Josh Frisch wrote:
The propensity for roles which give immunity from kills and investigative powers is, in large part, a function of the lack of good bonuses to give town for correct guessing, role verification, as exist for innocent children, gay knights, and to some extent prophets, is dangerous and game breaking when it makes up too large a proportion of game (see spring game 2012), and nobody has given an example of a good town incentive which doesn't fall under these three categories. Historically this was counteracted by the existence of vanilla townies, however a large majority of players seem to prefer being a powerrole to a vanilla townie.
Man, the syntax of this paragraph was hard to parse.
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But anyway, I speak here as a new player, so my advice is heavily biased by this one game. But here is what I felt from this game.
Comments regarding each of the roles:
InvestigatorBasically the core of the game, but with the existence of the don and many manipulative powers, as well as fake investigators (see Ade), this should not be treated by town as infallibly as it is now (where "(s)he came up negative" is enough to dismiss NP evidence for a time). I think weakening investigations too much would make the game significantly harder for town, which may not be entirely a good thing. A moderate nerfing might be good though. One idea is to make them known to whoever they're investigating, but this would just get them killed early in the game and make late game drier.
SuperheroUnder the current situation this is basically a half-useful investigator (who would choose to be strongConspiracy or strongCynic??), with the one bonus being providing some protection against set-a-trap for
anyone with an investigative role due to doubt about their actual role. If investigator is not nerfed (or maybe even if), superhero should be strengthened somehow.
One idea is to gain two charges for each inactive day, but that just adds to the investigation overload; another is to add more crazy roles superheroes can be, including maybe a strongProphet-Desperado (investigates, stays alive for however many charges they currently have, gets two smites within that time period, dies immediately after the second smite or when the charges run out).
DesperadoI agree, underused, but with so many investigative powers going around already and the inability of claiming for fear of kaboom, this is not that useful of a role except when you know in advance that you need to get something done within the next few days. Strengthen slightly, perhaps, unless investigator is nerfed?
ProphetUnderused this game, though the threat of its use played an important part in some mafia decisions, it seems. Considering this is a one-shot ability, I don't think it's
that overpowered, and having immediate death would certainly make it even more underused. One possibility is to have them die that night even after a successful smite (I've fulfilled my duty in this world, now I can go meet my Maker), which weakens just slightly but encourages usage more?
IC, Gay KnightsWorked as intended for innocence purposes, I think. Inactives are a big problem for these though, since they hinder the network.
For knights (whoa it's National Coming Out week or something), inactive/evicted partners is a big issue; the remaining player should probably stay alive. One possible dynamic is to have some partnerships develop over time, perhaps voluntarily, or chosen by a cupid-like role after some in-game stuff has already happened
GeniesThe rules for this were one of the parts I grossly misunderstood; I thought each wish only gave you one investigation, not arbitrarily many investigations on one kill. I agree that this is probably too OP, but if benevolence is modified to confirm known kills (i.e. if anyone's already gotten a positive investigation for that kill) it should be ok, allowing town a small degree of manipulation/testing if they know a killer but have not used any investigations on that person.
CynicI actually enjoyed this role a lot, in part because the feeling of receiving invulnerability for correct predictions was nice, but also (in retrospect) because it allowed me to troll mafia (almost trapping one early on
) without too much worry, though I'm afraid that might not work for me anymore in future games. I think it's good to have a totally invulnerable role that's reasonably hard to activate, for the purpose of petition-carrying and whatnot; it encourages such a player to be active and doesn't break the game too much unless mafia actually fall for the trap (which they essentially did with me, though unfortunately circumstances prevented that trap from being fruitful).
Conspiracy TheoristI agree with the general sentiment that this is the least useful role in town at the moment, but I think it's a nice thing to have (though it's played virtually no role in this game except in getting lgunder killed instead of dininno). It's only useful at all if no one knows you have it though, and there's not as much pressure to be active as there is for cynic (you just put people in your living group and publicly suspected mafia), so might be good to strengthen it with some other odd factors.
RogueThe existence of rogues allows a few townies an opportunity to try to lie to mafia. In my case it did give potentially useful (though unfortunately misused) information. Unfortunately for mafia, no real rogues were found through public sacrifice this game, which brings up the main problem for rogues: inactivity. With no one to guide/push them, it's very easy for them to just not do things, especially since they might accidentally kill another rogue or get exposed (they don't share any of the role information mafia can get, and don't have powers to cover themselves up), or even get slaughtered by rampaging mafia. Probably should strengthen.
Elected roles:
MayorNot much use in this game (due to investigative inflation) except using their enumerative combinatorics skills and acting as a figurehead. Should be strengthened unless other investigations significantly decrease.
Police OfficerLynch targets after their interrogation, kill targets if they're not mafia-aligned; basically, for people who don't care much about surviving long. I don't think interrogation is that terribly overpowered since it takes so long, and if they have good reasons to guess correctly, they could've guessed correctly in just leading a lynch anyway.
If interrogation gets nerfed, running for PO will probably become even more unpopular than it is now - the risk of mafia free-kabooming becomes much greater than the benefits of a cynicky triple investigation (again, see investigative inflation). If non-mafia-aligned PO is needed for ANY investigations to work, mafia will just keep killing POs, and the game would be MUCH harder for townies, but this may be OK if protective roles are strong/common enough.
DonA nice addition for mafia, especially when town is being silly and forgetting its existence. Current limitations are probably appropriate. Free kabooms are an idea but would probably just be too OP.
GodfatherI feel like he's doing too much this game, but I'm probably biased. I would personally really enjoy being a town version of godfather (without PM ability), since my primary mafia skill seems to be enforcing consistency in reasoning among townies. (My other skills, intuitively sensing liars and trolling liars, would probably be less relevant for this.) But this would probably make town too OP, since the current limiting factor for town is basically its ability to retain information and reason correctly.
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More importantly, general comments:-If we believe ksedlar's simulations, the game should be relatively fair. The reason, I think, that it seems unfair, is that the
determination of game results comes really early. It's like a stochastic process involving guerrilla troops fighting a traditional army, where early extra losses in mafia significantly reduces their chance of winning, while early lucky escapes can significantly increase their chance of winning. So for much of the game, town victory seems to be imminent, even though initially it's not imminent.
One way to reduce this feeling of fatalism is to make game determination happen later in the game, e.g. push mafia's power to later in the game. This way there can hopefully be a much higher chance of actually having comebacks (by both sides) :O
For example, mafia can have a necromantic role that, once only a third of the mafia are left, picks one mafia-aligned person from the graveyard to send their choice of a 100-digit binary code (if this doesn't break the cryptography rule) or a 22-letter alphabetic string, through the mods, to the living mafia. They can pre-agree on what this string means. This particular example might actually be really bad, but some way to make mafia's win-probability stable around 50% until mid-game regardless of early happenings would be nice.
-Another major issue is the
silencing of experienced / clever players. These are targeted by mafia to throw town into confusion and allow mafia to control town, and if they remain alive are targeted by town due to suspicion. Not only does this presumably make the game less fun for very experienced players, it gives selection bias for newer players to be inactive and/or not clever, to avoid getting killed. But cleverness is something that should be the highlight of mafia, so it'd be nice if clever reasoning could be preserved, and kills were more to cut out currently contained information or power than to cut out future reasoning skills.
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Alibis have some major problems. Inactives not posting alibis scarcely get investigated (and it would generally be a waste to investigate them, especially if we want to nerf investigations), so this is another source of pressure for people to be inactive. We need to fix this somehow; perhaps warn people beforehand that being inactive is not acceptable.
But even among active players, it's hard to always have (good, confirmable) alibis when you're innocent, so some degree of investigative redundancy is still pushed for in big games. I don't know if this is fixable.
So a lot of these problems point back to investigative inflation, but some are just there on their own. I don't know if the patches I proposed would be good, but this is what I've gotten from my first game.