at least all my files n shit aren’t on my boot drive so I’m not losing anything
Speak for urself
i don’t particularly care what happens if someone needs or especially desires to eat me… provided i’m dead.
but uhm. i imagine some people do.
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clarification added because i think you can never be too safe in a cannibalism convo
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Things which were helpful to me when designing a FAM having not really done much mash design before:
- Categorizing the roles, then comparing vs. previous designs is an easy way to balance
I have not designed many mashes and don’t have a good instinct for balance. Luckily, you don’t have to have one yourself! I categorized my roles, then compared the numbers to FAM5. Actually, I matched every single role to an equivalent-power FAM5 one LOL but that’s overkill.
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My categories were:
- Killpower (split into number of kills it gives)
- Strong investigative (town cops/watchers/etc.; wolf rolecops)
- Weak investigative
- Protective
- Blocking/Manipulative
- ITA/Damaging
- Neighborizing
-
BullshitMiscellaneous
Then I counted the proportions of each role and checked against FAM5, which had a roughly equal playercount.
NBOW said that she believes generally 1/3 of each faction should be “premium” roles (town KP cop watcher, wolf KP roleblocker etc), 1/3 should be weaker roles (weaker investigatives, powerful ITA roles), and 1/3 should be vanilla or vanilla+ (weaker ITA roles, weird communicative stuff, doublevoter in a mash, etc.). I roughly followed that guideline, didn’t do the math on it, but that seems correct-ish.
- Role complexity above a certain threshold is bad, especially for non-premium roles
If a player has to spend more than ten seconds understanding what their ability does, they are spending Mental Effort Charges, and if somebody is spending 20 Mental Effort Charges to understand a role that gives them +1 ITA, that’s bad.
Those Mental Effort Charges add up, especially because players coordinating mech have to read every single flip in the game and understand what it does. Even in FAM6, people misunderstood mech because reading all those flips is a lot of work!
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Here is one way to give a player some bonus ITA damage:
Submit a post to the hosts which could be plausibly construed as containing out-of-game information. Fire a 10 damage silent ITA at the player who posted it.
It takes like 2 seconds to read and understand. It’s a bonus ITA that’s leashed to “finding a post and making up a reason why it’s OGI”. It’s not fully basic nor is it an especially interesting design but it is a good flavor tie-in and it’s inoffensive.
Here’s another way to give a player some bonus ITA damage:
This takes significantly more mental effort to understand! And that’s not to say it’s necessarily bad, it was (abiding by my philosophy) a bit more powerful and I think it’s a good flavor fit 'cause it gives people the opportunity to pop off extremely in the exact way that the actual gummy did in FAM6.
But I wasn’t the happiest with it, and that’s because it was still a decent amount of reading and effort for a role that isn’t doing that much more than the bonus ITA for “OGI”.
Because this game was made under my iron fist, there aren’t that many examples of roles I was really unhappy with in this way, and I don’t want to call other people’s roles Bad for not following my philosophy, so I won’t do that.
- ROLES SHOULD BE DESIGNED WITH AN INTEREST IN PEOPLE AND UPLIFTING PEOPLE AND MAKING PEOPLE FEEL GOOD AND HAPPY
This is a very big thing for me in FAM/metamafia in general.
Unless I knew somebody well enough to know they’d be happy with it, I avoided designing roles based off of:
- A game somebody feels bad about (a poor performance and/or a loss that clearly made them upset)
- Media properties the person happens to like with no tie-in to them as an individual
- Really basic low-effort references to their “stereotype” or generic stuff that applies to a lot of people (e.g. being an SPK)
- Interactions that I had with a person that were more important to me than them
- Things their role was based off of in previous years
In general, I also tried to have at least two distinct references to a person in a role, and if one broke these rules, I tried to make the other not, so it’s not like “wow my entire identity is [for example] Pokemon”, your identity is Pokemon and that game you played here once, which is generally broad enough that it feels like you’re a human being to the designers.
This varies greatly per person, obviously, some people would clearly be happy to have a role that breaks these rules, but they’re good general guidelines. Also, I tried to put in extra effort for the flavor of less-powerful roles. Getting to be the cop flavor is exciting, getting to be the odd-night fruit vendor isn’t necessarily.
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An example: this was the Ruby role from FAM6:
This is mainly a reference to March 7th from HSR, who Ruby likes a lot, and I was confident she’d appreciate the reference. But again, I don’t like roles based solely off a character or media property and not a person, so it also contained a mechanical reference to a game Ruby played, Odyssey to the Fortress of Lunacy. She was an even-night vigilante who shot the only actual wolf to die: this was a town loss, but it was a good performance from her and not one that I expected her to feel bad about referencing.
I wouldn’t reference a game where somebody was a vigilante who shot a bunch of town and lost and clearly felt upset about it. People should feel uplifted when they see their role, not, like, “oh my legacy was this shitty performance?!?” or “wow this is just a Ghostbusters role and not about me at all” or “unsurprising, this is the same reference as last year’s role”.
Another example: the catbae role was literally just a Void Stranger reference, technically breaking the above rules, but it was 1. a reference to catbae’s personality rather than a generic “catbae is good at mafia” role like the past few FAMs 2. a very high-effort, powerful and central role as a LW with KP 3. about something I (well, Chloe) knew they really, really liked. These factors compensate for the breaking of rule #2.
In fact I spent Eight whole of my United States Dollars and Many of my United States Hours playing Void Stranger to understand more stuff for this role. Which was not torture to be clear it is in fact quite a good game I’m happy I did it but I did fall into a lot of holes.
Third one: YBW’s role was simple (Literally Just Bodyguard) and referenced her Generic Stereotypical Deal (dog girl), but it also has tie-ins to her personality and things about herself that she’s proud of (being loyal to and protective of her friends) and I was thoughtful about the flavor text to make sure that came through.
So, like, it depends! It’s dependent! Per person! But I tried really hard to make sure the flavor would stick to stuff people could be happy about, and I think that’s one of the most important things about designing a FAM.
- You should minimize the cognitive load for players and for hosts doing processing, fuck neighborhoods
4a. Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods are work. You have to manually close and reopen the neighborhoods during action processing. You have to read the neighborhoods to make sure nobody breaks rules in there. Players have to play, consistently, in the neighborhoods, and wolves have to wolf in there. Count your neighborhoods and then cut them in half. Maybe again if there’s still many.
I killed so many neighborhoods in their infancy and still so many people went “what’s with all the neighborhoods”. They’re so easy to add becuase they feel low-impact but fun. Stop adding neighborhoods.
4b. Subjectivity
Subjective abilities which require any kind of judgement call (e.g. freeform abilities which get vetoed if too powerful, trigger conditions based on subjectivities like “somebody townreads you in thread”) should be budgeted very carefully.
Every single one is potential for a debate between hosts as to the right call, a debate between hosts and players as to whether somebody should get to trigger their ability (give an inch and players are obligated to take a mile to work toward their wincon), and a debate between players in thread trying to make sense of night actions as to whether something counts.
4c. Counting and tracking
Nyaluminum added a ton of work because we had to count and track soo many things. This was fine because it was a main game gimmick, but any individual ability which requires you (or the players) count or track a million posts or visits or whatever had better be really cool and really powerful to be worth it.
Remember that you’re doing like SIXTY of these and that it’ll often be OTHER PEOPLE processing them and save everybody some effort.
- Always always always consider how fun an ability will be to play with and against.
Seems obvious but you gotta be careful! This is hard for me to give generic advice for, it’s the most subjective of them all.
Always consider how a role will feel if randed to either a strong player or a weak player, a townread one or a wolfread one, etc. Roles which require you to get wolfread to get utility can feel bad if you’re playing too well to use them. Roles which require you to harm your team to get utility do feel bad.
Town hates when you add friction to ITAs. They deserve some friction in their ITAs, but not too much. It is -EV for town to make it harder to kill slots that they want to die, EVEN town slots, they’ll just sink resources there.
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Two example: original lol role made all ITAs on it fail silently, they’d say “the shot connects” but they wouldn’t take any damage, instead they’d take 10 nonlethal damage at the end of the night, and got to venge if they died to this damage. This makes it harder to kill the lol role if town wants them ITAed (-EV) and only gets utility if they’re being shot a lot in the first place (frustrating for somebody who’s townread).
The original original lol role didn’t flip on death by execution or ITA, instead getting to gladiate somebody, with the loser dying and the winner living. This means that if wolves succeed at getting a miskill, it’s immediately undone, which is pretty tilting! And was a processing nightmare. So that was thrown out.
One of my less good designs in FAM6 was the Leafia role, which needed to go below 60 HP to use any abilities and had no method fo self-damage: this means town had to spend ITAs on it and give it a 40% change of dying for anything to happen. No fun.
It’s more fun to just be vanilla than to feel like abilities are being dangled in front of you.
I will maybe add more stuff as I think about it
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I don’t like using “tonight” or “today” when referring to game phases.
i fear im not enough of a nerd to understand the difference outside of “when” feeling more natural when attached to a kill
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why not?
I had a phase of trying to avoid tonight/today but it’s so much more natural than any alternative in a lot of cases
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I should read all of these long role/mash design posts but im lazy grrr
also i saw lissa being a nerd above and it made me sad as this was my safe space from him
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and i can say it really did and I thought, out of all FAMs so far, that it was the role thst reflected me the best and it was also the one that I liked the most bc it felt like it tied in to my actual personality rather than being like “oh you like this thing right? Heres a bit about this thing”
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When I write roles with “this night phase” or “this phase” it tends to be clunky and requires careful reading to parse, whereas “tonight” and “today” tend to go over better to somebody who’s scanning
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i felt represented as a traitor personally
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kinda like that one hit game that’s based off that other hit game
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yeah that was actually a cool bit i saw
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this doesn’t quell my hatred for bodyguards but it was cool flavour
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I like bodyguards and will never stop using them. They had to hit me on the head and tell me stop adding bodyguards
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actually this reminds me i wanted to like steal that role for anni and make it flavored after soweli but it HAD to have weird ita fuckery that. oh for fucks sake we totally could have done that it was just that we decided to add some manual ita stuff late
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one of the wolves in anni had this ability and it just struck me as. ok this results in so much extra work for the hosts for marginal gain and also extra work for us if we want to know the ita percentage and also seems somewhat ill defined (different people make different shotlists, does a shot who made it onto one person’s shotlist without otherwise being consensus count?) anyway the one boosted ita we got from it didn’t even HIT
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