Mini 751: Suzumiya Haruhi Mafia (OVER)

[Percy]

Thanks everyone, that was heaps of fun!

Nice work Trumpet, especially. I turned Seraphim, and I reckon I could have turned veerus when he got back. If only malthusis had unvoted!

I made a big mistake in hammering. Nice work on the setup, Tar - it totally made sense that my gambit didn't work.

I loved the roles, especially the statis mafia ability.


DGB, we decided to kill you off because your unpredictability made us feel very vulnerable. We like our town nice and (semi-)predictable :D

[Trumpet of Doom]

Nice work Trumpet, especially.

Sigged. Thanks!

Panzer's taking me out of the game was actually really good for me. Especially with my lurking D1 and (I think) D2. When I came back, I had to refresh myself on the game, essentially replacing back in, and I think I play better as a replacement.

On that note, Panzer, what made you choose me to take out of the game? And for so long? Am I really that good?

[forbiddanlight]

Would this have allowed us to talk to FL?

I don't think so. At that point I was completely NOT in the game at all, my effects just kept going off.

[zwetschenwasser]

GG, guys!

[Kinetic]

I'm starting realize how lucky we are for roffman's ability that will effectively block all the mafia kills on one of these days, nearly giving us a free lynch. I'm going to do a real analysing post (or try to) hopefully later today.

From watching the game as a back up mod I thought that Malt should have been lynched immediately for this post . (130)

[veerus]

wee i felt useful in this game.. phasing out 2 scum (well, technically 1) and getting correct sucmmy reads on just about all others... gg all

[Budja]

good game all.

Big props to Percy. He nearly convinced me there was only one mafia team. Our gambit failed badly .

@ roffman, I killed you simply because I recognised you . Looks like I've caused your death twice now.

[forbiddanlight]

Mod notes. I am interested in them.

[Tarhalindur]

Mod Notes should be up later tonight. - Tar

[Tarhalindur]

Mod Notes:

This setup boiled down to three main themes: 1) try out some of my zaniest role ideas, 2) try out roles whose choices are decided at game start, and 3) troll for Scummy nominations with cool roles. There was a grand total of one role I can think of that *didn't* have a twist (Kyon, of course).

Probably the most interesting thing about the setup was that - with the exception of one role (I'll get to that shortly) - the setup was designed so that any role could fit any alignment, to such an extent that I assigned alignments AFTER I decided what ability would go with each role name (again, with one exception).

I'm quite pleased with how most of the roles and game turned out.

Note on balance for those of you complaining about 7-2-2-1: Town won this game despite being outnumbered from D2 to D4 and mislynching THREE times (Seraphim, zwetschenwasser, Panzerjager*), though they required an absurdly lucky series of events to have a chance as late as they did (Global Roleblock D3 preventing any Prisoner's Dilemma shenanigans), Mikuru returning D4, Panzerjager's lynch returning Trumpet of Doom, and veerus successfully phasing the less obvious Beta Mafioso AND blocking the Beta Mafia kill D4). I think Mafia had a fair chance here - Town would have been doomed if Percy hadn't been such a kill magnet D2, for starters - but lost due to a combination of the Alpha Mafia self-destructing and the Beta Mafia getting outconfirmed.

* - The only way the Day 4 lynch makes sense to me is if players thought there were three Alpha Mafiosos.

My impression is that all players with the possible exception of Ortolan (who just got unlucky, IMO) were mediocre at best. The D1 Seraphim lynch nearly wound up costing the town the game, the D2 zwet lynch was uninspired (I distinctly remember it being more town-driven than it should have been). On the other hand, Panzer's play D3 and self-destruct D4 were both awful, as was malthusis's claim (if he had either claimed that he hadn't received a phase counter or that he was targetable, he might have had a shot).

Role Notes:

Haruhi:

Well, she's a Dreaming God. Obviously - the flavor has fit since Mind Screw 1, people. The twist was that, as a potential goddess, it would take more than killing her to shut her ability down (also part of the "choose ability at start of game" subtheme).

Miyoko:

Yet another of my protective role variants with the "the Mafia can silence the protected player, but not the protected role" feature (though I've become more lax on that over time due to how hard it can be to find replacements).

Mikuru:

A bulletproof variant I've been wanting to try out for a while - you survive the kill, but you don't come back for a while. It also fits in nicely with a "choose actions at game start" theme.

Mikuru's one of the roles I *really* liked the flavor on (more than usual for this setup) - all of her abilities are easily understood in terms of time travel (traveling back in time to talk to dead players, bringing a dead player back from the moment before their death to talk for a while, and literal time travel).

Kyon:

There were two things I knew when I made the setup. One, Kyon would be in the game. Two, Kyon would be vanilla (there's speculation that he may be the true source of the god power, but the show flavor made it blatantly obvious that he needed to be vanilla). The "presumably vanilla townie" was just to lead the player away from this conclusion.

Sasaki:

The flavor here is that Sasaki has a very strong and very static sense of herself (for those of you who watched the Haruhi anime - she has a Closed Space like Haruhi, but hers doesn't change, and I'm not saying much more about that) - it wasn't that far of a leap to "deny change", which is the flavorful basis behind both of her abilities. Why did her global roleblock ability resolve after death? Well... that's a spoiler. Let's just say the reason is rather similar to the reason why Haruhi's Dreams of Reality resolved after death...

Kuyoh:

My favorite role from the original setup (the other candidate was changed very late). The concept behind this role is had to explain, but I'll give it a shot: it's as if there are two locations, and they're so far apart that if a player in one player tries to target a player in the other location, they just can't get there to use their action. Given this, Kuyoh has the ability to shift players between locations. (It's a very simple mental picture, but EXTREMELY hard to put into words.)

The role's also very flavorful, but I won't say more because there are spoilers in those waters.

Note on anti-SOS being town: I always intended to have townies from both groups, as it made setup-breaking harder.

Kyoko:

The original concept behind this role was very simple - it's a reverse Hider (the becomes untargetable variant). Originally, it just made the target untargetable and copied all actions targeting Kyoko to the target - the roleblocking function was added during the review stage, due to a combination of Kinetic's insistence and better flavor.

Again, very flavorful role, but also spoileriffic.

Koizumi:

When I planned this setup out, I knew Koizumi was the only character that was going to be an investigative role (flavor pretty much required it). When I chose which roles would be Mafia, I decided that, given how much the town emphasized protective roles, it was only fitting to make Koizumi (the only investigative role) Mafia to give him an easy hole to hide in... well, okay, that and that he was the most obvious SOS-dan member to make scum.

The kill-prevent was added late in review, when I decided the Alpha Mafia was too vulnerable to kills.

Yuki:

Again, a role I simply love. The original concept was that she's a Jailkeeper that protects her target for a predefined length of time (for one day or for many), at the price of removing that player from the game. When I assigned Mafia alignment to roles, I realized just how useful this ability could be as a Mafia bonus kill, and so Yuki (pretty much my favorite non-Kyon character in the series, with the possible exception of Sasaki) became a Mafioso. The Regenerate Data Interface ability was added at the same time that Koizumi's shield was added, and for the same reason.

Tsuruya:

Tsuruya was a hard role to pick an ability for, because she's so enigmatic. I eventually decided on Copier (because I like the role) with a limited-shot Mirror (Tsuruya using her family's position to avoid harm). Tsuruya's Mirror, Mirror was originally two-shot, but I nerfed it before review for balance reasons. Tsuruya became Mafia because I wanted a character outside either SOS-dan to be Mafia, and I wasn't going to make Ryoko Mafia (see below).

Fujiwara:

Fujiwara is an odd redirector, with huge amounts of potential. He can deflect abilities away from a player (originally any other player, but I changed that when I made him Mafia) OR he can play like a normal redirector... or both, if he's good enough at manipulating.

Fujiwara was the last role name selected to be Mafia (SK doesn't count here...), mainly because I decided that I'd rather Kyoko be town than him. I'd apologize, but he is a bit of a bastard.

Ryoko Asakura:

THE role with the oddest history in the setup, yet one of the roles I'm most proud of.

You know all those comments that "Tarhalindur wouldn't give us a 7-2-2-1 setup"? Those were unusually funny to me, because originally this WASN'T a 7-2-2-1 setup. It was 8-2-2, and Ryoko was an odd Vig variant (vigiblocker - roleblock a player, then kill that player) with a scummy role name ("how could Ryoko be town?").

This changed when Kinetic complained to no end that there was no scum role with an unrestricted kill (which he found unbalancing) to such an extent that I gave in. I considered shifting Ryoko to Vigicultist briefly before I remembered that most of the protective roles also granted untargetability or roleblocked. That's when I decided to try Ryoko as a rapidkilling SK who removed her target from the game instead of killing (bypassed all kill blocks except the bulletproofs (including Mikuru), Tsuruya's Mirror (which eventually did in ortolan), and Global Roleblock). I decided to give Ryoko a single kill shield (I don't like SKs with no crosskill protection at all and like bulletproof vest on them) - usefully, I could use the same flavor for her that I did for Yuki - but nothing else, making Ryoko a glass cannon.

Watching the confusion and panic ortolan caused with his forbiddanlight kill was hilarious. Watching ortolan ram his kill into Tsuruya's Mirror... and thus into his own kill shield... and then get Beta Mafia killed was painful.

[forbiddanlight]

Well, that was fun. Anyway, did you mind me bugging you after I was killed and you gave me the set up and throwing out my WMGs?

[Seraphim]

Yeah, I realized later that my D1 lynch of myself was somewhat stupid but due to a lot of luck, I managed to make it work. It was a misunderstand, something that will not happen in any games I join of yours again.

[veerus]

It worked out with me staying alive the whole game that I was able to phase out most people at the end except for confirmed townies. And phasing malthusis wasn't luck. He was the only target that made sense at the time with Seraphim being confirmed, Percy being the obvious lynch the following day for the quick hammer and TOD not being back yet. After having wasted my initial phase out on someone who immediately got lynched, I wasn't about to waste another on Percy.

[Budja]

I think our gambit wasn't half as bad a move as it looked. Panzer's first post of the day and Percy's investigation on me downed us quickly.

[malthusis]

I feel a bit shafted for only having 1 (1!!) kill go through for us, and the fact that if Percy had taken the kill right after we lynched Panzer (or some time around there) we would have won. However, it was a great game and felt I played extremely well (until everything crumbled on the last day).

[MeMe]

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