Ah thats the motivation I somehow missed, but I know Tutuu purposely ignored my defense case on Jason when Willow was considered (especially I thought Leafia was paired, but cool heads prevailed)
Even I thought it was too coincidental, what are they thinking @_@
Especially you have to explain the jailkeep is used to roleblock and not protect is not a good look, even though this didn’t end up being a lie, this still feels dishonest.
No townreads made, so that makes me think, why protecting kiiruma over anyone else
They thought I was PR, as you can see from maf chat. :D
Mod Thoughts
What worked:
Happy with the setup balance given my goals for this game
Excellent modding from Ash
Really high level of play for most of the early game
What didn’t work:
Last minute changes resulting in some unintentional bastard moddery
Miscommunication resulting in an extremely poor interaction between Untargetable and Tracker
Activity being a double-edged sword
Setup Manifesto:
After playing in astand’s game earlier this summer I had the hankering to start designing some setups again, and typically I like to fill a hole in what games are normally designed in a given site (if a site hosts a bunch of vanilla games, host role madness and vice versa).
What I saw from FoL were either complete Mountainous setups, open setups, or really complex role madness games, so I wanted to once again design the type of setup I like the most, which is a large closed “normal” game with simple roles. I’ve ran a couple of these in the past (Kaguya Mafia) but I still really enjoy these types of games and they’re very close to classic mafia in my mind. The game is closed so as an uninformed townie, you have to do some evaluation on what roles may or may not exist in the setup, which I think is an important skill to test. Wagon and interaction analysis is easier to do with four mafia members; and as we kind of saw in this game for wolves, figuring out the setup is of immense importance, and if they don’t accurately pinpoint who the power roles are, they can get buried (which I think is part of the push-pull of mafia, giving the town something up their sleeve that rewards them for keeping the mafia in the dark, as we saw with AngryFrog this game).
Other than that, most of my manifesto is echoed in Kaguya’s – I’ll quote the relevant parts here since I think they apply to this game, and I’ll instead use this opportunity to wax poetic about the minutia of this particular setup:
For starters, given that mafia won I think 80% of games last year, I designed this game to be slightly town-favored from the ground up - probably like 56%/44% town/wolf favored if this setup was run 100 times. I wanted there to be two investigative ones, one stronger and one weaker. Neapolitan I like because it gives definitive innocents while giving not clearly defined guilties, which I think gives the town enough direction if they live long enough to N3. Desparado can also give the town a lot of direction if used properly but it’s definitely the swingiest role in the game.
This setup originally had a Reporter instead of a Tracker (target a player, learn if that player acted or not). I ended up replacing the reporter with a tracker because then the two investigative roles don’t step on each other’s toes (Neapolitan gives defined innocents and not clearly defined guilties, trackers give defined guilties but not clearly defined innocents – which should have happened this game but didn’t to an error of judgement in my part) which definitely makes the setup more elegant for me. I just think trackers are a bit overused personally and wanted to experiment with different investigative roles.
As for the mafia, they don’t have a lot going on for them, but I thought that the utility of the JoaT and the jailkeeper being able to true claim their roles without being counterclaimed, as well as being able to prove their role (with the JoaT’s neighborize ability) was decently strong. I can see worlds where snow claiming jailkeeper would have been enough for people to stop voting them, for example.
Overall, pretty happy with the balancing of this setup and happy to field any questions about it if people asked. There were two things I was really unhappy about (me messing up May’s track on N2, and one-shot untargetable literally not being in the list of vanilla roles) but I’ll cover those in things that didn’t work.
Huge shoutout to @Ash for being an excellent host for this game (I was travelling for most of last month but still wanted to host my game). He took care of all actions/player communication/thread management/votecounts up until the end. He was an excellent co-host and I’ve already thanked him for his service multiple times, but just wanted to give one last final shoutout of recognition here. Thank you so much Ash for helping me run my game, it is so greatly appreciated.
Finally, I was really happy with the high level of town play in the early-to-mid game; a lot of people were pouring their hearts out and solving, and due to the successive wolf executions on D1/D2 the town were able to have the misexecutions necessary to spare at the end to finish this game through. Not to say the wolves also didn’t give it a valiant effort and their best shot (D1/D2 looked /so/ bad for them and I’ve definitely been in spots like those before as wolf where I just wanted to give up, and huge respect to the wolf team for plugging away and finding their spots), but I think D1/D2 of this game has to be up there in terms of being some of the best town play I’ve ever seen on this website.
Now let’s talk about the things that didn’t work and I personally feel really bad about, since as a host I pride myself on not missing these things and running a tight ship.
First, I made some last minute changes to the setup essentially to give wolves more of a fighting chance than what Luka originally reviewed it as. I turned Kanne from a one-shot bulletproof into a one-shot untargetable, and gave Sense an extra rolecop shot.
I thought that the one-shot bulletproof would have been game-ending if it procced, and the bodyguard + jailkeeper + 1x bulletproof doesn’t leave a lot of room for the jailkeeper to roam free while jailkeeper + bodyguard can theoretically exist in the same setup. 1x untargetable has upside for skill expression if they bait the mafia NK but can also easily be negative town utility if they get bodyguarded or play bad (tracked or visited by neapolitan). What’s more, the 1x bulletproof is not something the mafia can interact with easily - I thought it was a frustrating role to play against because they have to spend two kills on killing a player with this role if it randed onto someone good. My thought was that the 1x untargetable role gives the mafia a bit more room to maneuver around.
Except that there’s a huge problem here - a 1x untargetable literally doesn’t exist in the vanilla roles in FoL, and I didn’t catch that when I made my last minute changes to the setup. It’s also tough because I thought the role was relatively simple, but it caused a TON of confusion and discrepancies in night actions in-game which was not intended. I tried to rationalize it in my brain as an ascetic variant, but given that literally in the rules it says " This setup only consists of vanilla roles as allowed on Fortress of Lies" which basically meant that this game was bastard-lite when it was very clearly not meant to be. This caused a bunch of cascading effects to happen in-game, such as the mafia spending their kill on dia N2 as well as May tracking tutuu to that kill but not seeing it, and because 1x untargetable is not a role on the list it was impossible for May to figure out if that role interaction was legitimate (also, again, not something they should have had to worry about given that this was a vanilla setup).
So, apologies - this is why we have reviewers, this is why we don’t make last minute changes to setups when they can’t review them, this was pure hubris and something I completely overlooked until I randed the setup.
Secondly, I stuck to my guns on a mod error and again it had huge ramifications on this game and made the game much closer than it should have been. N2, tutuu neighborized AngryFrog and attempted to kill diafiasco, running straight into the 1x untargetable vest. May tracked tutuu that night. May should have seen both actions (the neighborize and tutuu visiting dia). However, May only saw the neighborize because the kill on dia failed due to dia’s role.
What really happened here is that Ash asked me before day started how he should have ruled this interaction. I didn’t see his message until day started, to which he ruled that May wouldn’t see tutuu’s kill on dia. I was pretty distracted when this happened, so I told him “I would have ruled the other way, but I can see it make sense happening this way. Either way it’s been done so we will just roll with it”.
This was clearly just wrong, and don’t blame Ash at all for this, I didn’t go over this ruling with him beforehand. It was just my fault that I made the incorrect judgement call there and stuck to it. What should have happened was I should have DM’d May at the start of the day telling them that we made a mistake in night action processing and instead they tracked tutuu to the nightkill and neighborize.
@May, I apologize for essentially ruining your red check and making you play out the rest of the game with bastardly/incorrect info. I feel pretty bad about this; lemme know if there’s anything I can do to make it up to you in some form or fashion.
Finally, as happy as I was about the strong town play early in the game, it also caused this game to be a bit /too/ active? And I know some of the wolves were having trouble keeping up which I do feel bad about. It makes me wonder if postcount limits would be good for future games but I think this playerlist was just very chatty and there were two hydras which also contributed a bit, I feel, to the rambunctious nature of the game. I feel especially bad for @snow since this was their first game on the site and this /should/ be the game that would be appropriate for new players.
I have huge sympathies for them randing wolf as a newcomer, since that is actually how I started off my first ever mafia game and I got overwhelmed extremely quickly. So apologies, snow, for randomly throwing you in the lion’s den and thank you for sticking around and sowing just enough doubt that Willow almost got there in the end. I don’t know if you will play in future games on this site but I promise they aren’t as much as a trial by fire as this one was.
I still want to make one more reflection post detailing my thoughts on the play of the game, as well as nominating my picks of MVP on each side since I did try to keep up and read my own game, but it’ll have to be in a couple of days since there’s a lot to get through. Either way, if you’ve read this far, thank you and I hope you had a good time if you participated in this game.
10 Likes
same tbh
i always tell people it takes practice, but it is hard to understate how overwhelming it can be trying to fake town perspective when you don’t really know what that perspective is. i still struggled for a while even with a lot of chat based mafia experience, because it didn’t really directly translate. but i hope they’ll give it another go.
4 Likes
What I’ve learnt here is that you’re all bad at the game of standard mafia yet you think you’re all geniuses who can outsmart the other people at the table. Newsflash: you probably can’t outwit the other people at the table because the other people at the table are also smart.
2 Likes
for what its worth the setup was fine i’m just personally annoyed by the neopolitan jumpscare lol
1 Like
Where’s that even from lol
I remember you said the same thing in grande idea
3 Likes
Actual take by a guy on throne of lies discord
6 Likes
A million bucks!!!
(Don’t sweat it, I needed my time to sulk but it was an enjoyable game nonetheless and it was ultimately also partially on me. The game easily could have considered an Untargetable, well, untargetable, and not tracking tutuu to the kill was also a valid interpretation of the game rules. My oversight of this was my own fault as well.)
2 Likes
eliminating the desperado check is actually criminal
otherwise game seemed super solid and genuinely very close
gj peeps
grats to both town and wolves tbh
11 Likes
ok but what if you do it then win anyway
then its no longer a crime but instead a power move
5 Likes
no.
4 Likes
ur just mad that id vote u out if u were desperado cleared and u wouldnt have the guts to do it back
3 Likes
Summary
Summary
Summary
Summary
8 Likes
god fucking damnit
3 Likes
gotta get her out so she cant throw
3 Likes
UNCALLED for ):<
3 Likes