OK, time for my thoughts on the game and how it played out. I need to thank both MagnaofIllusion and Magister Ludi for helping with the setup design. Their ideas were very helpful, and I enjoyed working with them. I respect them both as mods and setup designers, and would gladly work with them again in the future.
First, a minor note about the title of the game. I called it "Chrono Trigger Mafia Resurrection" for a few reasons. First, to distinguish it from the earlier Chrono Trigger Mafia game that was run back in 2006. Second, it was a bit of a reference to the fan-made project "Chrono Resurrection", which was unfortunately cancelled but made some nice progress on a 3D version of Chrono Trigger, several screenshots of which still are floating around (some of you may have noticed I used one of their shots for the D1 start of day image). Finally, it was a reference to the resurrection mechanics in this game.
I'll get some negatives out of the way first. I think I said all I wanted to say about both the Katsuki and the Oversoul/Tierce situations in the dead players quicktopic. While I'm not particularly happy with those players and would have to think long and hard about letting them into future games of mine, I do feel that I handled those situations in the way that affected the game the least. Some players expressed disagreement with my decisions privately while the game was going on, and while I'm fine debating it, I feel pretty strongly that modkills in either situation would have had a larger external impact on the game than the original infractions that those modkills would have been punishing. I wish those situations didn't happen, but I dealt with them as I saw fit, and I hope those players learn and improve their behavior in the future.
The time period mechanic was originally Ludi's suggestion. Having a set of time periods where players could have different powers depending on the era was a cool idea, and I worked out the details of the Gate Key such that it would start in the hands of town, but could plausibly end up in the hands of scum. In that event, I didn't want the scum to just be able to play keep-away with it, so that's why I announced who used the Gate Key at the start of every day. If the scum wanted to control the era, it would become pretty obvious that they were passing to their buddies once one of them flipped. I also made the decision for players to not have their era-specific powers be a part of their role name. In this way, a lot of the town's power was "hidden" in the era-specific roles. The Belthasar role was meant to help the town figure out the setup by revealing what era-specific roles the dead players had. I think this mechanic played out well, and I'm happy with how it was implemented. Both scum teams had a one-shot day power that could change the time period, which was a way of giving them some sort of control over the game, even if they never got the Gate Key (and they never did).
As far as overall game balance goes, my plan almost from the very start was to have a large number of scum relative to game size, but for them to have fairly weak powers compared to the town. 18/5/5 sounds like an insane ratio of town to scum, but I had some ideas in place to balance them. First, the town had a lot of protective roles. Two doctors (which I would actually argue is swingier, and only marginally more powerful than one), a bulletproof townie, a reviver, and various era-specific protects. Second, the town had several confirmable or near-confirmable roles: masons, vendor, ability cop, plus some era-specific powers that could confirm several players (governor, sensor, 3 vigs). Also, both scum teams had some one-way lover conditions (more on that later), and neither scumteams had amazing powers overall. I thought that would all work out.
As it turns out, the confirmable town roles just made those players targets for the scum, and the protective roles were either protecting the wrong players, failing to submit night actions (which hurt the town at least once), etc. It became clear after about D4 or D5 that the town really needed to pick up some crosskills to have a chance. I had anticipated something like 3 or 4 crosskills over the course of the game, and I figured the town would vig 1 or 2 scum. That would leave 4-6 scum to be lynched. I probably underestimated the amount of vig power that the town would need in this game. Town had a one-shot standard vig and three era-specific vigs. SpyreX's vig was roleblocked, Kcdaspot failed to submit his vig kill on the night he had it, and CES was killed the night before she would get his shot. Only Staeg successfully vigged, and he hit town. Maybe if town had one or two more era-specific or limited-shot vigs, this would have worked out better.
The key role that led to the town victory ended up being the even/odd sensor. This was actually a last-minute addition to the setup. I knew I wanted Robo to have some sort of investigative role in the future. I really like the idea behind the sensor role, but it's really an extremely powerful ability, so I was looking for a way to nerf it while still retaining the idea behind it. I thought the even/odd modification would make it weaker, since the player would not know precisely how many scum were on the lynch wagon. As it turned out, the ability was nearly as powerful as a regular sensor because it's pretty easy to guess that there are more likely to be three out of seven scum on the wagon (I don't remember the exact number) rather than one or five out of seven. So this modification didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, although it ended up being something the town really needed since the rest of the setup was balanced against them in terms of numbers. The main reason the sensor was bad, despite this, is that the town's chances were almost entirely dependent on zoraster surviving long enough to use it, and that's not good, but I guess it worked out in this particular iteration of the game.
I experimented with a lot of things when designing the Lavos faction, trying to do things that both fit with the source material and that would be interesting mechanics. I knew that I wanted the Lavos Core to be the focus of the team such that if he died, both pods would die as well. This would partially offset the numbers advantage the scum had if the core were to be lynched. I gave him action-immunity, enabled by the Lavos Pod, just like in the game, so that a random vig or scum kill wouldn't screw their entire faction. I didn't really expect that the core would ever get lynched before both pods were killed, since I figured the team would do everything they could to defend him. That, in turn, would lead to the core falling under suspicion once those players died and flipped as scum. It turns out that since the pods died off so early, this didn't really play out, which was unfortunate. The revival mechanic was another experiment, since I wanted the Core to be able to restore its action-immunity if needed. Standard revival of scum is super overpowered, so that's why I had pods revive without the ability to vote. In a sense, it was choosing to no-kill and regaining a power. I also knew that the town would see that the pod was voteless and would realize that lynching them again would be a waste. The Lavos team decided early on that revival was generally not worth forfeiting a night kill for, which I think was a reasonable decision, but there may have been situations where I could see them wanting to revive one of the pods for various reasons.
I designed the faction's Evolve ability around the idea that even if the Center Pod died, the ability could still be useful if they revived. Unfortunately, I don't think they fully understood the mechanics of that role, since they could have used it on N2 even after Vi died, plus they tried to absorb an era-specific role later in the game when the ability said it would only work on standard abilities. I don't think the ability description was unclear on this point, but regardless, we never really got to see this mechanic play out.
The idea of having two Lavos Spawns as traitors disconnected from the main team was something I wanted to try out rather than having them just be a regular part of the faction. This was done both to distinguish them from the Time's Eclipse mafia, and I've always kinda had this idea in the back of my head for a game with a "disconnected" scum team. That is, a team that knew each other but couldn't interact other than through the main game thread. I sort of went with a hybrid version of that idea here. I expected that it would impact the day game quite a bit, as the traitors couldn't coordinate with the rest of their team. What I did not expect was that it would impact the night game, as pidgey killed off Primate in an attempt to buy Oversoul some town credit, but ended up exposing him as a liar. I think it led to some interesting situations, but I'm not sure if it was more fun for the traitors than just being regular scum.
The Time's Eclipse mafia were much more of a "standard" scum group. Since Lavos had a one-way lover condition with the core, I gave the TE scum a similar deal with Schala and the Dream Devourer. It wasn't quite as extreme, but the idea was the same - they would defend Nuwen at all costs to prevent losing two players, which would draw more suspicion on her if/when they flipped as scum. This actually happened with DRey's flip, but they were able to get kanye lynched first. I thought the mason gambit was actually quite clever, except for the part where they assumed that there were no real masons in the game. I also was surprised that the real masons believed the claim outright instead of counterclaiming immediately. The flavor behind the claim didn't quite make sense, but it was a nice idea. I think maybe to weaken them a bit, it may have been a better idea to make Schala and the Dream Devourer regular lovers with a mutual bulletproof or something of the sort. That would have reduced swinginess as well. In terms of balance between the scum teams, I think the TE mafia were stronger overall because of the lack of traitors, the less severe lover condition, and better powers. I don't think the balance was skewed egregiously toward TE since both teams had fairly weak powers overall and equal numbers, but I probably would have made some changes.
Like all setups I've run, I always look back and ask myself how I would have done things differently having seen the game play out. I think the general sentiment here is that the town was underpowered, and the scumteams should be brought closer to each other in terms of power. I don't think there were any sweeping changes that should have been made, but I think a few key changes would have been in order to make this a better game:
1) Add two townies, one or both with an era-specific vig. This helps the town in terms of numbers, and gives them a little more killing power. I originally thought this was going to be a 30-player game, but I guess I have an irrational aversion to games with 30 or more players. It's sort of a cut-off point for me where I feel games that large or larger sort of devolve into chaos and unplayability. It's completely arbitrary, and I don't think it would have made that big a difference, so I should have just stuck with a 30 player game to start.
2) Weaken the TE mafia slightly. I think making DD/Schala full lovers with a mutual limited-shot or other conditional bulletproof would have helped, and maybe getting rid of some of the goons' era-specific powers.
3) Remove the sensor, and distribute more investigative power throughout the town to compensate. The sensor was really too much power to concentrate into a single role, so this would reduce swinginess and give players more powers to work with.
And that's really it. There were some things that didn't quite work out the way I envisioned (some of the Lavos mafia mechanics primarily) that could have been done better, but as far as game balance, I think those changes would have made this game much closer to balanced. Overall game balance in a setup like this is pretty much impossible, but efforts can always be made to get it close. It may not always be possible to achieve good balance, but I think it's always possible to achieve
better
balance.
Anyway, I hope that people had fun, despite some of the issues with the setup. It was fun for me as a huge Chrono Trigger fan to design and mod the game. I will gladly answer any questions and accept any comments about the game, either positive or negative. With every game I run, I try to come out of it as a better mod/setup designer, so feedback from the players is always welcome.
I haven't decided what game I'm running next, if some people were wondering. In principle, I'm working on a His Dark Materials large theme, but I've been struggling for over a year on the key mechanic for that setup, and I really don't know what the timescale is for that. I have a mini theme that I haven't quite decided the theme for yet, but that should be a far more sane game than this one. I also discussed with a few people in the dead QT that I may float an open setup idea based on the Lavos Core idea in this game, so we'll see where that goes. Also, I've got a 40-player Chrono Cross large theme with 15 scum in it that I am running soon.
...
OK, just kidding about that last one.
