Succession Mafia (OVER!)

[Mr. Flay]

Night Zero:

• vezokpiraka talked sense into ReaperCharlie through a note under the door, which he duly ignored (not told it existed).
  
• animorpherv1 recruited Seraphim (no possibility of failure, so processed immediately)
  
• ooba considered whether to fire N0, since he is a "Loose Cannon", but opted not to.
  
• dramonic stood guard on Yosarian2 (no effect)
  
• Andrius investigated ReaperCharlie, finding him unaligned.
  
• Chronopie blocked Yosarian2 (no effect)
  
• Erg0 also wanted to recruit Seraphim, but was too late. (Seraphim didn't get notice of this until just before dawn, for balance reasons)
  
• ReaperCharlie wanted to investigate Faraday, but was stopped by the bodyguard. He was also investigated in turn by Andrius.
  xvart stood guard on Faraday, preventing RC's investigation.
  
• Porochaz chose not to block anyone.
  
• Furcolow forgot to send in a choice in time; if he'd managed to, he and Andrius both would have investigated ReaperCharlie.

End of N0 tally: 17 town, 2 Vittorio, 1 Porfirio

Night One:

• dramonic stood guard on Andrius, before being killed himself.
  
• Andrius investigated ooba, finding nothing decisive.
  
• ReaperCharlie also investigated ooba.
  
• Erg0 recruited xvart.
  
• zwet killed dramonic.
  
• vezokpiraka talked sense into Andrius (no effect).
  
• xvart wanted to stand guard on Erg0, but was otherwise occupied.
  
• Porochaz blocked Friend (no effect).
  
• ooba killed zwetschenwasser
  
• Chronopie blocked xvart from guarding Erg0.
  
• animorpherv1 recruited Yosarian2 into his faction

End of N1 tally: 12 town, 3 Vittorio, 2 Porfirio

Night Two:

• Andrius investigated Gurgi, finding him unaligned.
  
• RC also investigated Gurgi, finding him unaligned.
  
• Chronopie wanted to roleblock M=W, but was blocked instead.
  
• Flameaxe recruited ReaperCharlie into his faction.
  
• Erg0 sent xvart to kill Me=Weird
  
• Robocopter talked sense into Andrius (no effect).
  
• Porochaz chose to block Chronopie, causing a 'scene'.
  
• xvart skipped his regular night action to kill Me=Weird, providing the first scum-kill of the game.

End of N2 tally: 11 town, 3 Vittorio, 2 Porfirio

Night Three:

• Porochaz blocked xvart from doing anything.
  
• Flameaxe tried to recruit the already-recruited xvart; not only did it not work, but he was blocked from talking about it, due to Chronopie.
  
• Robocopter talked sense into Andrius again (no effect except deterrence).
  
• Chronopie roleblocked Flameaxe (didn't stop the recruit attempt, but does stop him from talking that night).
  
• Andrius investigated Yosarian2, providing him with his first guilty of the game.
  
• xvart misses any chance at an action, due to being blocked.
  
• Erg0 tried to recruit the other recruiter (which of course fails).
  
• ReaperCharlie investigated Chronopie, finding him unaligned.

End of N3 tally: 9 town, 3 Vittorio, 2 Porfirio

Night Four:

• Flameaxe recruited Chronopie.
  
• Andrius tried to investigate Quagmire/Erg0, but was stopped by seeing xvart looming outside the door.
  
• Chronopie blocked Quagmire, making her the first role to 'score' a hit with both Sons!
  
• Robocopter talked sense into Andrius again (no effect except deterrence).
  
• ReaperCharlie investigates Darox, finding him also unaligned.
  
• Porochaz ALSO blocked Quagmire (no real effect by the time it resolves, but amusing as hell).
  
• xvart gives up his protection to kill ooba. He also registers the attempt of Andrius to stop by, but doesn't identify him.

End of N4 tally: 6 town, 4 Vittorio, 2 Porfirio - now it's starting to get pretty grim.

Night Five:

• Andrius wants to investigate xvart, turning up another guilty party.
  
• Porochaz blocks xvart.
  
• Flameaxe recruits Darox.
  
• xvart tries to kill Yos2, but is blocked instead.
  
• Robocopter talked sense into Andrius again (no effect except deterrence).
  
• ReaperCharlie investigates Porochaz, finding him unaligned.
  
• Chronopie also blocks xvart.

End of N5 tally: 5 town, 5 Vittorio, 1 Porfirio goon by himself

Night Six:

• Andrius wanted to investigate Lord Gurgi, then switched to Darox. Both are guilty, not that it matters.
  
• Flameaxe decided to recruit Porochaz (and singersigner and Lord Gurgi in endgame). Andrius and xvart get to die honorably with their current win conditions.
  
• Chronopie blocked xvart.
  
• Porochaz, once recruited, was going to be directed to block Lord Gurgi.
  
• ReaperCharlie wanted to investigated singersigner.
  
• xvart never even got a chance to send in his action...

End of N6 tally: 3 town, 6 Vittorio, 1 Porfirio (game over, endgame triggered)

Realistically, I could have called game after Day Six's mislynch, but I wanted to see what would happen that night. In theory, xvart could have slipped through and killed Flameaxe, then gone on to be a pseudo-Vig for town to help destroy Vittorio's faction during the days, though he probably would have been lynched or NKed in the end. With both blockers on Vittorio's side by the end of that Night, though, victory was assured, so I called game out of sheer mercy. Gurgi and singer both got the option to refuse recruitment in endgame, in which case they would have died like Andrius and lost with Town. I did it that way because Cult games cause a bad endgame effect if you're part of a shrinking town... if endgame is only supposed to 'avoid delaying the inevitable', then there should realistically be a chance to recruit each remaining player. Hence, Andrius died as the "Day Seven lynch", and then the other two were recruited (although Loose Cannons shouldn't be, technically, and singersigner may cause problems someday down the line...

[Mr. Flay]

Oh, also several people tried to pump me for information about how Night Actions would resolve. Mostly I stuck to Natural Action Resolution, but it made sense that the Recruiters (and hence the Consigliere) would act first, so they'd have a chance to change their recruit's action for that Night, and talk with them. So I had to wait until both the Consigliere AND the Sons had their choices in, and the Molls who might end up blocking the Consigliere, not that his protection ever did anything but deterrence. All other actions were 'resolved' at Dawn like a normal game, though the flavor text hinted otherwise: seductions, protections, then beatings and killings. Also, as previously mentioned, if a roleblocker blocked a Recruit or Son, they were denied access to their QT as soon as I was sure of NAR.

Sons who tried to recruit the same player on the same Night were resolved in order of who got their choice in first... I thought about giving the player a legitimate 'choice', but discarded it as too powerful. vezok was no problem for getting the Cult Doccing in on time, though I had to poke Robocopter a couple of times once he jumped into that role... sorry man, I couldn't tell you

why

.

[Mr. Flay]

I do think having two recruiters balanced the game a bit, in that only about 5 out of 10 opportunities to recruit were successful before Quag died. And yes, the Consigliere was unrecruitable as well, so if the Loose Cannons hadn't offed each other, Town would have been in a LOT better shape. Making the LCs double-shot might have helped, in that case... but it also might have made them too powerful. This was, by design, a swingy setup, that I tried to force to resolve by skill more than luck. Unfortunately, there seemed to be precious little skill to go around...

[Yosarian2]

Long version:

Something went wrong here. I'm not certain the setup was all that flawed, though I'm thankful for the changes my reviewers (mykonian and Max) encouraged me to do, they helped immensely.

You can't judge if a cult game was balanced by it's end state, really.

Cult games, by their very nature, tend to end in either an early, overwhelming town victory or a late, overwhelming scum victory. There's really not much middle ground, and so even a cult game that is balanced 50/50 will very often end up like...this.

I do think, though, that you could have given the town power of a type that's a little more effective against cults. Roleblockers that can't stop recruitments and cops that can't find recruiters aren't that much help, for the most part. Better might have been, say, a small unrecruitable mason group. Plus, all the extra power you piled on the recruiters was a little silly; I think you still are underestimating how powerful and basically unbalancing a cult recruiter role is always going to be, let alone a game with 2 cult recruiter roles. There was really no need for, say, that "bribery" ability, or for the recruiter to not be investigatable. A cult recruiter really just doesn't need any help, especially not if his cult can keep killing after he's dead.

To his credit, I think Furc did a pretty good job, and I mention him specifically because I saw some prior game problems and asked him to 'rein it in a bit'. He said he would, and I feel he acquitted himself fairly well.

He didn't do that badly. He made one big mistake, which was how he handled the claim; he claimed "power role" prematurely, realized he shouldn't have, then compounded his mistake by trying a gambit of trying to take back his claim and claim townie. If he didn't do that, he wouldn't have been lynched; as it was, he ended up just looking like scum trying to get out of a bad claim he made. By the time he tried to undo his townie claim and claim cop, he had lost all credibility as far as claims went, and I don't think anyone took him seriously.

Vengeance lynches and personality clashes, though... what a mess that threw into Day One. People, you have GOT to leave out-of-this-game stuff out of games!

Hmm? I'm curious...i didn't really see any vengeance lynches or personality clashes on day 1 at all. People voted furcolow for rational reasons, pretty much all the way through.

The only real "vengeance lynch/ personality clash" I remember was serephem voting vez, and then asking to be replaced out. Of course, Seprehem was recruited scum at this point anyway.

After that, you (town) ran into some bad, bad luck/choices on Night One. One Loose Cannon shot another, a second Loose Cannon shot a Bodyguard (again due to personality conflicts, as far as I could tell)

I don't think any of that was personality conflicts, either; Zwet and ooba had both made their suspicions pretty clear at the end of day 1.

The schtick of their role is that they'd come up unreadable to Enforcers, but were unrecruitable by Sons. They were

supposed

to be the fallback for town getting behind the recruitment curve, but instead by N2 they were all used up!

Did they know they were unrecruitable?

A one-shot vig who knows he's unrecruitable might consider saving his kill until later (although, considering how fast town has to kill the recruiters in order to have a chance, I'm not really sure about that, either). A one shot vig who doesn't know that he's unrecruitable should always shoot right away, assuming he's playing to the town win condition.

[Mr. Flay]

No, Loose Cannons didn't know they were unrecruitable, though it was hinted at.

The personality conflict was masked by the sheer volume of posts. Oldbies who expected regular posting, VIs who were posting unhelpfully, and spammers who were posting INCESSANTLY all grated on each other. In the end, you compromised on a rather crap lynch (yes yes, I know, D1 sucks, but 4 claims?!?).

Bribery was solely in the game to avoid a D1 loss for a Son. Anybody who did that was going to get vigged/dogpiled the next day, so it either bought you one extra Night, or avoided a total rout for their side. It's not like a normal lynchproof where Town might ignore that person from then on, because at least one other role (plus any of their recruits) knew the power existed out there. And the whole POINT of the game was to see what dueling recruiters would do to the dynamic, not a traditional Cult vs. Town game.

As for the claim that the Cult Recruiters were too powerful, look at what they were up against: 2 Sane Cops, 2 Roleblockers, 3 unrecruitable Vigs, 2 Doctors, an unrecruitable rival, and an unrecruitable Cult Doc. The game could VERY easily have swung the other way, it just didn't.

[Flameaxe]

Another question: Did the cult doc's ability protect against a bribe as well, during the following day?

[Mr. Flay]

It would have, yes. That's the other reason LCs were there - even in LyLo, they could force the count past bare majority.

[Yosarian2]

The personality conflict was masked by the sheer volume of posts. Oldbies who expected regular posting, VIs who were posting unhelpfully, and spammers who were posting INCESSANTLY all grated on each other.

I...don't really think that's true. I mean, sure, VI's annoyed experenced players, which always happens.

In the end, you compromised on a rather crap lynch (yes yes, I know, D1 sucks).

No, furcolow was by far my #1 choice for lynch on day 1. He was caught lying about his role, in a way that (I didn't think) made any sense for town. It wasn't a compromise lynch at all; I, personally, thought he was by far more likely to be a cult recruiter then anyone else in the game, based on his play, and I wasn't the only one.

Of course, the odds of town actually lynching any kind of scum on day 1 of this game was even smaller then normal.

Bribery was solely in the game to avoid a D1 loss for a Son. Anybody who did that was going to get vigged/dogpiled the next day, so it either bought you one extra Night, or avoided a total rout for their side. It's not like a normal lynchproof where Town might ignore that person from then on, because at least one other role (plus any of their recruits) knew the power existed out there.

Well, that's fine; but the biggest effect it had was that in a 4 scum out of 9 endgame, it meant that if the town had managed to wagon our recruiter, it would have cost them the game instantly, right?

As for the claim that Cults were too powerful, look at what they were up against: 2 Sane Cops, 2 Roleblockers, 3 unrecruitable Vigs, 2 Doctors, and an unrecruitable Cult Doc. The game could VERY easily have swung the other way, it just didn't.

Well, except that, so long as the recruiters were recruiting, the bodyguards, cops, and roleblockers were all completely ineffective against them. Cops that can find recruits but not recruiters, and roleblockers that can't stop recruitments, are actually much more likely to help the cults then to hurt them, especially as they're recruitable. The vigs could have been helpful, but the odds of a one-shot vig taking down a recruiter aren't that high in the best of circumstances.

The town basically has until day 4 or so to lynch at least one recruiter or town loses, and has to lynch them both by day 6 or so at the latest. In a 20 player game, town doing both of those things is just not all that likely (By my calculations, if the town is lynching randomly, the odds of getting both recruiters by day 6 is something like 5%).

Anyway, I don't want to sound too critical. This was an awesome game, it was a lot of fun, and it was run very well. I would just suggest that, if you were to run a game like this again, you'd want to give town powers that do more to prevent the real threat (recruitment and the recruiters), rather then roles that prevent nightkilling and can only catch recruits.

[ReaperCharlie]

Anyway, I don't want to sound too critical. This was an awesome game, it was a lot of fun, and it was run very well. I would just suggest that, if you were to run a game like this again, you'd want to give town powers that do more to prevent the real threat (recruitment and the recruiters), rather then roles that prevent nightkilling and can only catch recruits.

I agree; I had a lot of fun in this game, all things considered.

Next time (if there is a next time, which I highly think there should be. Succession II, anyone?) I would recommend doing all of what Yosarian2 suggested, in addition to finding some way to make night AR easier on yourself. Of course, it's always going to be crazy with cults, but perhaps by making it clear to the cult doc that he needed to act fast (or even submit his actions before nightfall), that might have helped you in resolving quite a few things more easily. And on that note, another thing that seemed to be a trend was that people just didn't understand (or didn't bother to try to understand?) their roles, OR the game's setup. I mean, I thought you made it pretty clear that there were no more and no less than 2 recruiters. And even though the clues were there, some people just wanted to speculate otherwise. Unless you looked closely (which a lot of people didn't), it could have been misinterpreted. And then of course, things would have gone much better for the town if the loose cannons would have known that they were un-recruitable, investigation-immune/millers, etc.

I realize that things seem more fun/mysterious/interesting when you have to piece together the clues; I tend to err on the side of safety/ambiguity in most of my games too. But it's easy to forget what you have/haven't told players, especially when a lot of your mod notes are in your head, and not written down somewhere. There was a large amount of ambiguity that worked against the town from the beginning, and once I was recruited, I immediately began looking for ways to use that to my advantage, because I knew that had been my biggest disadvantage as town.

Don't take this as outright criticism; it's not. It's just saying that not everyone is as smart as you wish they were, and you have to break things down for them barney-style sometimes, so they can understand it. You mentioned one example of this on the bottom of the previous page:

Don't remember if it was a Townie or Recruit who said Day Six that there was no "flavor reason for a Cult Doc", but I wanted to smack them. If anything, there should have been two roles that could stop recruitment.

That was me. .. And I realize that there are such things as Cult doctors, and that they'd be very important especially in a game with multiple cults, but when all was said and done, the ambiguity there was a small crack which (over time) I could work my wedge into. Give it a few days, and eventually I had it wide open. and more people began jumping onto the bandwagon with me. It was like pouring lemon juice on a wound. Another thing that could really have helped toward balancing the game a little more toward a town victory would have been doing just as you suggested in the excerpt I quoted: adding a second Cult doc. Even if he would have picked the wrong target every single night, he could still have corroborated Robo's claim and would have successfully prevented the mislynch on Day 6. Even if he'd been killed before that, he'd have flipped Cult doc and Robo's claim would have been instantly believed. Not to mention, they could have protected each other from recruitment each night, and besides the fact that they could have had 200% of the coverage that Robo did, the very fact that there were two of them would have created about 500% more WIFOM for the cult recruiters to wade through when trying to pick a target.

And speaking of the recruiters, I can't believe they both picked the same target on Night 0. What are the chances? lol

I'm very surprised that there ended up being ONLY xvart on the other team at the end. We all thought that at LEAST one of Gurgi/singersigner were on the other team as well, if not both of them. We recruited Porochaz on the last night just so that we could block two out of three of our 'other cult' suspects. I am appalled at the amount of bad luck the other cult had when recruiting; that was really, really unprecedented. I think we got very lucky early on that they had two failed recruiting attempts. Though I cannot fault them for trying to recruit Flameaxe. I would have tried to recruit him too. Flameaxe did an excellent job of staying under the radar just enough, but without lurking. My hat's off to him.

One other big thing I would recommend changing for the next iteration of the setup (...seriously. Succession II. Do it. I'll even co-mod.) is that the loose cannons should be two-shot. I don't know about making them unrecruitable again, but having only one shot was severely crippling to the town (especially because of the cross-kills, but etc.) and if they'd had more, we would have been a lot more worried about one of us (or even our recruiter) getting shot at night. That, I feel, would have evened the playing field a lot more.

All in all, I enjoyed this game a lot, I feel that the theme of the flavor, two sons both wanting to inherit their father's mafia group, was extremely well conceived. I'm not sure if it's copied from a movie or something, or if it's been done before at all, but honestly, that really sucked me into the game. That was excellent. The game was well-narrated, too, and I for one liked the amount of ambiguity that was floating around at any given moment (even though it was detrimental to the possible win percentage of those who paid less attention). It really kept me and the rest of my cult on our toes, and playing outguess-the-mod is always fun anyway.

Thanks for a fun "last" game on Mafia.

[Andrius]

Better might have been, say, a small unrecruitable mason group.

I was praying there would be a mason group. A little too wishful for mason RECRUITER, but I was hoping there would be some masons in the woodwork.

More later, but I definitely agree that the LC's had alot more potential than we (Enforcers) did.

Swingy setup, but I'd definitely play it again. As town. Preferably Mason. <3

[Chronopie]

I liked my Role.

Seriously, Great Flavour too.

[ReaperCharlie]

Yeah, Flay. Can you make some post like this? http://www.mafiascum.net/forum/viewtopi ... 8#p2496528

And can you change the beginning post to have links to everywhere, like this? http://www.mafiascum.net/forum/viewtopi ... =3&t=14466

Thanks!

[Seraphim]

I probably should have kept my cool...but Vezok's play was just pissing me off in this game. Even though I was scum, I probably would done the same thing as town.

[Mr. Flay]

Yeah, I considered that a null tell, Sera. Replacing out is hardly ever going to enhance your role's win condition.

I appreciate all the constructive criticism (by which I mean, practically all of it!) you guys are making. I definitely erred on the side of too few ways to rid yourselves of the Cult Recruiters. Bribery may need to work differently, I'm still not sure it needs to be removed. I hate when some faction can be booted D1/N1 from a game, and in this case it would have thrown the entire setup into a cocked hat...

Yos, you and I are going to have to agree to disagree about Day One. From my perspective, everybody went after EVERYBODY (you had like... 5 vote leaders, and 4 role claims), and Furcolow was picked more or less at random, and the other people with his role refused to corroborate him (because they were mad at him I guess?). Seriously, he wasn't going to be a recruiter with that partial roleclaim, and in a cult game role/lack of role isn't really the reason you lynch somebody, but lynching a claimed Cop!?

Succession II??? Good lord you people are demanding! I've already got to run War in Heaven III/War Is Hell sometime... but yeah, I'll think about a way to make it work with most of the mechanics revealed. Hell, as RC says, it may work better, in that people spend less time on setup speculation.

RC, I'm not going to post all the flavor PMs, they weren't as impressive as yours. And the first post already does have links to everything that happened...

[Yosarian2]

Yos, you and I are going to have to agree to disagree about Day One. From my perspective, everybody went after EVERYBODY (you had like... 5 vote leaders, and 4 role claims), and Furcolow was picked more or less at random, and the other people with his role refused to corroborate him (because they were mad at him I guess?). Seriously, he wasn't going to be a recruiter with that partial roleclaim, and in a cult game role/lack of role isn't really the reason you lynch somebody, but lynching a claimed Cop!?

You may have the benifit of foreknowlege when it comes to furcolow. The rest of us didn't already know he was a cop.

If you were playing in a game where someone claimed power role, then said he lied and claimed townie, then just as he was about to lynched said he was actually the cop, I doubt you would take the cop claim any more seriously then we did.

By the way, if you do make a succession II, I'd defiantly be interested.

[gandalf5166]

I dont think Flay would ever stick a jester in a setup, particularly one years in the making.

I said recruit playing jester. As in, trying to get lynched.

[Seraphim]

Yeah, I considered that a null tell, Sera. Replacing out is hardly ever going to enhance your role's win condition.

I dunno, it might have lol. I replaced out and everyone immediately started calling Me=Friend town so I don't know how completely true that line of thinking is.

Since this game, I have since learned to just ignore Vezok.

[Yosarian2]

I dont think Flay would ever stick a jester in a setup, particularly one years in the making.

I said recruit playing jester. As in, trying to get lynched.

(nods) That's actually a reasonable option in some cases. That last day, when Andy threatened to lynch me if I didn't claim, I was considering just laughing at him, telling him to do it, and self-voting.

[xvart]

Succession II??? Good lord you people are demanding! I've already got to run War in Heaven III/War Is Hell sometime... but yeah, I'll think about a way to make it work with most of the mechanics revealed. Hell, as RC says, it may work better, in that people spend less time on setup speculation.

Not speculating on setup would have helped me a lot, because from my perspective when I was denied access to my QT I falsely assumed that anything and everything would be refused (i.e. recruiting, too). It was pretty powerful (and maybe more so because that left only one person in my QT to talk so it was exponentially worse than having three other people who can keep on scheming). Of course, Erg0 was absent from our QT up until I got blocked and then when he came I was absent). I also couldn't really imagine a guy banging a hooker six ways from Sunday and another guy come in and say "hey, excuse me for a second, but you wanna come work for me?" but I guess that is the order of operations and it could work).

[ReaperCharlie]

Succession II

Yes!!1

/pre-in

[Mr. Flay]

Also, I wanted to ask, what did people think of the Day Clock??

I'm trying to figure out a way to make it NOT suck for late-game days next time I use it, but overall I really liked the semi-bankable deadline aspect of it. The clock was kind of a pain in the keister, though....

[Chronopie]

The clock aspect wasn't bad, although

Day

ending around midday is kinda odd.

and

if

When

you decide to run Succession II... Pre-/in?

[Me=Weird]

Maybe for the bribe ability, you could make it only effective if the recruiter has one or no recruits?

[ReaperCharlie]

Or maybe even: his bribe ability could be used at any time of day or night (once per cycle), and that was the way he culted people.

But with items! (flashlight = search/investigate, brass knuckles=bodyguard, tommy gun=hitman, etc). That'd be pretty awesome!

[Mr. Flay]

Items would just consolidate power for cult groups faster... they'd be able to pass them off if one person was likely to be Tracked, etc. Town wouldn't trust anyone enough to trade an item.

I like the modification to bribe, though... not sure I'll use it, but I like the theory behind limiting it.[/modwifom]