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Author Topic: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review  (Read 236131 times)

webadict

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #225 on: July 08, 2014, 08:54:57 am »

Questions:
If you are being reflected and you action yourself, does the action actually happen? Also, if you are Radiant while being Reflected, do you Radiant before the Reflect or afterward? Do Reflects reflect reflected actions?
If you have all 2-point Autos, does Bless do anything?
Does Santa give Powers that the target already has?
If you Recycle a Power that is being used, does that action still succeed?
If an action is copied or Radianted that would only be able to happen once (Gift a target a Power/Point Share), would the copied/Radianted action fail?
If you Copycat yourself Copycating yourself while being Radiant, does everyone get Copycatted to you? Also, does the world end?

Suggestions:
-5 is a good cap for Flaws at the start. Doing so seems to prevent too much power.
Deep South should have your actions be able to be sent any time during the Day. This makes the game go by faster, at the cost of not allowing the information from the lynch to affect your action. In fact, if actions are NOT sent before the lynch, then they shouldn't really be counted at all. Otherwise, it's not really Nightless.

Possible Strong Role:
-4 from Flaws.
Free Innate Self Bless for 6.
Holy for 3.
Get free points in the forms of Autos, especially once you get Prolific and Flexible.
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notquitethere

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #226 on: July 08, 2014, 10:10:50 am »

If you are being reflected and you action yourself, does the action actually happen?
No it happens: it just means the reflection was redundant. Reflection can be thought of as setting the target of the action to yourself even when it was already set to yourself.

Also, if you are Radiant while being Reflected, do you Radiant before the Reflect or afterward?
Reflect triggers first, changing your target to yourself, and then you would hit yourself and have that action radiate onto a random player.

Do Reflects reflect reflected actions?
No, as above, if you had reflect and targeted a kill on someone who had reflect, you would kill yourself: the first reflect would change the target to yourself, it would hit your reflect and change the target to yourself and then kill yourself. You don't get the FF7 situation where there's magic bouncing back and forth for eternity.

If you have all 2-point Autos, does Bless do anything?
Hmm, I'd have to make a ruling: either, no, it doesn't do anything; it starts giving you other autos of lower then higher value; or it just gives you duplicates of autos that you can sell off.

Does Santa give Powers that the target already has?
I think that's how I did it last time, and no one was unlucky enough to get the same power twice. Stacking up multiples of the same power still gives you things to sell or Gift or swap or whatever.

If you Recycle a Power that is being used, does that action still succeed?
In the previous game it acted as a roleblock, but in the Deep South variant it makes most sense just to destroy the power, not any current affects it might have given the player that used it.

If an action is copied or Radianted that would only be able to happen once (Gift a target a
Power/Point Share), would the copied/Radianted action fail?
My first instinct is to say, yeah, why not have duplicated gifting and sharing, but I suspect that'd be horribly abused by a clever scum team, so I'd probably err on one-off actions failing to copy (along with the scum-kill which is considered a strictly once-per-day action).

If you Copycat yourself Copycating yourself while being Radiant, does everyone get Copycatted to you? Also, does the world end?
Copycat doesn't work on mult-targeted actions, and copycat is a multi-targeted action, so thankfully I'm spared that headache.

-5 is a good cap for Flaws at the start. Doing so seems to prevent too much power.
Cool. It's decided.

Deep South should have your actions be able to be sent any time during the Day.
Yep, that's how it'll work.

In fact, if actions are NOT sent before the lynch, then they shouldn't really be counted at all. Otherwise, it's not really Nightless.
Actions sent while I'm processing the lynch won't count, but I'm considering allowing people to stack up conditional actions to trigger at the start of the day where it makes sense to get in early (like protects, blocks etc.)

Possible Strong Role:
-4 from Flaws.
Free Innate Self Bless for 6.
Holy for 3.
Get free points in the forms of Autos, especially once you get Prolific and Flexible.
That'd be nice. Slow run up, but so long as you survive the first phase or two could be pretty devastating.
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webadict

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #227 on: July 08, 2014, 01:27:20 pm »

I see. You don't process all the actions at the end of the day. You do it immediately. That's pretty harsh. I feel like it'd make protects pretty useless, as well as blocks. Bleh.
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flabort

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #228 on: July 08, 2014, 02:22:56 pm »

-5 is a good cap for Flaws at the start. Doing so seems to prevent too much power.
Cool. It's decided.
Nooooooooooo! :P
I'll have to drop hidden, and some of the flaws I picked, but I guess my choices still work. Oh, yeah, and drop scan, because I was only using that to qualify for Generous, to get more points, which I can't get now.
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notquitethere

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #229 on: July 08, 2014, 04:28:19 pm »

I see. You don't process all the actions at the end of the day. You do it immediately. That's pretty harsh. I feel like it'd make protects pretty useless, as well as blocks. Bleh.
Well, that's why I'd allow protects etc. to be set in advance. I thought about it both ways: but basically, the day is more exciting if there's constant new flow of actions happening throughout. Also, having everything suddenly hit at the lynch makes investigative roles less useful/interesting. Note that Protect is already very cheap: a player could potentially protect multiple people every day. I'm happy to hear out the alternative argument.

---

Thinking about buying and selling: I think I'll allow only one lot of buying and selling in a day (taken when they like), to prevent players with Flexible buying free-use powers, selling them off and then buying more free-use powers endlessly.
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Toaster

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #230 on: July 09, 2014, 09:00:30 am »

You could just disallow selling a power you've used that day.
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notquitethere

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #231 on: July 09, 2014, 09:07:53 am »

Oh that's good. Yes much more elegant. Ten points to King Toast. That's the rule now.
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notquitethere

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #232 on: July 09, 2014, 09:09:17 am »

Anyone else got any gonzo gamebreaking builds? I'm sure scum could do something fun with prolific free copycat santas.
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Leafsnail

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #233 on: July 09, 2014, 11:10:27 am »

I think Alignment Cop is still probably worthless and all townies should pick Suspicious, although at least the game won't be ripped apart by infallibility this time.

The main issues I see are
1) the town can easily make themselves completely unkillable, making this effectively a vanilla game with no nights
The only way the scum could break this is with an insane vote-stealer rush, but vote-stealer is very expensive and the town can lock down harder with super-saints to prevent this.  You could have Power Steal hit autos too (or make an Auto Steal power) to prevent auto-based breaking strategies?

2) The only way that scum stand a chance is if they have a lot of bussing.  It was the best defensive option last game and it's even better now, although I can't really suggest nerfing it because otherwise the game would be a town walkover.
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webadict

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #234 on: July 09, 2014, 12:30:20 pm »

I think Alignment Cop is still probably worthless and all townies should pick Suspicious, although at least the game won't be ripped apart by infallibility this time.

The main issues I see are
1) the town can easily make themselves completely unkillable, making this effectively a vanilla game with no nights
The only way the scum could break this is with an insane vote-stealer rush, but vote-stealer is very expensive and the town can lock down harder with super-saints to prevent this.  You could have Power Steal hit autos too (or make an Auto Steal power) to prevent auto-based breaking strategies?

2) The only way that scum stand a chance is if they have a lot of bussing.  It was the best defensive option last game and it's even better now, although I can't really suggest nerfing it because otherwise the game would be a town walkover.
I tend to agree with this sentiment. While there's no outright unbalance, you'll notice by Day 2 that the game has favored town for many reasons.

Oh that's good. Yes much more elegant. Ten points to King Toast. That's the rule now.
This rule can be broken by Free Self Recycle, which creates a huge problem, especially when mixed with the Auto that lets you sell back Autos. Basically, you invest in a bunch of Free actions and you can sell them back on that Day with Recycle.
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notquitethere

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #235 on: July 09, 2014, 02:53:44 pm »

I think Alignment Cop is still probably worthless and all townies should pick Suspicious, although at least the game won't be ripped apart by infallibility this time.
Might make Alignment Cop super cheap, essentially making it a 'did this person use one of their five flaw points on Suspicious?' check.

The main issues I see are
1) the town can easily make themselves completely unkillable, making this effectively a vanilla game with no nights
The only way the scum could break this is with an insane vote-stealer rush, but vote-stealer is very expensive and the town can lock down harder with super-saints to prevent this.  You could have Power Steal hit autos too (or make an Auto Steal power) to prevent auto-based breaking strategies?
The thing is, most players will want to have more active powers so most won't put most of their points into unkillable. But yeah, an autosteal power is a good addition.

2) The only way that scum stand a chance is if they have a lot of bussing.  It was the best defensive option last game and it's even better now, although I can't really suggest nerfing it because otherwise the game would be a town walkover.
See it's a hard thing, because a competent and well oiled scum team (exactly what there wasn't last time) could easily come up with any number of game breaking combos. The existence of Power Steal now is a potent weapon against the inevitable town mass-claim. Would you suggest any pro-scum additions?

This rule can be broken by Free Self Recycle, which creates a huge problem, especially when mixed with the Auto that lets you sell back Autos. Basically, you invest in a bunch of Free actions and you can sell them back on that Day with Recycle.
I'm borderline close to scrapping Recycle: it was too powerful in the first game and I'm not sure it adds enough to justify the potential for over-exploiting. I'll have a little think on it.
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4maskwolf

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #236 on: July 09, 2014, 02:55:22 pm »

My two cents: scrap recycle.

notquitethere

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #237 on: July 09, 2014, 03:12:00 pm »

Okay, for reference, here's the latest power list. I've made the decision to scrap Recycle as being too anti-fun. Besides, we saw quite enough of the Vampire build last game. I'll consider bringing it back in some form if someone puts forward a decent counterargument. I've also scrapped alignment cop, frame and suspicious and so now there is absolutely no power difference between a town player and a scum player, they just have different wincons (scum as a team can still only make one kill a night though). I think this might encourage subtler scumhunting. Bus has been renamed Mask Swap for clarity.

Any powers people think could be interesting? Anyone think of any more trickery based powers like Gossip, Redirect or Mask Swap?

Spoiler: Current Power List (click to show/hide)
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Leafsnail

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #238 on: July 09, 2014, 03:33:04 pm »

I disagree with scrapping something that works like recycle entirely, it's a good anti-gamebreak tool and it's not really overpowered now that it doesn't also block.  How about replacing it with an ability that disables the target's autos for the night?  That would continue to work against degenerate auto strategies while losing the "super roleblock" and "super power steal" aspects, and it would also fix the self-targeting problem.
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notquitethere

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Re: Mafia Setup Discussion and Review
« Reply #239 on: July 09, 2014, 03:45:18 pm »

Yeah, an autoblock power would be a interesting countermeasure. Scum teams could co-ordinate with one person blocking the autos on the kill target (though if that target had reflect, hilarity would ensue). But how would it be priced? That's a lot of potential point expenditure being nullifed.

Another power I was thinking of:

3 - Patsy: pick a new colour for a mask; that mask is now seen in-play (players always know how many masks are in-play and what colour they are). Like any mask, it can be a valid target for any power.
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