Jack Be Nimble

13 Players

1 Mafia Ascetic
1 Mafia JOAT (3 Powers)
1 Mafia Goon

2 Town JOATs (3 Powers)

8 Vanilla Townies

Mafia JOAT Powers are randomly selected from the following pool:

• Roleblock
  
• Strongman Kill (Variant: Protection/Bodyguard/PGO Immune)
  
• Ninja Kill (Variant: Watcher/Roleblock Immune)
  
• Bus Drive
  
• Role Cop

Town JOAT Powers are randomly selected from the following pool:

• Cop
  
• Watcher
  
• Jailkeeper
  
• Friendly Neighbor
  
• Bodyguard
  
• Vigilante
  
• Roleblocker
  
• Commuter
  
• Kidnapper
  
• Vengeful Self (permanent)

To clarify, the powers are selected from a pool, meaning that each power can only appear once.

[Kaiveran]

First instinct is to kill off the Ascetic for scum.

10:3 with two town PRs and one scum PR is already strong for scum, they do not need anything else. Only reason I im not immediately pushing for more town power is that you have two confirmed town and scum will have a very difficult time fakeclaiming JOAT in this situation.

Thanks for the commentary. I am making the changes and will be taking this to the review thread for some official evaluation as I feel this setup has the greatest chance of any of my setups to be run here.

[Kaiveran]

The first day there is one lynch. For the preceeding days, there is a number of lynches per day equal to amount of town that died that night.

So if scum cross kill at night, the game immediately goes into another night? That’s interesting. ..

[Kaiveran]

As my turn in the Open queue is coming up soon and I've been working on this with LlamaFluffStuff, I would like to have a few more pairs of eyes on this semi-open multiball setup.
It's tentatively called

C18++

, but given how close the revisions have made it to its inspiration, I'd be willing to call it

Two-Fold C9++.

Wiki article here.

Posted this in the Open Setup Reviews thread but got nothing but dead air. Since my turn in the open queue is coming up and LlamaFluff wants this to be trial run, he told me to crosspost here where it's more active. Basically we're just looking for a couple of people to say "this makes sense."

[Kaiveran]

Hmm, yeah, maybe I should add some more details about how things are determined and assigned for future mods. Like how extra powers for the scum are given to Goons, and the specific process used to distribute the role modules.

[Kaiveran]

I was watching this game, and I feel like the biggest non-gameplay contributor to the Mafia's loss was the lone Doc having no protection.

1-Shot shared BP sounds okay, but I was originally going to suggest both be 1-Shot BP.

How is there a confirmed town if SK is lynched Day 1?

[Kaiveran]

Town doctor is safe to claim as mafia don't have a kill

Oh right, and if Mafia counterclaims, they will just eventually confirm themselves scum.

Lemme think a bit.

[Kaiveran]

There are No EVs for Nightless setups D:
and I doubt my abysmal figure of 20% win rate for Mafia after D1 SK lynch is correct. Some help in this department would be appreciated.

In the mean time, since you're meaning to mitigate the impact of an SK dying early: why not give the Mafia a 1-Shot Kill if SK is lynched?

[Kaiveran]

In the mean time, since you're meaning to mitigate the impact of an SK dying early: why not give the Mafia a 1-Shot Kill if SK is lynched?

Because then town can't win in a 1 Mafia, 1 SK, 2 Townie situation.[/quote]

Fair enough

Also @salamence, 2:7 Nightless is not scumsided with a confirmed town. Nightless is inherently a bit townsided (compared to the mathematical result) because there's no possibility of countering strong townies. Throw what is basically an IC into the mix and odds look rather slim for the Mafia.

@molla: I think Salamence's idea plus your "1st Mafia lynched vengekills" bring this up to par.

A bit contrived for sure, but then so was Hope Plus One.

[Kaiveran]

I think points 3 and 4 could be condensed into "Mafia have the factional abilities of a 1-Shot BP and 1-Shot Vengeful Kill" or suchlike. But yeah, looks good to me.

[Kaiveran]

wgeurts9++

What is a Virgin? I was gonna say can't be roleblocked, but that would make no sense since there is no implied night action.

[Kaiveran]

Hmm, I'd then just have the Mafia RB flavored as Hooker all the time. Is it really a good idea to let scum know there's a specific power role in the game?

Other than that, I honestly think this could be developed into a viable alternative to C9++ and the ilk. I especially like the inclusion of Backups; it really mitigates the "no real way to defend against 3 Cops/Docs/RBs" problem with higher power draws in the other doubleplusgood setups.

Scum roles definitely need to be tweaked though. 3:10 with scum PRs is too strong against the larger amount of T's which have only 1-2 town PRs.

[Kaiveran]

This would mean that all roles in-game wouldn't be announced at game start to get your proposal to work. Any suggestions on the Mafia tweaks? Mabye I could just add 2 more people to the player count.

First off, I don't think you get how ++ setups work – under NO circumstances do you reveal the roles that have been drawn at the beginning of the game. That's a secret to everybody except the mod. So, in this instance, making the Mafia Roleblocker into a Hooker at all times doesn't affect anything other than, the Mafia will no longer know if there's a Virgin in the game or not. Which they weren't supposed to know

anyway

. You get me?

I don't think it should be a larger game either, everything but the Mafia roles seems consistent with the original 13 player design.

I think I'll work on this later today.

[Kaiveran]

@wgeurts

Town:
TTTTTTT =

Lawyer + Goon

,

Serial Killer

TTTTTT =

Lawyer + Goon

TTTTT =

1-Shot Stalker + Goon + Lawyer

,

Serial Killer

TTTT =

1-Shot Stalker + Goon + Lawyer

TTT =

1-Shot Stalker + Goon + Hooker

,

Serial Killer

TT =

1-Shot Stalker + Goon + Hooker

T =

Stalker + Lawyer + Hooker

,

Serial Killer

0 Ts =

Stalker + Lawyer + Hooker

Informative:
I =

1-Shot Cop

II =

Cop

III =

Cop + 1-Shot Cop

IIII =

Cop + Deputy

IIIII =

Cop + Deputy + 1-Shot Cop

IIIIII =

2 Cops + Deputy

Protective:
P =

Bodyguard

PP =

Doctor

PPP =

Doctor + Bodyguard

PPPP =

Doctor + Bodyguard + Nurse

PPPPP =

2 Doctors + Nurse

Killing:
K =

1-Shot Vigilante

KK =

1-Shot Vigilante + Suicide Bomber

KKK =

2 1-Shot Vigilantes

KKKK =

2 1-Shot Vigilantes + Suicide Bomber

OR

Vengeful

KKKKK =

Vigilante + 1-Shot Vigilante + Vengeful

Passive:
A =

Innocent Child

AA =

2 Masons

AAA =

2 Masons + Innocent Child

AAAA =

2 Masons + Innocent Child + Virgin

AAAAA =

3 Masons + Virgin

Manipulative:
M =

1-Shot Roleblocker

MM =

Roleblocker

MMM =

Roleblocker + 1-Shot Rolestopper

MMMM =

Roleblocker + 1-Shot Rolestopper + 1-Shot Roleblocker

MMMMM =

2 Roleblockers + 1-Shot Rolestopper

Serial Killer

chooses one of two abilities at start of game;

• Innocent to Cops
  Or
  
• 1-Shot Bulletproof

These might be better distributions.

For Scum:

Lawyer shouldn't be held in such high esteem. It's a limited utility role and like Godfather (which it is equivalent to at the bottom tier) it's mainly there to knock the Cop category down a peg so that it's more on par with the other categories. I also re-added SK for 7 Ts, so that it's an even 50% probability across the board; besides, 2:1:10 mountainous doesn't have bad chances.

In the next tier you have a slight increase in active power with the 1-Shot Stalker and extra member to weather the odds with more power roles.

Hooker is a bigger jump in power but is balanced out by losing protection from cops, and finally a full Stalker rounds out the movement.

Killing Roles:

Suicide Bomber is a poor choice for an entry level killing role. At least a 1-Shot vig (the standard first tier in these games) can turn around a Mylo situation if it lives to such. Suicide Bomber can't even do that. Therefore I bumped the power up 1 level.

Misc:

Serial Killer can choose full investigation Immunity. And I recommend changing the name Rolestopper to Asceticizer (I understand that name is entrenched here but Asceticize describes what it does a lot better. )

[Kaiveran]

wgeurts, with all due respect, you aren't ready to design setups yet, especially no. I recommend that you stop spamming this thread and start doing your time and actually playing some games; I especially recommend starting the Theme queue, as analyzing those kinds of games post-facto will give you more of a sense of how complex games/mechanics are balanced. You should also read the wiki more.

Cult/Zombies/Betrays, however, are just too frustrating to deal with and hard to balance in any game. The only Cults I've seen that don't break the game in two are Cult Mentors.

[Kaiveran]

Bahaha that reminds me

I ran this one off-site game where I now realize there were essentially two cults with limited recruits trying to kill each other.

Each could have only three disciples and they could attack the other at any time; if they equaled or outnumbered the other Cult they would kill them all, otherwise they would all die themselves

It was fun to watch as the mod, at least