23456th poster gets a cookie (cookie thread (Part 7)) (Part 11)

[YoubutWorse]

Lmao
Makes sense
I did try to make it work tho! (got killed n1)

[katze]

iirc both were random and limited to 3 GFs or 3 swaps idr which

[notblackorwhite]

mayplechora: “let’s add a godfatherball: a godfather that gets automatically inherited by a random wolf when it dies”
me: “no. why would we do that?”
mayplechora: meows cutely
me: “no”
mayplechora: meows cutelier
me: “fine. fuck it. but it’s going to be publicly announced that it exists at least.”

[ElizaThePsycho (Willow)]

I see

[Zugzwang]

@May

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.

Also even if it’s a main game gimmick like Nyaluminum, it can still be a problem! Nyaluminum was doable because we only had to verify players’ Nyaluminum counts when they used abilities that consume it, or when they asked for their current total. If on the other hand we had to know every player’s Nyaluminum count every night this would have been extremely painful and very not worth it.

[Marshal]

yeah

[Italy]

it goes a long way that the lw hunt was the “worst” part of fam6 because it honestly wasn’t actually that horrible even if it was annoying and honestly it was even possible to mechsolve chomps for claiming a medium-high power multirole JOAT which is probably one of the most lw coded roles in the history of forever (but that’s just me dvc warrioring a month after the game ended)
it wasn’t really an incident that measures up to the horrors that were Bot Commander and amogus

[May]

“Whats my current nyaluminum total” FUCK if I know

[May]

On June 23rd let’s all go to the hosts and ask for our Nyaluminum total, the look on their faces will be awesome

[orangeandblack5]

i still liked getting whysper to count up every time any player swore in thread

[katze]

i liked getting whysper

i miss it

[katze]

oh ty zug for quoting this bc i wanted to actually read it since ive been on the design team for like 5 of these fuckin games despite that i have no clue what im doing still

this ended up being long

@May

Categorizing the roles, then comparing vs. previous designs is an easy way to balance

imo “easy way to balance” is a bad way to put it, i think it’s a great way to build a foundation though which is like almost the same thing but im pedantic

@May

My categories were:

1. Killpower (split into number of kills it gives)
2. Strong investigative (town cops/watchers/etc.; wolf rolecops)
3. Weak investigative
4. Protective
5. Blocking/Manipulative
6. ITA/Damaging
7. Neighborizing
8. Bullshit Miscellaneous

having a category for neighborizing is kinda funny to me (i do get it but i see you talk more about them later)

also i feel like if i saw your spreadsheet id either say “wow this is so much more organized than anything ive ever done” or “what the fuck is this mess. what even are you” and i dont know which but prob the latter

@May

A game somebody feels bad about (a poor performance and/or a loss that clearly made them upset)

ngl i feel like the bolded is just forbidden territory period unless enough time has passed that they can joke about it in a way that im extremely confident is not copium. because if u get that read wrong ur fucked

@May

Media properties the person happens to like with no tie-in to them as an individual

this is kind of a pet peeve of mine and im glad you singled it out

i remember a conversation i had (with ruby, ironically, since shes your example below) a few years ago where she was like clearly pretty unhappy with her flavor in some anni because it was like. “you are ruby, vt. you are a person, just like the people from danganronpa, am i right” and it was like. yea.

i feel like its an easy trap to fall into if you don’t KNOW the person that well, but… if you’re running into this you need more people helping you with this role/with the mash in general.

writing flavor/roles for some people IS hard tho. with FAM it might be a bit less extreme, i dont super remember struggling with it back then, but when you’re hosting a 200~ player mash some of the flavors are gonna be people who are pretty new and not suuuuper well known in which case my advice is to have a nerd in the host team who dives into their medical records and shit to find a few things

@May

Things their role was based off of in previous years

i was tempted to like get a list of every role people got in the last few annis at some point (part of me still wants to but god itd be so much work) because i was kind of unhappy at times this year either because i was pretty sure they were very similar to a few years ago or like. knew it was. i think every time i thought that i looked and they were… different enough for me to feel okay with, with the exception of specifically brad whose role i am still quite mixed on because i am happy with most of it (and i did work a bit extra for some more subtle references flavorwise) but in the end the first line i wrote for his flavor blurb was a joke about how it’s a brad flavor in anni and that its a fuckin bodyguard role yet again (which im PRETTY SURE was scrapped)

anyway uh. i do think he was actually happy with his role and i did make sure to give it like, some level of extra love to make up for the generic concept, but i still feel mixed enough about it to write a whole paragraph tangent about it lol

the role in question for anyone who cares

@May

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.

wait holy shit is ybw just doggirl brad

@May

You should minimize the cognitive load for players and for hosts doing processing, fuck neighborhoods

yea

@May

Stop adding neighborhoods.

yea

(not literally but it is SO easy to overdo it)

@May

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.

in general i agree, but in my experience this isnt tooooo bad if you just like. add a bit of text to the role. like we had (too many of them) some painters in anni and we told all of them a general gist of “you’re getting 1 kill with this role max, one peek max, etc” and idt any of them were a problem. someone did try to see how far they could go but it wasnt too bad since it was one guy and imo everything he suggested was p easy yes or no

conditionals like “someone says X” you just tell the player with the role to handle for you, if they dont do it then their loss

wish granters are when it gets more dangerous. honestly fuck wish granters fuck you mafia for granting a wish that required me to check the pronoun field of EVERY PLAYER and give FIFTY TWO OF THEM a ONE PERCENT ITA BOOST (this was a cursed wish and in general not. common for wish granters.)

and FUCK YOU BENNEH FOR MAKING ME GIVE 33 PEOPLE AN UNDERTITLE AND LIKE 20 PEOPLE A 2% ITA BUFF IM SO GLAD THAT ROLE DIED D2

role in question

(the role is too long for a single screenshot but this should tell you enough anyway)

dont do roles like that for your own sanity unless u have someone whos like pregame completely dedicated to doing all that shit themselves. fuck u benneh. at least lissa was on top of his own abomination roles i still have no clue how the sparkleturtles work

@May

4c. Counting and tracking

oh i guess i accidentally talked about this too but yeah

game wide mechanics are effort. be prepared for it. have plans for it. the crafting system in anni 2025 would have been absolute hell if nbowie didnt have a discord bot for it. well it was still kinda helllish but for different reasons. u dont need a discord bot but a dedicated space at the very least.

these kinds of things can be super cool if done right and these games are partially about doing cool stuff to give back to the community and that alone might entice you to add more stuff like this but. ur own sanity is at stake here. putting in a ton of effort to track something that nobody will really care about or notice isnt worth it (i think the stett flavor in anni2025 was a case where we probably put in too much effort into something too insignificant, even if i do think it was a fun idea and 99% of this effort was just editing role pms)

im not gonna find a list of roles/abilities but essentially every single “bullshit action” had to be given a tag of a dancing cat gif that nobody understood. i dont remember if this actually came into play a single time during the game either.

@May

Always always always consider how fun an ability will be to play with and against.

10 kill arsonist

@May

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.

i think this is kind of down to risk vs reward, but i would at the least make these roles usually not unusable if they dont do the thing and also like… account for it in design that these things are Less Strong because of it

we did have a role last anni that i think broke this rule and iirc the player who randed it didnt comment on it? but i suspect you would see this role and have negative feelings about it

role

woke version

(note she was NOT aware of this)

in general i think this role might have had a bit of a scuffed risk vs reward? i do think the combination of ita vulnerability + a shield makes it so the absolute worst case is pretty bad (shield pop → elimmed) but the more likely “bad” roll is just getting hit twice and in that scenario it is an easier to kill in ITAs VT which is plausibly a better VT

altho tbh i think it wouldnt have been that hard to just claim something for this role to get value. either way. it is a weird role to play as and i considered the anti-funness of it and decided that it was a risk but not egregious at least. in general i do abide by a rule of if a role has to do weird/maybe antifun shit to get value, that role should know either what its aiming for or know it’s A Big Reward, and its awkward to make the reward Too big because these roles are disproportionally likely to NOT be used or be worse than VTs. from a balance pov i considered the above role a weak investigative even tho i think in practice it’s actually decent

@May

Town hates when you add friction to ITAs.

i think in general, stuff that drastically messes with ITAs/the elimination are very very very very very high risk and the reward is p much never worth it

this is probably when i should tlak about ITA angels but im bored so im just pressing send

good post

[katze]

@May

Things which were helpful to me when designing a FAM having not really done much mash design before:

oh i meant to add this

p much everything here minus exactly the third section is just good mash practice

and id love to see more people host mashes

[MapleMay]

it was really thematic for the roles flavour and was the best way to reference the MK Incident

[Atlas]

i was literally just reading this! what the heck!

[Marshal]

mustve been a slow work day

[May]

@katze

@May

A game somebody feels bad about (a poor performance and/ or a loss that clearly made them upset )

ngl i feel like the bolded is just forbidden territory period unless enough time has passed that they can joke about it in a way that im extremely confident is not copium. because if u get that read wrong ur fucked

Ur bracketing it wrong

[a poor performance and/or a loss] that clearly made them upset

[MapleMay]

[MapleMay]

wow you really fought me tooth and nail on this role huh

[Lissa]

whats my current nyalimunimum total