Undertale Mafia: Friends & Corpses [GAME OVER]

[pieguyn]

yeah OK, I was following this to some extent and I'm going to set my personal feelings aside for a few minutes (be grateful for this...) and say a few things which I hope should be constructive.

1. if you join a game that is openly advertised as bastard, you forfeit any right to claim "the setup made no sense" or "the setup wasn't mafia" or "I don't think I had any way of winning this"; it's an openly bastard game, of course there's going to be shit in there that will fall way outside of your expectations and I'm of the opinion that if you play a bastard game you should not have any expectation that the game should be "fair" or balanced, you should largely just play it for fun and if you win, that's cool too. since apparently there was a lot of issue with this: this is distinct from just not playing to win, obviously yeah you should but it is possible to play to win and enjoy the game normally while still not having any expectation of actually winning the game.

2. I think the idea behind this setup was actually pretty cool (even though I think it needs a few modifications in order to work, which I'll get into below), and I think the scum team size scaling based on # players left was predictable too, I figured that out and I wasn't even in the game nor do I have any flavor knowledge at all.

3. that said, I think if you're going to make a setup like this where it's really easy for players to feel cheesed, 22p is too large and makes players experience that feeling for too long. I think something like a 16p or 18p would likely provide the best length for this sort of setup since it remains a larger game while still not requiring the very high level of commitment required from an ultra-large (>21p ended up being 10 game days) game.

4. also, I think the point about town not being rewarded for lynching "scum" early/scum having no advantage for surviving longer due to the scaling scum team size has merit, and that's why I think a setup based around the principle this was based around is absolute hell to balance *if* you try to implement a workaround for this - it is very difficult to find a single scum player, and if you implement a more gradual scale then it's likely just from a pure odds POV that by the time you finally get around to lynching the scum player you might wake up in LYLO the next day. to work around this, I probably would just bite the bullet, ignore that, and make the initial scum team size constant (if you're doing 22p 4 players, probably 3 players for 18p? this is mostly based on intuition, but again, I also don't think people should go into openly bastard games with the expectation that things need to be perfectly fair and balanced), or maybe constant until the first potential LYLO or pre-LYLO day, decrease once and then constant again (just to make it a bit easier).

all of this is opinion and I don't really know why I'm posting it, I guess I just like talking about setup design.