3ps work at all well in mashes maybe 10% of the time
Jesters are fun only if you know explicitly about their existence and make enough of an impact to have to play around them. Otherwise horrible role, never pans out in a mash.
Dead interaction sucks, unless done in very creative ways where deaddies have little to no actual game influence, wolfing in a game where a person who has died can still supply reads makes it significantly less fun to play the game
cop checks should be immutable in my opinion, this one is more up for debate but any roles that fuck with them dont work.
If there’s the rare tailor or godfather or framer, people will ignore the possibility of those roles and just treat the check as fact. Either the role is useless all game, or it triggers, and then the game just gets less fun, it’s optimal to trust the check and when it’s wrong it just sucks but there’s almost no counterplay.
If theres a ton of cop check fuck up items, then cop checks because pretty useless.
The only way that this can be played around is if there’s some kind of mechanic that can directly track, counter, or confirm cop checks and cop check fuckery. Otherwise it’s just mechanical swing that doesn’t end up as fun for one faction or another
I normally dislike elements that fuck with cop checks unless.
A) The element is an aware Miller. The correct play in this case is to effectively openclaim it as soon as you can, and I like this because it allows plays such as fakeclaiming Miller as a wolf preemptive defense against red checks or fakeclaiming Miller as V for reactions .
B) The element is a Godfather with some way for town to predict that the GF exists in the game, like in the DR mash I had to can due to having an accident while running it where Junko was a GF but Shuichi, the cop, had a passive that told him that the wolves had exactly 1 GF in the match. This voids green checks until the GF is yeeted.
However, since this game is bastard then I’m not sticking to these rules. The game will still be normally solvable with reads as I won’t pull stupid shit like lying to a player about their own alignment, but mech fuckery will be highly unreliable.
I’m planning on limiting, though.
Dead people are likely not going to be able to carry the game like what happened in Drakengard.
feel like throwing in a bunch of the classic ‘these elements make the game more unstable, which consequently leads to players having less fun, don’t do these’ list items in a bastard game with the justification being that it’s bastard can very easily lead to an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion where these elements are not altered in a way that addresses the reason that they make the game unfun and are instead just thrown in there because one can.
not super interested in a game with excessive 3ps/dead-interaction/copcheck-ruiners, feel like these things could be done in a creative way that tackles and negates the reasons why people don’t like them in games but that doesn’t feel like the vision of this game
im obv not miss game design, it’s not easy to do all of those things and i have my own tastes in forum mafia which are a lot blander than most peoples’ tastes, but my personal feedback is a hard no atm because i think those features make a game tiresome for myself.
2 Likes
Game won’t have much of those features. As I said before I’m making a game similar to Eevee’s CFM2 or Anime FM rather than an anything-goes shitstorm.
I’ve done extensive analysis on both of those games and came out with numerous fundamental problems in their design
aka I wouldn’t try to emulate them
they break the formula in ways that break the main gameplay loop of fm rather than enhance it
you are not enlightened enough to understand
my bastard games contain shitposts but aren’t shitposts in their whole
anyway anime FM had like, suuuper busted design in a lot of places, and not in a good way
i was barely paying attention and i can tell you that
eevee has talents as a designer but trying to emulate it is not going to end up well
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i get what you were trying to communicate is that you’re going for a more restrained style of bastard game, which is good, but I think trying to communicate that with games whose big problem was always that they included stuff that was just eevee being too clever for his own good is probably not the best idea?
and also i have no idea why you’re trying to convince people to join your game by advertising there is a high likelihood of serial killers, a mechanic that pretty much nobody likes nowadays?
as for dead interaction, it’s basically in the same space as a lot of common bad FM mechanics in that it’s not inherrently busted but the form in which it is almost always implemented is unfathomably busted, and people don’t seem to be willing to deviate from that?
i’ve tried to make dead communication work (ToLFM, where the balancing mechanism was the more people talked about the dead interaction and relied on it and speculated about it the sooner it would dissapear) and it didn’t work out… badly in that game? but it only lasted a single game so I don’t think we can call that a good sample size or an example of how it can work
Cool x5.
Cool x2.
You know my stance on 3ps, it’s in my title. When I see/hear suspicion of a 3p, I want that person dead. I hate 3ps so much. I think mafia is a better game when there are two clear-cut sides.
Jesters are 3ps.
Dead interaction is ~fine as long as it’s implemented in a way that doesn’t break the game.
Lost wolves are fine, though I sometimes feel like they are like 3ps who share their wincon with wolves, and 3ps… I think I’d rather have lost wolves than actual 3ps, all things considered.
Millers/Framers/etc. are fine to have. I think they are underused here, rather than overused.