Re: WOLF MAFIA
Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2019 10:06 am
by OrangeRKN
Well played TAP, no idea why you made the play at the end for power but it worked I guess!
Thanks for running this Dan. It's certainly achieved it's primary goal of being an active game!
Some thoughts from myself:
Thanks for running this Dan. It's certainly achieved it's primary goal of being an active game!
Some thoughts from myself:
Game ending by timeout sucks
The "wolves win by Friday 13th" timeout clause made the endgame frustrating for me, and their win feel cheapened. Had there been no timeout, as we had managed to find the other wolves, Mommy and myself could have kept the seer protection circle going right up until the end and we would have won. So the only reason we didn't win was because of a somewhat arbitrary limit on when the wolves would win by default.
On that note, was there any mechanism to force the wolves to pick targets to kill? What was actually going on with all the nights with no kills? It certainly appeared like the wolves were deliberately avoiding kills to make the village odds smaller and give us nothing to work with, which is pretty much the opposite of how mafia should play (the wolves should always be keen to get as many kills as possible, as their win condition should be matching the village in number, and in making those kills they give information for the village to work with).
On mitigating the seer protection circle aka get rid of the mayor and other options
There are several ways of mitigating the protection circle tactic, so I thought I'd talk about a couple of them:
1) Get rid of the mayor
The mayor is not a standard part of the mafia setup! I find the suggestion of "get rid of the witch doctor" a funny take, because the witch doctor is much more of a standard mafia role than having an elected mayor who is safe from both lynch and night kills and who gets to nominate the candidates for lynch. Get rid of the mayor, and protection circles are a mechanical impossibility.
Getting rid of the mayor is also good for voting. I think the game genuinely just works better when everyone is voting for who to lynch, as voting records are more useful and more interesting wagons and reversals in the vote seem to naturally arise. Also, no mayor election means no need to split the day phase into two votes - instead the lynch vote runs across the whole day. It makes the game simpler and easier to play!
2) Give the wolves a roleblocker role
A roleblocker targets a player in the night phase and prevents them using any power role. For example a roleblocked seer gets back no result, while a doctor's protection is nullified. In the case of a seer and other roles, it is obvious when they have been roleblocked, so the roleblocker's existence is discoverable from their actions.
Against a protection circle a roleblocker is obviously disruptive. Once the seer/doctor are publicly declared, the roleblocker can target the doctor on the night he isn't mayor and so the mafia can kill him off. Public protection circles are easily broken.
In this game specifically, a roleblocker could have started targeting Mommy on day 1 as soon as he declared as seer, and all of his seer attempts could then have been blocked. As soon as I declared as the witch doctor, the wolves could have disrupted the protection circle.
The game is better with no outside communication (including PMs!)
Again this is an area GRcade seems pretty non-standard in - allowing villagers to freely PM each other. With the exception of the wolves, villagers should only be able to communicate about the game in thread. It forces public discussion, forces thread activity, and generally just makes the game more interesting. It also makes seers less overpowered in that they can't slowly establish their own "informed minority" of seered villagers. A seer should be torn between revealing their role and making all their findings public, and staying hidden from everyone to give themselves more time to investigate more people. A seer who can PM trusted others their results in confidence is a seer without any such dilemma.
Having a default no-PM rule also makes roles like lovers more interesting, where the downside of them both dying at the same time is balanced by them being able to communicate via PM.
Roles that change alignment suck
Mafia is a game about examining past behaviour to infer player alignment. When players can start on one side and switch to another (be it the half-wolf role in this game or in the generic case of a recruitment game, as we've seen previously), such deduction becomes largely pointless. Being able to trust in deduction is in large part the appeal of the game, so I really don't like alignment-switching roles.
Roles should get reliably named on death
Half-wolves returning as "human" on death was harsh. When the host lies, it discourages and frustrates the village (and maybe even the wolves!). Death post reveals should be the one thing we can actually trust when it comes to confirming player alignment - otherwise everything becomes questionable and deduction is once again waylaid.
Hidden mechanics largely suck
This wasn't a standard game of mafia. It was somewhat frustrating being told it was a standard game of mafia on signing up, only to discover halfway through the game that it wasn't a standard game of mafia. In retrospect the half-wolf role doesn't change the game too much, but because we didn't know about the role or mechanics of it, it had a much greater effect as everything in the game got called into question. With the game now over I'm left hoping that the next game will actually be a standard game, and I don't think that's what Dan was going for.
Clues are a distraction
Their meaning is unknown until the end of the game, with any theories having no way of being verified, so clues are largely pointless (and mostly just a distraction). Instead they added to the frustration of knowing there were hidden mechanics in play. I think clues are better avoided unless the game is aiming to be a wild experiment in unknown mechanics.
Mommy is mental
Finally, Mommy is a right crazy seer and I am definitely voting to lynch him on the first day of the next game
The "wolves win by Friday 13th" timeout clause made the endgame frustrating for me, and their win feel cheapened. Had there been no timeout, as we had managed to find the other wolves, Mommy and myself could have kept the seer protection circle going right up until the end and we would have won. So the only reason we didn't win was because of a somewhat arbitrary limit on when the wolves would win by default.
On that note, was there any mechanism to force the wolves to pick targets to kill? What was actually going on with all the nights with no kills? It certainly appeared like the wolves were deliberately avoiding kills to make the village odds smaller and give us nothing to work with, which is pretty much the opposite of how mafia should play (the wolves should always be keen to get as many kills as possible, as their win condition should be matching the village in number, and in making those kills they give information for the village to work with).
On mitigating the seer protection circle aka get rid of the mayor and other options
There are several ways of mitigating the protection circle tactic, so I thought I'd talk about a couple of them:
1) Get rid of the mayor
The mayor is not a standard part of the mafia setup! I find the suggestion of "get rid of the witch doctor" a funny take, because the witch doctor is much more of a standard mafia role than having an elected mayor who is safe from both lynch and night kills and who gets to nominate the candidates for lynch. Get rid of the mayor, and protection circles are a mechanical impossibility.
Getting rid of the mayor is also good for voting. I think the game genuinely just works better when everyone is voting for who to lynch, as voting records are more useful and more interesting wagons and reversals in the vote seem to naturally arise. Also, no mayor election means no need to split the day phase into two votes - instead the lynch vote runs across the whole day. It makes the game simpler and easier to play!
2) Give the wolves a roleblocker role
A roleblocker targets a player in the night phase and prevents them using any power role. For example a roleblocked seer gets back no result, while a doctor's protection is nullified. In the case of a seer and other roles, it is obvious when they have been roleblocked, so the roleblocker's existence is discoverable from their actions.
Against a protection circle a roleblocker is obviously disruptive. Once the seer/doctor are publicly declared, the roleblocker can target the doctor on the night he isn't mayor and so the mafia can kill him off. Public protection circles are easily broken.
In this game specifically, a roleblocker could have started targeting Mommy on day 1 as soon as he declared as seer, and all of his seer attempts could then have been blocked. As soon as I declared as the witch doctor, the wolves could have disrupted the protection circle.
The game is better with no outside communication (including PMs!)
Again this is an area GRcade seems pretty non-standard in - allowing villagers to freely PM each other. With the exception of the wolves, villagers should only be able to communicate about the game in thread. It forces public discussion, forces thread activity, and generally just makes the game more interesting. It also makes seers less overpowered in that they can't slowly establish their own "informed minority" of seered villagers. A seer should be torn between revealing their role and making all their findings public, and staying hidden from everyone to give themselves more time to investigate more people. A seer who can PM trusted others their results in confidence is a seer without any such dilemma.
Having a default no-PM rule also makes roles like lovers more interesting, where the downside of them both dying at the same time is balanced by them being able to communicate via PM.
Roles that change alignment suck
Mafia is a game about examining past behaviour to infer player alignment. When players can start on one side and switch to another (be it the half-wolf role in this game or in the generic case of a recruitment game, as we've seen previously), such deduction becomes largely pointless. Being able to trust in deduction is in large part the appeal of the game, so I really don't like alignment-switching roles.
Roles should get reliably named on death
Half-wolves returning as "human" on death was harsh. When the host lies, it discourages and frustrates the village (and maybe even the wolves!). Death post reveals should be the one thing we can actually trust when it comes to confirming player alignment - otherwise everything becomes questionable and deduction is once again waylaid.
Hidden mechanics largely suck
This wasn't a standard game of mafia. It was somewhat frustrating being told it was a standard game of mafia on signing up, only to discover halfway through the game that it wasn't a standard game of mafia. In retrospect the half-wolf role doesn't change the game too much, but because we didn't know about the role or mechanics of it, it had a much greater effect as everything in the game got called into question. With the game now over I'm left hoping that the next game will actually be a standard game, and I don't think that's what Dan was going for.
Clues are a distraction
Their meaning is unknown until the end of the game, with any theories having no way of being verified, so clues are largely pointless (and mostly just a distraction). Instead they added to the frustration of knowing there were hidden mechanics in play. I think clues are better avoided unless the game is aiming to be a wild experiment in unknown mechanics.
Mommy is mental
Finally, Mommy is a right crazy seer and I am definitely voting to lynch him on the first day of the next game