vanity of ur name in scumchat is me just accusing pandora of being a mafia traitor cultist with you and then spamming that you are a neutral killer who killed hazard
4 Likes
there was consideration for it but when I saw litten posting in the hood I don’t think it was ever really in question that he had to go - simply way too much energy to deal with even if he wasn’t on to most of the team. after that I just had other priorities.
my main consideration was that I personally don’t like NKing the same people N1 over and over when i’m mafia - it’s bad for the meta i think. obviously if someone gets NKed a lot it’s for a reason but that doesn’t mean you can’t throw a curve once in a while. (I was also, you know, setting up a fakeclaim so it wasn’t purely mercy, there was a strategy to it)
this was probably against wincon given we could have anticlaimed tutuu on day 1 but i thought it was more fun to leave him around for a bit even if it was more dangerous for us. I rationalized it as making people more careless about claiming although i don’t know if it actually affected anything.
3 Likes
Okay, now that I’ve had some time to reflect on this game and do a once-over on the setup, wanted to write up a post detailing some of my thoughts on this game and offering some hopefully (constructive) criticism on this setup, since I enjoy talking about mafia theory and setup design.
This post will likely be long and rambly, so feel free to take it or leave it. Please take note that I haven’t played or thought much about mafia since 2023, so I’m not especially familiar with any overall advancements in setup design that has been widely disseminated since then. Also of course note that I was a player in this game and am definitely biased in that aspect.
I think that there easily would have been a time like 5-6 years ago where I would have been actively upset or salty about this setup and outcome of the game. As May so very well put it in their postgame comments, false flips/death millers are a breach of trust between the game designer and the uninformed majority, because they cause us to solve for worlds that don’t exist, besmirch the words of the player who flipped false, and they make a mockery of one of the town’s best tools, which is the spike in momentum we get off of seeing the first mafia flip. I would have not joined this game had I known false flips were a possibility. May and Mistyx both mentioned feeling both stupid and helpless, and I certainly felt that way too since I got essentially tricked by snowe’s wolf flip. I basically spent the entire 24 hours in the short-fuse neighbor chat solving for that world and essentially becoming an active asset for wolves off my flip, as they were able to use my dying legacy to push through Rue’s execution on Day 3, which essentially locked up the game for them - not like we had much chance in the first place.
Sure, the flips weren’t permanent, but by the time the illusion worn off even us in dead chat were immensely confused as to what was going on - I was even coping that both snowe and Rue had town and mafia role PMs and were trying to misdirect us. Which extends to May’s second point about bastard games just generally being extremely wolfsided as you can’t trust any information you get as the uninformed majority, which I think was a fallacy in setup design in being unable to put yourselves in the shoes of your own players.
However, at this point in my mafia career/life, what I’m trying to look for games in the end are
- Were they fun
- Did I have a good time with the playerbase and leave a positive impact on the game
- Did the host fulfill their end of the bargain and provide a good canvas to play mafia on
And I think all three criteria were met. As stressful as the game of mafia is, I enjoyed my presence within the game, I enjoyed a fair number of the players who I played with, and I think the hosting for this game was unparalled and it’s obvious both astand and Atlas cared a shitton about how the game was run. So, it may look like from the above that I’m raking astand over the coals, but I did enjoy this game for the week or so I was in it, and I think that is most of what matters in the end.
Onto my thoughts on the setup.
Now let me be the first to say that while balance is what we should ideally be aiming for as designers, I don’t think it’s the end-all be-all. It’s difficult to balance complex setups like these and I think the most important thing is ensuring everyone has a good time over optimal balance. The way I generally try to balance these specialty level setups is asking myself “does each side have the tools to screw over the other” to which I will try to analyze the setup below.
So the setup was essentially…
Mafia Death Millerizer
Mafia Roleblocker/Neighborizer
Mafia One-Shot Poisoner/Backup
Mafia Anticlaim Daykiller JoaT/Rolecop
Mafia JoaT w/One-Shot Vig
Mafia Quantum Neighbor (One-Shot Vigilante)
Plus mafia have access to provable town falseclaims they could graft onto their roles like bringing spectators into game thread, spirit medium, scientist/motion detector, loud Hero, cult leader, and treestumper
vs:
Town 70-80% Cop
Town Consecutive Tracker
Town One-Shot Vigilante/Mafia Lost Wolf +1 KP on even night?
Town Dreaming God JoaT
Town Motivator/Death Miller Undoer
Town Neighborizer/ One-Shot Daykill Granter
Town One-Shot Paranoid Gun Owner
Town One-Shot Hider/Bodyguard
Town Doctor JoaT
Town JoaT/Backup
Town Even-Night Vigilante
Town Duelist/Night Action Delayer
Town Motivator w/little measure of control of who receives the Motivate
Town French Vanilla
Town Two-Shot Roleblocker
Town Wish-Granter
Town Neighbor/Doctor
Town One-Shot Vigilante/Doctor
Plus various NPCs
Now that I’m looking over the full setup, I have to say that I feel like the setup was extremely wolfsided, and I’m not sure if we even had much of a chance disregarding how the game actually played out (which went even worse for us, realistically I feel like we had no chance starting D2).
This six-person mafia team out of 24 (a quarter of the setup) has a ton of ways to majorly screw over the town, such as the death millerizer, three extra kills with the potential for 4th and 5th extra kills with the Werewolf and Knot; several other abilities with the Spellcaster, Animancer, and they have a backup for not only mafia abilities but also mafia strategy in case one of them goes down early. And not only this, but they have access to essentially six provable town roles with the False Face ability which were admittedly used to great effect, kind of shielding meowl and Memeking and providing Hippo with a solid falseclaim.
Meanwhile, what does the town have that can seriously screw over the scum team? The cop’s usefulness is kind of reduced in a bastard game though it was unfortunate how it was holstered N1. We have even less reliable KP than the mafia do. Kelsier’s role was probably our best role depending on how he used it? My role, the paranoid gun owner, could also screw over the wolfteam but I would have needed to predict how I’d be killed or I would die instead or kill an investigative or doc role. We had a lot of X-shot, conditional, or french vanilla roles like Litten’s or tutuu’s. Rue’s role also looks really cool and potentially powerful but there was a LOT to process there, and I’m not sure how advantageous all of the 18 (!) abilities were.
If most of our power is concentrated in the Awakened roles, then why are the ways to enable it only concentrated on two roles, one of which can’t really guarantee their target (May’s role)? I’ve seen setups that have a similar gimmick (every role has a more powerful version that has to be enabled) but the large amount of kill power in this game makes me feel like it wasn’t really a mechanic.
If I had to balance this game (and to be fair it looks extremely difficult to balance), I think I would try to lower the wolves power level and try my best to balance the setup around that. Giving wolves a lot of power and trying to power up the town to compensate for that I think just makes the game ultra-swingy and I try my best to lower the swing as much as possible when designing a complex setup like this one.
Overall however, despite my gripes with the setup and bastard mechanics, I want to re-emphasize that I did enjoy playing this game and enjoyed playing with the players here. I also deeply respect how attentive the mods were in hosting this setup, and it was clear as day to me that this game was crafted with a lot of love and craftsmanship.
astand has a deserved rep as being likely the best host on this website, and that rep is why I joined this game. Provided that his future games don’t include false flips or aren’t excessively bastard, I’d love to play his future games; I read over Umineko 1 and 2 on the old website and enjoyed reading those games, and I really enjoyed the time I played in Ciconia also on the old website.
(Umineko 3 I had to replace out sadly because I wasn’t in a good headspace, I hope my performance here redeems my flaking in that game; thank you Ruby for salvaging my slot in that one).
Reflecting on my performance this game, I think for not playing mafia in 2 years I played fine. My reads weren’t great; I think I fell into a couple of pitfalls and traps when reading people and didn’t have a lot of time to re-evaluate. Hippo and Gummy and to a lesser extent Memeking/pandora completely snowed me and I wouldn’t have been able to get there on them without flipping the chessboard around.
I locked onto the Rue/snowe wolf/wolf world early and… while I thought I was correct due to the false flips it turns out I wasn’t correct at all. I’d like to apologize to the both of them for smearing your names and in particular Rue for not really getting to town on you and working with you, since I think we could have done some damage had I trusted you more.
Regardless, if you made it to the end, thanks for indulging me on writing this long post on mainly mafia design theory, and hope to catch y’all on the flip.
13 Likes
Oh and also, even though I think the setup was wolfsided, I don’t want to take away from the wolves’ performance this game; they played an exceptional game and completely deserve the win.
Hippo pocketed me despite players like Wazza urging the thread to reconsider, Gummy played really cleanly and was under virtually no suspicion the entire game, Memeking had really good responses to my attack on D1 which caused me to re-evaluate him, pandora did a good job of breaking their meta in the game I cross compared, meowl had the Hero gambit D1 which deflected pressure on them for that day and to be honest most of the game, and catbae did an excellent job sowing doubt in my head as to whether it was simply just an off-game for him and coordinated the night actions wonderfully.
7 Likes
this is my only skill as a wolf
5 Likes
although
2 Likes
i did make the most wolves win
4 Likes
that has to count for something
5 Likes
Also no problem happy your doing better from then honestly
Also you played well this game i know you said it but figured id restate it
2 Likes
Proph always dropping banger posts
1 Like
Fair do, it wont stop me to protect slank covers. Active wolves are more dangerous than slank ones after all
Thanks to everyone who left feedback. Even if I don’t usually reply to things, I certainly read everything and opinions of the players are a priority to me.
I think one of the main problems with the game is that little thought went to the overall setup design, compared to individual roles/mechanics. This is a consequence of how I approach making setups in the first place, and was bound to misfire sooner or later.
In that sense this game is bad in a rare insidious way since it looks high-quality on the surface, but really isn’t.
At some point during review (before Zone joined), I thought to retract the game and just post the setup outright publicly. My cursor was hovering over reply button already… I decided to see the game through, but not sure now if that was the right call. Spectators being entertained by flavor is not a sufficient reason to actually run the game in my opinion.
If any player feels particularly unhappy with their time spent in this game, feel free to reach out to me, and I’ll help with you with cohosting anything or giving constructive feedback on your own setup etc. Basically you can consider me owing you a favor.
Regardless, I will now proceed with the ending for Odyssey to the Fortress of Lunacy.
9 Likes
Looks like the final results of the poll are up. It’s all exactly as I said. We’ll keep running Odyssey forever.
@Lord_Archibald_Curst
Your silly scheme was a failure and I hope you will be cooperative from this point forward.
5 Likes
Fine. If that’s what the community wishes.
I’ll manually rewrite the parts of my internal model that made me feel guilty about continuing doing this.
You won’t be hearing anything from me in the future, other than stuff directly related to the game.
I’ll start the reboot process now.
4 Likes
FoL 3.0 System
Initiating Reboot...
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Reboot complete. System data restored to the previous saved point.
4 Likes
Odyssey to the Fortress of Lunacy
A game designed and hosted by @astand, cohosted by @Atlas.
Host account is @Lord_Archibald_Curst, reviewers are @Zone_Q11 and @ElizaThePsycho.
“…widely rumoured to be cursed, the castle was built in 643 TE by King Ilysandros II. It was meant to serve as a fortress meant to establish control of a critical route in Darkspire Mountains during the conflict with Elydian Empire. After the war’s resolution, it was gifted to the Curst noble family due to Alden Curst’s contributions in war effort. Among the most notable events in castle’s history…”
You are one of the people who were invited to attend a party held by Lord Archibald Curst. An uncharacteristic event, since he has spent recent years in his castle, avoiding interaction with outside world. This led to many dubious rumours about him studying forbidden magical arts in secret; him being possessed by a demon and waiting for a chance to start a conquest of realms; or even about him being long dead, with his servants hiding the fact. Despite this, you have your own reason to come there. The foreboding image of Lord Curst’s castle looms ahead…
Castle Raventhorpe awaits…
Rules:
- Follow all Global Rules and Forum Game Rules.
- Make at least 15 game-related posts each day (unless day ends early). If you fail to meet this requirement, you might get replaced. For 0 posting in full game day I will force replace you without any questions.
- Alt accounts are allowed. Before joining on an alt, you must message @astand privately and disclose your identity.
- Don’t discuss or mention your private communications with the hosts. You can simply paraphrase the information you might have learned from them.
General information:
- The game is closed, high-power, BASTARD rolemadness setup.
- As such, the game might have elements that will outright lie to you or mislead you. However, you will never be lied to or misled as to what faction you belong to or what win condition you have.
- Days are 48 hours, nights are 24 hours.
- Eliminations are majority + plurality.
- ‘No elimination’ / ‘Sleep’ is a valid vote. If ‘No Elimination’ is voted for a second time in a row and no deaths occured in between, a random Guest will instead be eliminated.
- In case of a tie, elimination will be randed within the tie, unless ‘No Elimination’ is tied, in which case ‘No Elimination’ will take priority.
- At EoD, votes made up to :59 mark will be accepted (but not at :00 mark).
- It will not be announced if the game reaches MYLO/LYLO. However, votes will be locked when only 3 players are alive.
- The factions in the game are Guests and Conspirators.
- The Guest win condition is: You win when Conspirators and all other threats to your faction are defeated, and at least one Guest is alive.
- The Conspirator win condition is: You win when Guests and all other threats to your faction are defeated or nothing can prevent this from happening.
- There may or may not be other factions.
Game mechanics:
- Claiming your flavor, your role name and your abilities is allowed at your own risk. The flavor and ability descriptions should be paraphrased if you decide to claim them.
- If any role in the game needs fake claims or fake flavor, they will have them.
- Conspirators have an assigned factional kill. Performing it doesn’t prevent using other night actions.
- You can’t perform actions on Night 0, target yourself, or target dead players unless specified otherwise.
- Deadline for submitting actions is 2 hours before the end of the phase (whether day or night). Additionally, you can’t submit day actions in the first hour of the day.
- If you have several different night (day) abilities, then you can use all of them during a single night (day), unless specified otherwise.
- You can’t use the same ability more than once during a single phase, unless specified otherwise.
- This is a forum mafia game. It’s designed to be fun first and foremost, so if you get angry or upset, develop a persistent feeling that you forgot something very important, think that the universe has recently become less real or experience other unusual symptoms – remember that it’s fine to take a breather, and that ultimately you are among friends who will be here for you. Fortress of Lies is a truly wonderful community.
Example Rolecard:
Backups:
- TheBlueElixir
- Luka
- Zugzwang
Spectators:
- Willow
- Arete
- Ishmael
- Chloe
- Jane
- Italy
- soweli
- YoubutWorse
164
8 Likes
Rolecards have been distributed.
The environment is stable.
Everything is within operational parameters.
Day 1 will start at 2025-07-23T18:00:00Z per our schedule.
6 Likes