Guardian wrote:Happy this got bumped so I'd read it - I really like the post and think that if you have infinite time you can't go amiss in following its guidelines.
I've modded a number of games in scumchat in the past few weeks imho to a degree of success and one thing I would like to suggest:
Make the game and roles FUN! people don't like having a lack of flavor. Post funny/good scenes. Put work into flavor. Be creative as possible. Have fun roles. This leads into:
people don't like being vanilla townies. to a lesser extent, they don't like being vanilla mafia. This may not work for everyone, but most games I host have no vanillas - and the people who would have gotten vanilla but get some power tend to like this!
A game I hosted tonight had a Miller Vigilante One Shot Day Role-name cop, who was also made a Doc by another role. When I did the death scene for that role, people laughed and complained and cried, but I think that they got some fun out of that role being in the game - and the player playing the role enjoyed being it. Mafia won the game, by the way, after one of the two mafia was lynched day one.
So yeah, make sure your games are ballanced and fair, but after that put as much power and flavor as possible.
Discuss
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This is more true for Scumchat than it is for forum mafia. The reason for this is the relative levels of investment means that it's more important that forum mafia is "fair".
There are many types of fair. The principle one that most people understand is balance, each side should have a reasonable chance of winning - realising at the end of the game that winning as mafia was almost impossible is galling when you've put hours of work into a game over a several-month period.
Other important issues are excessively swingy games, where a combination of nightchoices and extraneous information can lead to redux situations where for the last three days, there's literally nothing one side (
usually
the scum) can do to undermine the level of information that can lead the game. Too many power roles (and for that matter, too much flavour if it's not done quite right) can lead to such situations. This is bad because obviously, the last part of the game is effectively non-interactive, at least for some of the players.
Another issue is roles that are simply unfair - ie, the bad sort of bastard-modding. If a role doesn't work as advertised, then perfectly valid reasoning is going to be undermined. If you're going to have roles, generally speaking, don't punish people for using them.
Now, none of this is too bad on scumchat, because games take half an hour max and people won't complain you've wasted too much of their time. People get involved in forum games to a completely different level and as such designs need to be more careful. That's not to say dense games with few to no vanillas can't work, but they're harder to do.
Furthermore, there are levels of intricacy to analysing behavour in forum mafia that don't really exist in Scumchat. Put simply, there's more to being a townie in forum mafia, so being a townie doesn't mean you're disenfranchised from the game in the same way.
By not having too many power roles, you require that intricacy of behavioural analysis in the first place - and generally speaking, if it's not required, it's hardly used. In other words, dense games and sparse games play in fundamentally different ways, and people like both. Tellingly (generally speaking) the more experienced a player is, the more they prefer sparse games.
So far, I think it's easier to balance by removing things rather than giving more power. Not every game should be stripped of every power role (there are some games like that, but of course not every game should be that way), I'm saying that it's a lot easier to balance when the game isn't filled to the brim with special stuff.
