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[TolyK]

You can look at my games for bad examples.

lol
...
i've balanced (with the help of Webadict and Mephansteras) thanks

[Mr.Person]

Modding isn't too hard as long as you stay realistic with your goals.

Balancing is impossible, however.

[Leafsnail]

The only perfectly balanced game I've ever seen was a bastard one with all SKs.

[RedWarrior0]

The one where the nights were private lynches that the players didn't know were lynches?

[Leafsnail]

That's one version.  The other version where almost everyone is dead by day 2 is also good.

[SaintDraze]

Well if it is impossible for a game to be balanced then what game type favours which side?

[Mephansteras]

Which it's technically impossible for most games to be truly balanced, you CAN balance things so that both sides have a decent shot at victory.

Generally, anything that increases the number of kills per day helps the scum more since the game can get to lylo quicker. Anything that reduces kills AND provides information helps the town out.

Mostly it's a question of looking at the powers available per side and figuring out best/worst case scenarios.

For example, a town that has both a doctor and a cap vs a scum team with only a single role-blocker has an advantage. But it's not a huge advantage, since the scum will never block scum while the town might end up protecting scum with the doctor.

Basically, assume that most of the time town is going to 'miss' with their powers. A town role-blocker will block another town role instead of scum, doctor will protect the wrong person, and so on. So the town should have an overall higher number of power roles than the scum since the scum both know who they all are and can co-ordinate their actions.

Rule of thumb I use is that scum powers are worth two town powers. Anything that gets scum an extra kill is worth 3 or 4 town powers, depending on the powers in question.

[TolyK]

how do you think the clean-up crew in my dwarven mafia is? personally I think that not knowing the alignment/job of the NK'd is a serious advantage.

[Mephansteras]

how do you think the clean-up crew in my dwarven mafia is? personally I think that not knowing the alignment/job of the NK'd is a serious advantage.

This is actually a perfect example of where a role needs to be both well thought out and explained clearly. It sounds simple - they have a one-shot power to remove the corpse of who was NK'd so they don't flip. But that doesn't answer lots of questions about what happens.

What if more then 1 NK happens in a night? Say the Hammerer kills an Elf and the Elves kill the Sheriff. Which corpse gets hidden? One or both? If only one, do the elves get to pick?

Do they learn who they killed, or is that information lost for everyone?

Do they have to decide to use that power before or after they know how many kills happened? What happens if no kills happen that night? Is their ability used up or do they get another shot later? What if the clean-up crew gets blocked? Is the power used up then?

The answers to those questions all greatly effect how powerful the role is and you need to know the answers to all of those questions before the game starts if possible. Otherwise you're stuck making rules decisions in the middle of the game and that can end up giving an unfair advantage to one side or the other.

Depending on how you set it up it can be an incredibly powerful ability or just a mildly useful one.

[Toaster]

Expanding on that, you need to have a clear-cut idea of how the various roles interact with each other before the game begins, so you can handle the odd edge cases, especially with things like multiple roleblockers and redirectors.

Couple of examples:

Say you have two roleblockers, A and B, and a cop, C.  A blocks B.  B blocks C.  Is B blocked before or after they block C?

Say you have a mafia A, a vig B, and a townie C.  A kills C.  B kills A.  Does A die before he kills C?


An order of operations for actions is a good thing to have.  Meph has one in his Paranormal games that's a good place to start.

[Mephansteras]

Specifically it is:

    Mind Control
    Pure Role-blockers
    Abductors
    Protectors
    Investigators
    Night Kills/Conversions (The War Vet (or equivalent) is sort of an exception, in that he'll kill anyone who targets them on THEIR turn, rather than his)


Mind Control gets to direct what action another player takes that night. (Which could be do nothing)
Roleblockers stop another player from performing an action. In Paranormal, Roleblockers block another role-blocker before any other role-blocks take effect.
Abductors remove a player from the game temporarily (or permanently). An abducted player therefore cannot be protected, investigated, or killed.
Protectors stop night kills
Investigators gain knowledge about a target
Night Kills and Faction Conversions happen last, unless it's a reactionary effect.


This isn't the only way you could set thing up, of course, but I find that it works pretty well for that game. More importantly, these rules are set out so that everyone knows what is going on and can plan accordingly.

Making plans only to discover after the fact that they failed because you didn't know a rule that wasn't written anywhere tends to make people rather upset. Unless you're running a Bastard Game, you want your players to know everything they're going to have to know to play. Some information may need to be sent with a role PM if it's information the rest of the players shouldn't know, but in general everyone has more fun when they don't get blindsided by unexpected rules.

The challenge is mafia is generally outsmarting the other players, not worrying about being outsmarted by the mod or the rules.

[TolyK]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

how do you think the clean-up crew in my dwarven mafia is? personally I think that not knowing the alignment/job of the NK'd is a serious advantage.

This is actually a perfect example of where a role needs to be both well thought out and explained clearly. It sounds simple - they have a one-shot power to remove the corpse of who was NK'd so they don't flip. But that doesn't answer lots of questions about what happens.

What if more then 1 NK happens in a night? Say the Hammerer kills an Elf and the Elves kill the Sheriff. Which corpse gets hidden? One or both? If only one, do the elves get to pick?
Only the elves' NK

Do they learn who they killed, or is that information lost for everyone?
They know who they killed.

Do they have to decide to use that power before or after they know how many kills happened? Before. What happens if no kills happen that night? Is their ability used up or do they get another shot later? They get another shot later. What if the clean-up crew gets blocked? Is the power used up then? No

The answers to those questions all greatly effect how powerful the role is and you need to know the answers to all of those questions before the game starts if possible. Otherwise you're stuck making rules decisions in the middle of the game and that can end up giving an unfair advantage to one side or the other.

Depending on how you set it up it can be an incredibly powerful ability or just a mildly useful one.

In bold in the spoiler.
....
I am now getting a nagging feeling...
Can everyone please ask all the questions they can think of for the rules so that I can answer them and avoid confusion/last minute decisions?

@Toaster the Ninja:
In my DM the elves kill near midnight while the hammerer kills a bit later. The mechanic does it before midnight, hunters/ambushers/doc/sheriff all night, spy/cleanup crew/recruiter before hammerer.
The sheriff gets body info at night (investigating someone who was NK'd).

[Mephansteras]

In that case, you have a moderately powerful role. It removes role information from the town and gives the scum a slight advantage, but it's not likely to be game changing. After all, any covered up kill is going to have been done by the Elves so the town can just assume that they lost a dwarf.

[Pandarsenic]

Just for reference WWYDT is PROBABLY going to be a horrendously swingy game with a win by [SPOILER REDACTED] so don't look at it to see how to balance things.

I honestly realized last night before sending PMs that there was a MEEP that interacted with another MEEP that I hadn't MEEP MEEP within the normal MEEP and had to alter a bunch of MEEP <_<

[Jokerman-EXE]

I'm pretty much available to co-mod for anyone that needs it. I've worked with Meph on two or three flavor- and role-heavy games and I've got some experience under my belt, if anyone needs it.

If not, then I'd like a few experienced mods to bounce some ideas and balancing suggestions off of when I get more time to work on making a game.