Pitchfork Music Mafia
Summer Circuit Game 3: Post-Game Analysis
ON BALANCESetup Link:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16pE8iczV3XaiORoqbjYAE-2pSBNC1dXr9yXnkINvQ4c/edit?usp=sharingFirst things first, shoutout to Flush for the second set of eyes during the setup design process. It's never fully possible to keep things perfectly balanced--and at the end of the day, for better or for worse players will surprise you regardless. I do think, though, that this setup was largely successful in remaining competitive while giving each faction an equally fair and attainable shot at victory.
At the outset, the goal was to present a closed setup with roles that made good use of the OC setting, while still encouraging a well-rounded traditional skillset. Specifically my design benchmarks were
-A stable Group/Town/Solo multiball dynamic, with the aim of curbing any single faction from sweeping and minimized potential for kingmaking.
-Diverse role distribution that encouraged interaction and exploration across the playerlist without strictly turning into Social Gaming™️
-Decentralized rolepower, to reduce swing and accomodate a competitive format; each role should have some sense of purpose and utility both on its own and in the context of the setup
-An overall setup that resisted breaking strategies, discouraging Idea/Dethy logic and rewarding town for strong fundamentals in solving, while also reinforcing scum essentials such as thread-management.
I think the final iteration of the setup did a decent job at hitting these checkboxes, with a few standout roles:
I'm very pleased with how the Famous Singer panned out. It was obviously a strong fit flavorwise, but I think specifically including the Famous modifier did a great job of taking a role that's negtown on paper and giving it room to flourish in an OC environment, making it effectively a nerfed IC. It also gave both scum parties a reason to be diligent in their own rolehunting, as opposed to just haphazardly sending kills.
The dynamics around the Compulsive Bodyguard & Babysitter and the Even/Odd Tracker & Follower were pretty successful, too. In a setup this large, it can be hard to balance protective power in a way that prevents the game from being an absolute bloodbath while still ensuring that there's still a steady trickle of roles dying, and that protectives can't just docjerk. Likewise, investigatives that check for alignment can open things up FTC-adjacent play that's just as uncompetitive. I think distributing town's investigative power across slots with staggered modifiers kept either from becoming too centralizing while also making individual checks more useful in the broader context of the setup. Having the combination of bodyguard and babysitter, as well as having them both be compulsive, maximized their utility as protective power for important town roles without hurting scum's capacity for counterplay around that protective power. All four roles saw performance that reflected that.
Mafia's roster went through a few different iterations, but I'm pretty happy with the four roles I stuck with. Jailkeeper gives a strong disruptive that can also work as protection against opposing killpower in a multiball setup, Ascetic trades vulnerability to kills for wideranging investigative immunity, and JOAT gives the mafia some investigative power of its own. Balancing useful rolepower across for wolf slots is a bit tricky, because a full load of PRs has the potential to be gamebreaking, but I think it would be pretty lame to be throw in a normal Goon and end up being the only vanilla player in a role madness setup, or to use a traitor and hurt mafia's ability to impact wagons. Having the Backup Goon was a good compromise there, I think, striking a happy medium between giving wolves too much rolepower or too little--instead, they got to have a little more juice out of a role after it was eliminated, and the team as a whole has reason to be intentional about how they manage the workload as a team.
Serial Killer was probably the hardest to nail down balancewise--you need to give a single individual a fair shot at outlasting the other 17 players, without also making it overpowered. I went back and forth a bit on whether to go with an Arsonist or Poisoner instead, but ultimately I'm happy with the SK set. I think things like keeping the OS bulletproof passive and uninformed, or giving the SK a more robust JOAT kit that could counter wolves' kit while still being able to pass for villager under scrutiny, went a long way toward making the SK here work.
As for some of the more controversial roles--namely the Ascetic Lure, Thief and Inventor--I do stand by their inclusion, but I think it's worth breaking down those balance decisions a bit:
Commie and I spoke a bit about this in graveyard, but I think Ascetic Lure works best when thought of as a nerfed JK. It's superficially neg utility, but in actual practice, really it's a way to give town disruptive power that cannot itself be disrupted, while also being able to vet nightkills--not *strictly* as clearing as a direct alignment check, but with effective management absolutely capable of redchecking players without being gamebreaking.
Inventor was a bit funky, too, but fits in well with the OC element and has pretty high return on investment in its interaction with the other players: the ability set was picked out with the intention of rewarding strong townplay and scumplay alike, without also implementing a kit that was too similar to the Mafia and SK JOATs. OS Publisher can get a good bit of utility in the hands of either town or scum, scum is incentivized to make good use of an OS Ninja (which itself can be helpful for certain styles of town PR play), and OS Silencer goes a step further in aiding against kingmaking scenarios amid the three factions. I think the player who randed it did a great job of showing intentional/judicious role use, as well. If I *had* to make a tweak, I might give something like an OS Strongwill (which would've been applied to the Thief anyway in the larger 20p setup) or maybe something more roundabout/flexible, like a OS Gambit/Impossible modifier or something--but I'd still be a bit wary of swing there, and I think when town already has the advantage of having more manpower, a smaller kit is safer in terms of game balance.
Finally, Thief--I've explained my perspective on investigatives here, but if anything, Thief was here more as an anticlaim measure. The setup was highly flavored, and the role PM formatting and flavor sources were both made public before gamestart, so Thief existed as a means of vetting flavor claims in a way that kept massclaim from being an effective breaking strategy: Thief could return lyrics in its results (along with a flavored item result, which the Thief in this game never disclosed), but could not directly report a player's *full* role and alignment in their entirety without other contextualizing information. Town can't just clear everyone based on flavorclaims, since Mafia has plenty of room to lie, but Thief gives a means of following up on claims as well as helping to give players a sense of the setup without fully outing the playerlist.
ON GAME INTEGRITYTo briefly address the elephant in the room: the Gats appearance was something forum team had been on the lookout for since he first made it into the Deathnommy playlist. This game had a lot of new faces from a few different communities, so I'd been taking time to do some quick vetting during Signups ahead (this is also why the game server link took you to a landing page at first instead of directly to the game). ThatBeedrill444 had a pre-existing Showdown account, but ahead of gamestart I reached out to Hoeen about questionable history associated with the account, and micro was able to confirm an IP match shortly after Role PMs were sent. The account was banned and commie was subbed into the slot, with minor provisions prepared in case a full rerand was needed. Gratefully this was not the case--he only ever had access for a couple minutes, never had server access, and nothing he did send out was gamebreaking. I want to take a quick moment to thank you all for being good about sticking to procedure around ignoring questionable PMs from non-players and reporting directly when things do come up. The spam gats did manage to send out wasn't anything jeopardizing on its own (role and flavor template was public, the spam included none of these elements beyond mention of the role). What would've
actually made it detrimental is if people had started speculating about it actively in the game or treating it as confirmed by default, giving an minor inconvenience the same weight as a screenshot link--big shoutouts to everyone caught up in that for keeping a levelhead while we worked to resolve that situation quickly, and of course thanks to commie for subbing in on such short notice in the first place when we initially found the account.
ON SCUM PERFORMANCEAlright. Now the fun part. Maybe best to talk about solo first?
I want to shout out SheepGoMoo for playing the heck out of his role, even if he didn't make endgame. I've already touched on some of the balance elements here, but in terms of sheer play, SK definitely deserves a hand here for being able to wriggle out of being counterwagoned by opposing scum, leverage his position as a townread slot, and deliver on some really intentional dayplay and nightplay. His N1 idle was well-considered, and if not for a few surprises N2 and N3, I think it would've had even more payoff--most players hadn't suspected multiball, and with the early mafia flips, he made for a pretty convincing town JOAT. He managed his kit well, and I think when you factor in the fact that he was basically killing on behalf of both scum, it's really a commendable performance.
As for the wolves. Well. Glows and grows. I think wolves came into this game with some very strong positioning from all parties, even moreso when you consider how many new faces we had on the roster. Izaya really put himself out there and held his own pretty well for a first-timer here, STP put his usual silver tongue to quick use, and Lechen and DeathByDaylight began the phase with some of the most effective earlygame distancing I've seen in a while--there's absolutely a delicate balance between playing things with too much restraint and not coming across as unpartnered, and being too over-the-top and having it come across as hamfisted or TMI. Partners who are staging well-thought and well-executed dissociative interactions should aim to plausibly unpair each other as teammates while still affording themselves flexibility to ease up or double down on their stances toward each other--and I think Lechen and DBD struck that balance excellently.
I also think, in the short time DBD had, he did a great job asserting thread-control early on, and I think you could reasonably make the case that his attempt at townleading had significant sway on town's longterm solving approach. Into the late game as well, you can really see the mafia team showing how far you can go on charisma alone.
Which is all rather unfortunate, because I do think that both buses were a kneecap to that earlygame control. DBD's bus struck me as particularly egregious, as it was done without the team's full consent, but I do think Izaya's chop was avoidable as well. I'm somewhat open to idiosyncrasies in playstyle here--some people prefer to play domineering wolfgames, some would rather keep things reserved and UTR, some show up just to force as many mislims as possible even if they're outed in the process, and some people go scorched earth with a hellbus approach. Sometimes, pressure from villagers can feel paralyzing, and a bus may seem like a quick fix. It's one of those things where, y'know, people have their preferences--but there's absolutely tradeoffs that come with those preferences, you have to look at costs and benefits. And here? Eh. Towncred's cheap--Lechen stood a *lot* to benefit from DBD flipping early, and there's good optics around STP being on both wagons. But look at what you're giving up: you give town context that ends up spewing Izaya, now you're losing two of mafia's strongest roles, having already forced your Backup into the least optimal role, cutting your team's numbers in half and losing a great deal of flexibility in the process. I'd be maybe more sympathetic to the play if all teammates had had equal say in the decisionmaking, or if it had been effectively leveraged--but wolves didn't submit any actions on N2 or N3, and slanked through a good bit of the cycles right after the buses. As a result, they didn't get to fully capitalize on either bus, lost a lot of the thread control they initially had, and crucially, allowed villagers to establish multiple clears.
Would I call it gamethrow? Honestly, at this point I don't know if that's a debate I'm interested in. I will say, though, that this game was close even
with the mechanical advantage town gained after Day 4. It's not hard to imagine a mafia victory in a world where STP lets himself be bussed instead of swinging to No Vote, a world where we had those two missing nightkills and jailkeeps, or a world where the first two buses were put off for a day or two.
I don't mean to come across as overly harsh, but I really don't want to mince words here--because more than anything, it's just disappointing to see two players denied the opportunity to play the game they signed up for, and what's more, to see it happen at the entire team's expense. DBD's short performance had ripples well into the lategame, and for Izaya's first game with us, it's really quite outstanding that he was able to jump right into a game this size. Lechen pulled off some insane cockroaching, managing to somehow spin a straight-up redcheck into an extra phase of being townread, with multiple clears covering for him. And STP? STP took a claim that should have immediately been policied and was mechanically incapable of surviving lylo, and somehow made it to endgame on pure chatter. All four wolves gave impressive performances, and it just really sucks to have that cheapened by any one player's lack of sportsmanship.
ON VILLAGE PERFORMANCEI said in graveyard that I think this game's village was best described as a bunch of people working on a 1000-piece puzzle--but you've got folks only ever looking at a few hundred pieces at a time, and nobody's looking at the same few hundred pieces. You had people making some real slick reads, getting so creative with their thinking, putting their best effort into making a solve this game, even when things just didn't seem to add up. Without some concerted, organized collaboration across the board, though, things got dire very quickly.
That showed itself in a few places. This town's approach to the OC aspect, for example, was honestly pretty creative. I don't entirely agree with the choice to only use the forum for votes, and keep everything else on the server, but I do think it had the potential to work out for this playerlist. Folks had channels specifically for readlists, claims, and votecounts. Some people had private chats for individual solving and brainstorming, and there were a decent amount of smaller towncore chats that cropped up--which, although they weren't all pure, still resulted in some pretty crucial opportunities for villagers to find each other. Likewise, I think there was a very strong focus on claims and attempts to force mechsolves this game, which didn't entirely work out, but showed some good instincts, I think. In all the confusion of N2/N3 into D4, town laid the groundwork to produce quite a few clears, and there were loose networks in place to pull off some interesting nightplay that, while perhaps a bit clumsy, helped reinforce trust within some of those loose town clusters I mentioned earlier.
The flipside of that, of course, is that you wind up with an environment that makes it much more difficult to actually leverage those advantages you've built up. Using the thread exclusively for voting made it harder for folks to understand the context behind players' vote history--and wagons took longer to build in the first place because most of the game was happening in the server. Being slower to place votes means players have less time to actually read and react to wagons, which ultimately means mafia gets to sit back and chill--because hey, as long as no one's voting them, they're really not at any immediate risk of dying. You also run into the issue of players individually having access to all the information they've laid out, but having a much harder time keeping track of that information and holding each other accountable for it--because it's split between several channels, and the speed of the main chat is less conducive to making larger cases. Mostly it just keeps you from defending your townreads, convincing people of your scumreads, and makes the towncore more vulnerable to misclears--things that I think a bit more balance between thread and server could have prevented.
The same thing applies to action and roleclaiming, because you end up with a situation where the town has effectively all outed themselves, but they haven't actually coordinated a massclaim across all living players. Players then have to work with inaccuracies from fakeclaims that went on too long, players being treated as confirmed when they shouldn't be, or treated as
unconfirmed when they undeniably
should be. The hyperfocus on mechanics, without fully
committing to organizing and sorting through all the info available to you--not just claimed roles and actions, but how players
used their roles and actions over the course of the game--made the game take a bit longer than it needed to in some places (looking at you, D6 No Vote).
Ultimately, though, I think it's really a credit to this village's stamina that they managed to push on as long as they did. Across some truly stumping night results and some very tricky play from scum, this village was absolutely at its best when players were reminding each other of the facts and talking things through. Treating the team game like a team game, sitting down and really working with each other, was a big part in achieving this win, and I'm glad you all got there in the end.
OVERALLI think I've said plenty at this point, so I don't want to drag on too long, but despite some of my agonizing in graveyard--between hosting, trollhunting, night resolution over mobile, and moving apartments midgame--I did very much enjoy getting the chance to run this setup and watch y'all play. It would honestly be great to see more CSes hosted in the room, because while initially I know it was hard not having host-reassurance on different roles and interactions, eventually I do think you all got the hang of it and started to focus on solving the
players instead of the
setup. It was especially cool to see players, living and dead, get some exposure to folks from different communities and gain new perspectives over the course of the past few weeks. I'd definitely encourage folks to look around on MafiaScum and sift through roles sometime, maybe pick a role that seems weird or new to you and try to balance a setup around it (heck, that's how we got Tropicana17
[x]). It can be fun to experiment with game balance, and can really help the way you think about what roles make sense as what alignments, while still understanding them to be two separate things.
More than anything, I want to thank you guys for sticking it through and giving it your all. For the most part, I don't think this game ever got into any kind of toxicity, and spec chat did a great job of maintaining a welcoming environment, with very little salt. Thanks for keeping things competitive over
25[/i][/u] days of gameplay--I hope you all enjoyed!
