Hi, I'm going to share my opinion on what makes a good role in open setup games like witchhunt or tinyhunt. These principles also apply to closed setup games, but the hidden nature of closed setup games restricts how 'off the wall' (so to speak) any given role can be.

Principle One: Power.​

The player, with their role, must feel like they play a non-trivial role in their faction's ability to win. Note that this immediately discounts vanilla townies, since they completely lack any kind of mechanical impact. Additionally, it discounts 'noob trap' roles, whose power is trivial but seems strong at first glance. An example of this type of role would be the Pope from tinyhunt.

Why is having Power important? Without the ability to 'do something' in the game, many players will lose interest or otherwise be less motivated to play (I'm sure we are all familiar with this). The presence of power also contributes positively to the game - The entire game experience improves with The Priest or The Vigilante because this roles have an excellent individual player experience, but also increase the possibilities for the town discussion and the scum team. So these roles, despite being played by just one player, positively impact the entire game.

Principle Two: Agency.​

The player, with their role, must feel like they have a choice with the usage of their power (or how to use the information gained from their power). This discounts roles where there is always an 'optimal play', an example of this type of role would be the Leeroy from tinyhunt. Optimal play for Leeroy is (essentially) to never use your power, making you effectively into a vanilla townie outside of some specific situations.

Why is having Agency important? Without the ability to make your own choices within the game, many players will feel like they actually aren't playing at all - they are just acting out some prearranged script that the player-collective at large has decided for them. This is obviously a negative player experience.

Even purely defensive roles like the Survivalist (You start the game with an extra life) have a high degree of agency - The extra life gives you the leeway to play exactly how you wish to play: If you make a mistake, you have your next life to fall back on.

Principle Three: Simple.​

This is less set in stone than the first two Principles, but for the average* game, keeping the overall number of systems within your game low is ideal. Having an abundance of systems to support the underlying gameplay adds a huge amount of complexity to the game for dubious benefit, as it adds significantly to player overhead and moderation difficulty (see: dlphunt).

The core player directives are 'Who am I?', 'What am I supposed to be doing?' and 'What is the minimum I need to know?'. Answering these questions with as few words as possible is ideal - Do players need to know every mechanical interaction in your game to know what to do? (see: dlphunt**). Hopefully not. Ideally what a player is, and what they need to do in your game can be expressed without requiring full knowledge of the game at gamestart. A player can look up any unknown things as they encounter them.

If you have an entire system in the game that only exists to provide gameplay to a small amount of roles, is the gameplay it provides worth the cost in added complexity and player overhead?


Examples:

Tinyhunt​

Who am I?
Role, Faction.

What am I supposed to be doing?
Killing all the people on the opposite faction, there are 10 / 3 of them. (If town) Watch out for soup, don't reveal your role. (If scum) Try to act like a townie but get mislynches happening.

What do I need to know?
Two factions, town and witches. Soup. Angels. Lump vote.

dlphunt**​

​

Who am I?
Role, faction.

What am I supposed to be doing?
Killing all the people on all other factions, there are 14/3/2/1 of them. (If town) Watch out for modkills, don't reveal your role. (If scum) Try to act like a townie but get mislynches happening.

What do I need to know?
Four factions, town, witches and 3rd parties. The Mayor vote. The Asylum vote (all three types). Sanity. Plane Tickets/Taure. The Vira's powers. How the jwlk & Eidolonic interact. Modkills. The Castiel. The jon. Association. Summon. (This is probably not even the full list, but I cbf continuing reading the rules)

Pokemon​

​

Who am I?
A pokemon trainer.

What am I supposed to be doing?
Traveling around the world, beating the gym leaders and catching more pokemon.

What do I need to know?
the A button is accept. B is cancel. D-pad walks.

* - Average meaning 'targeted at a wide audience, rather than 100% veteran players'

** - sorry lungs, it's just an easy, obvious example.

--

The first two principles ensure that all roles have a positive impact on both the player and the game. The third principle ensures that players can actually play the game rather than engaging in mental gymnastics trying to figure out how to best play the game.

EDIT:

Bonus Topic: The Skill Check to Reward ratio.

If your role has a condition in order to receive the reward or payoff, it is important to ensure that the Skill Check is not disproportionately easier or harder than the value of the reward

I'll use two roles from Tinyhunt to illustrate this.

Oracle - Each night, select a player. If any other party also selected that player, learn how many witches are alive.

1. The Skill Check: Targeting a player that someone else has targeted.
2. The Payoff: You learn how many Witches are alive.

On any given night, you have less than 4 in 13 odds (Angels, Witches, Clown, Priest + random oneshots) of randomly selecting a player that has been targeted by someone else. Thus, this can be considered 'medium->hard'.

The Payoff is that you learn how many Witches are alive. Occasionally, you also can figure out what exactly hit your target with public information such as kill survival, pie claims, etc. I would rate this information as 'useful->good'.

So for Oracle, the Skill Check and Rewards are roughly aligned, it's pretty difficult, but you get useful info that can situationally improve to amazing.

Pope - Day starts, 4 or less players are alive. Learn the alignment of every living player.

1. The Skill Check: Living to 4 players alive (+more)
2. The Payoff: You learn which remaining players are Witches.

You need to survive to 4 (or less) players alive, while also having lynched two witches. This skill check can be considered 'very hard'.

The Payoff is that by surviving to day 4-5, you get the equivalent of one to two Priest checks. This is ok, I guess. Let's rate it 'useful'.

It doesn't look too bad, does it? But wait, your job doesn't end here - You need to convince everyone that you are actually the Pope and bob is the Witch. This is extremely difficult because the Pope is a natural Witch claim. If we take into consideration that there is basically nothing you can do with your info other than claim and hope for the best, the Skill Check to Payoff ratio becomes very bad.

 

This is good stuff. Your second two principles are spot on (and your bonus topic).

I don't agree about discounting Vanilla Townies, though. Sure, it depends on the personality of the player whether they like "simpler" roles, some people just don't.

But IMO the ability to vote and post in the main game thread is pretty damn powerful. For one thing when you're VT you don't need to worry about avoiding night kills as much, don't need to be cautious, so you can go hard with your traditional scum-hunting in a way PRs can't.

See:
Bill Door in that game where he caught the entire scum team.
Or Sesc's vote count analysis in more than one game.
Or that one time on another site when I was scum and came this close to winning, only to have my entire team systematically wiped out by a VT replacement. >.>

 

My post is primarily about Open setups, like tinyhunt or witchhunt. In a closed setup game, there are hard limits on what can be included in the game, due to the hidden nature of the roles and rules, while no such limit exists in an open setup game (though one would do well to show some level of restraint).

So in an open setup VT's are not necessary, because the rules of the game are known at game start: There is no reason to have a VT, who adds zero to the game or player experience when instead you could have some power, which adds something to the game, the player experience, or even both.

While some players can do well with a VT, surely this is due to their merits as a player, rather than any special property that VT's have. It follows then, they would do just as well if they had a unique role within the game, regardless of what that role may be.

--

As an aside, it seems to me that you're viewing this through a scarcity lens: People may feel bad about wasting their power role if they play aggressively. While this is true in a closed setup game that only has a few power roles, in an open setup, everybody has a role and (typically) there are natural redundancies built into the game: Losing any individual role (even the Priest!) does not have the same effect as losing the Cop in a closed game.

Also I think it's pretty telling that all your examples of people doing well with VT's include people who I would rate highly at mafia, regardless of their role.

 

Stickying this thread for posterity. A must-read of anybody thinking about creating their own game.

 

Personally, I think the most important rule out of the three KaiDASH mentioned is Principle Three: Simplicity. Speaking from experience as a GM, I can attest that the worst thing you could do is introduce a bajillion mechanics that conflict with one another. Games with roles and mechanics can conflict with one another can generate confusion among the players, making them feel more disconnected.

For example, Tinyhunt #1 is an example of a well-executed game due to its roles having an element of simplicity to them. On the other hand, I am sure that several people here have experienced games with... interesting mechanics/roles.

 

My two cents, since this thread's been bumped by way of Sticky.

Popping right back into Little Italy because, well. Reasons. But having organized one of the games with interesting mechanics/roles, I can definitely agree with this. My post also digresses somewhat from the topic at hand, and focuses on factions more than roles.

I took a look at the rule sets of A Hunt of Thrones and A Hunt of Thrones II. While I would rate the former as being more successful than not, the sequel game was entirely too convoluted and ended up with glaring possibilities for exploitation given some of the mechanics.

The design of both games included a 4-faction system in a 25+ player game. Though the majority town faction's win conditions remained the same as in almost every other Mafia setup, the other three scum factions' win conditions were very specific, with every single player having a specific role with specific capabilities.

In the case of the HoT games, this led to imbalance between factions. Yes, if I had been both more diligent and spent more time balancing, this may have been mitigated to any given degree. However, a Town victory in HoT was in some ways dependent on having the three scum factions taking each other out, or disabling one or more of them early on in the game in order to create a more manageable scenario. The scum factions' victories depended on keeping each individual member of their respective factions alive, and/or prioritizing survival based on their role details. But with two Night Kills (one per scum faction) happening per Night, it meant that too much was left to chance for each respective faction, given the sheer number of players and factions involved. Case in point, the Warlock-equivalent faction in HoT1 was hamstrung incredibly early, and the remaining member of that faction was unable to achieve victory on their own.

Without an achievable objective, this meant that that player had more incentive to fuck right the fuck off the game, or simply keep playing in order to sabotage other factions' victories on whimsy.

This can be better understood under KaiDASH's three tenets by treating each cohesive/informed group (Scum faction(s), any sub-factions with shared QTs, etc.) as a single unit of agency. By including two or more Scum factions in an open-setup game, those factions in the informed minority had less freedom to operate and thus were forced to prioritize taking out other scum factions before attending to achieving victory over Town. By allowing each Scum faction in a game greater agency as a faction itself, Scum players will then interact positively within the game itself by driving discussion, seeding mistrust, and attempting to direct the discourse of debate.

In an open setup game, as role and faction interactions are allowed to become more complex, less and less agency is afforded to both individual players and the individual power blocs that are the informed minority. This in turn precipitates into less freedom for each player to decide their strategy and how they interact with the discussion at large, which is counteractive to the fundamental mechanic of Mafia games - which is to acquire and disseminate information to suit the needs of your faction.

TL;DR, the entire point of this diatribe was to reinforce the importance KaiDASH's three points - Power, Agency, and Simplicity, with particular attention to the general relationship between Simplicity and Agency. Namely, the simpler a game's overall structure is, the more agency and freedom of choice can be afforded to the players themselves. This in turn allows players to affect the game as they see fit.

Any Power afforded to a player via the mechanics of their Role should as a rule of thumb not affect the agency of their faction on a systemic and negative basis - Town must be able to win without their Priest even if it becomes that much more difficult, Scum must be able to win without X role even if it becomes that much more difficult (although in the case of Scum, Night Kills are always a thing so this point is less applicable than Town roles).

 

Sorry Lutris, you can only sandbag reasons in an actual game of mafia.

lynch lutris

 

I will vouch for Lutris' reasons. Lutris is the Priest.

 

Nah, you're both probably scum.

Also, I feel like having a role ability really makes you more motivated playing the game. Less useless/lynch bait and more I can probably maybe do something.

 

The Traveller's Log:

The Traveller finds this discussion aimless. Clearly the best role is being The Traveller.

The Traveller Out.

 

Lutris, you should host more mafia games. After the slew of more hazy hosts, you'd be a gust of fresh air. Nothing tops the magic of Lesstiny and HOT1. #Cersei4lyf #QueenClaims

 

Excuse me~, my setup was great. :<

 

\o/

It's just as well that I'm just getting into Finals Week - but my exams end on the 3rd of February if all goes well and I don't shoot myself in the foot.

I'm writing up an interest thread for a closed setup game as we speak. Er. As I write this post up? Something.

 

Can that wait in line until after the Micro Mafia, Lucky's Dresden and my CYS game?

 

Yeah, of course. Just wanted to gauge interest at the moment anyway.

 

You had a game?

 

You're a jerk.