So: commentary and such: Well played to the Town. Regarding the Mafia, I think I can pinpoint a couple of strategic missteps that really hurt in the long run despite a lot of good individual dayplay.
Very few players knew or cared much about the source flavor - which was fine, although it did make a lot of my flavor-related subversion irrelevant to how the game played out. Morgoth, the Balrogs, Dragons, &c. were the baddies alongside the treacherous Maeglin (and the cowardly Salgant!) in the source flavor, where Idril and all the Elves were the good guys. AI first decided that Maeglin would be a Town Godfather in the vein of one used in an old Marathon Day game of PokerFace's, which I'd admired since I saw it first (when putting things together, I discovered that I said as much in at least one old MD thread - which I guess was good for game integrity that no one found) and that Idril would be scum, and that the flavor motive of the scumteam would be Idril's Secret Way. From there, I made a list of all the Elves from Gondolin (plus Tuor, of course), decided the teams' proportions and powers, and randomized the characters' alignments, then randomized which characters on each team got powers. I gave only Idril a safeclaim (Glorfindel - I actually think I didn't randomize the choice). I suppose, given that in the non-
Silmarillion
version of the story Tuor was explicitly in on the Secret Way stuff that if he'd been put on the Mafia I'd be tempted to give him a safeclaim, but it never came to pass.
Setup design ethos: The Godfather's ability to make players take actions without their knowledge was why I had to answer yes to the bastard game question when Queuing up the game. The Trackers were indeed intended to have the potential to discover these actions and get some messy accusations rolling. During review, a strange Seraph Knight-like bodyguard roll variation was replaced by the Voyeur, which I can only think of as a good thing. The Mafia were given multiple different tools to deal with Town power. The Godfather was not Roleblockable - but his chosen killers were, and blocking one of them would give a pseudo-guilty on them. The Shieldrender was a little like the Strongman people ended up assuming it was - it certainly could make kills go through Doctor protection. It was initially concewived as an inverted Jailkeeper - it puts of Rolestop mechanic on the target, but makes the target vulnerable to kill actions. In one version of the setup, Idril was Bulletproof, and using the Shieldrender on her would make her vulnerable to kills. It in this setup was more useful as an Ascetic-maker, able to keep Trackers off the killer and keep the Weak Doctor's protective action from going through (potential to give false pseudo-innocent results on a member of the Mafia). And there was next to nothing in terms of protective roles.
One thing I knew about the setup at the outset was that the scumteam started out with a lot of power to mitigate threats. They also started out in a position where losing a teammate early, especially one who had power, could hamstring the effort significantly. I anticipated from Day 1 that the bussing was counterproductive, which turned out to be the case even though they managed to mislynch the strongest Town PR Day 1. The exceptionally ballsy play and good reads from Town powerroles, combined with a bit of luck with ABR's fakeclaim that could easily have gone the other way both helped the Town a lot, obviously. That said, despite some pretty mediocre dayplay decisions by the Town over the course of the first two Days, I thought that scum were not in as good a position as they perhaps thought due to some of the expected fallout from Day 1 and the fact that they pushed JS to claim so early.
And yes, Maeglin's role was supposed to be a little overpowered. But consider that the one protective role in the game could not protect him without dying (and potentially implicating him). I worded Maeglin's Miller status and the Weak Doctor conditional very carefully. Consider also the general lack of protective roles at all.
I'm currently wondering if the setup was actually Town-favored or not. I certainly was not expecting the far-and-away strongest Townrole to be lynched Day 1 after claiming, despite the handicaps of the role. I was also not expecting the Weak Doctor to play so aggressively. To complete this trifecta, I never expected a Voyeur to be so actively useful prior to massclaim(!). Perhaps lower power all around might have been better, but keeping Maeglin's role, less power might have made him more powerful, not less . . .
As for the flavor . . . I didn't realize at first that it would develop to be so peculiarly lulzy (I wasn't even sue at first that I'd be writing acanonical flavor, but that went off pretty well). But there you are.
Good game to all.
