Mini Normal 2181 | College Basketball Players | Game Over

[fferyllt]

<3 thanks!

[Prism]

"scumhunting dynamo" is bold given my atrocious town w/l record and penchant for singlehandedly leading town into 3+ miselims

[Prism]

I think you were right to fear me/peta townlocking each other though. After these two posts it was virtually guaranteed.

For peta, I'm going to risk it.

You're either deepwolfing or just town. It's going to take more time to correct me if I'm wrong on you. Carry me in the meantime. My station as an ineffectual, unpersuasive but townread voter is my dream scenario as scum. It gives me near infinite freedom, and the wrong flips in the meantime give me more credibility as the number of eliminations needed to win gets closer. Yet I desperately want to change it. I also have no interest in exploiting your meltdown last night-it's NAI at worst and town at best.

If you disagree, that's fine, you don't have to get into it.

i'm not sure i actually have a response to that. i think i'm well outside my range but there's one person in the world who knows that. we can hopefully just figure this thing out before we have to murder each other

Peta knows my position Day 1 was what I lay awake at night dreaming of as scum, and his "not sure I have a response" over a more conclusive "that's bullshit" was a big townping.

[fferyllt]

I think you were right to fear me/peta townlocking each other though. After these two posts it was virtually guaranteed.

For peta, I'm going to risk it.

You're either deepwolfing or just town. It's going to take more time to correct me if I'm wrong on you. Carry me in the meantime. My station as an ineffectual, unpersuasive but townread voter is my dream scenario as scum. It gives me near infinite freedom, and the wrong flips in the meantime give me more credibility as the number of eliminations needed to win gets closer. Yet I desperately want to change it. I also have no interest in exploiting your meltdown last night-it's NAI at worst and town at best.

If you disagree, that's fine, you don't have to get into it.

i'm not sure i actually have a response to that. i think i'm well outside my range but there's one person in the world who knows that. we can hopefully just figure this thing out before we have to murder each other

Peta knows my position Day 1 was what I lay awake at night dreaming of as scum, and his "not sure I have a response" over a more conclusive "that's bullshit" was a big townping.

You and peta townlocking each other and jointly gamesolving was an unknown with huge potential, and I was askeered!

[Cabd]

The last I'll say about this setup is that if your ONLY consideration is on-paper balance, you're failing your players because agency is just as important.

Both alignments should feel like day AND night play is a result of their choices, not something that the cosmic powers that be have inflicted upon them.

[mastina]

Both alignments should feel like day AND night play is a result of their choices, not something that the cosmic powers that be have inflicted upon them.

A setup where both alignments have this is in my opinion impossible to create.

Any town investigative that gives concrete results, for instance, instantly creates a situation where the scum feel at the mercy of the cosmic powers, where they had little in the way of choice.

And on the opposite side, any setup lacking town investigatives that give concrete results instantly creates a situation where the town have little in the way of nightplay choices, so they won't have it.

And if you give the town an investigative giving concrete results but give the scum a role dominance in stopping that, the town are instead the ones at the mercy of the cosmic powers, where they had little in the way of choice.

This is literally a "you can't have your cake and eat it, too".
You cannot give scum AND town good control over day AND night.
You can create a setup which is 2-3 of the four:
Scum control over night, scum+town control over day; town control over night, scum+town control over day; scum control over night, town control over day.

You cannot create a setup which is all four at once.
A setup that focuses on nightplay cannot also revolve around dayplay unless you count "setup speccing which roles are which alignments and what results to trust, trying to solve the puzzle" as dayplay (which I do not, that's still nightplay).

If you feel otherwise, that it IS possible:
Go ahead and try; /in to mod a Mini Normal where you design a setup that you think allows for all four. And then, when that game is over, go back and look at it and see if you accomplished the goal. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong with you having succeeded, but because I do genuinely think it's impossible to be all four at once, I would expect it to not have succeeded.)

Reviewers tend to give a lot of agency to game moderators; we try to work with the moderator's vision and try to get the setup balanced to the vision of the game moderator. In reviews, when we see a setup isn't balanced, we ask the setup designer what their vision for the setup is and try to tweak it to fit that vision while fixing the imbalance of their initial setup.

So you'd be able to get a setup through fairly quickly.

[Prism]

Add 1-shot strongman. The game is fixed. Incredible. You're welcome.

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

i love this game

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

This game had really had it all, and it's not even done yet.

Town v. Town, Town v. Scum, Town v. Mod, Town v. Elitist clique

we are now at:

Town + Scum unite V. Normal Review Group.

This game really did have it all.

[skitter30]

ig my overall feeling on setups is that even if it's balanced on paper, if a significant number of players found the setup frustrating or unenjoyable, it just failed as a setup

[skitter30]

(I feel obligated to mention: standard game balance in NRG is 3-4 moderately strong PRs against all goons, approximately. This game had 5 PRs, but most of them are notably weak: odd-night vanilla cop is almost useless, basically being just an extra PR for the sake of having an extra PR. Friendly Neighbor can conftown themselves, but only themselves. Roleblocker requires god-tiered luck to block a kill unless two scum die, and in this setup there's no way to distinguish between an rb blocking the killer, doctor protecting the kill, jk blocking the killer, and jk blocking the kill. The only two strong roles in the game are the doctor and the jailkeeper, but due to the ambiguity of what causes a kill to fail, some of their innate power is removed. Which I again would like to emphasize: this is a setup feature, not a setup flaw.)

like on paper this is technically true but it wasn't fun for the scumteam so i think it just wasn't a good setup

as town i thought we were probably overpowered but it personally didn't bother me so much
as scum i would have not been super happy to play against all the roles town had

[skitter30]

Is it specifically the combination of roleblocker + doctor + jailkeeper? Is it the vanilla cop not having any specific interactions with anything else? My current understanding is that the frustration for town is that they can never be sure why a kill didn't happen and thus their roles are semi-useless because they can never confirm anyone, and the frustration for scum is just not being able to reliably push kills through.

honestly as town i think rb + doc + jk is kinda, like, weird but i see where it was going and i don't particularly mind it as town
as scum i think they needed to have like a strongman or something because they needed to play around a ton of prs and there's a very real chance they don't get most of their kills off here. the fact that we didnt' miss a kill any night is, tbh, quite astonishing and i think if we ran this setup 100 times that wouldnt' be the most likely outcome

idk if you remember but my complaint in last year's TM normal game was p similar: it seemed like we couldn't get a clean kill off for the first like three nights iirc what we understood the setup to be, and we had to make suboptimal kills because of that, to avoid hitting all the prs/getting caught
(tbf iirc in that game scum had a misunderstanding of what the setup *actually* was, and the setup didn't *actually* suffer from that problem, but it looked to us like it did, so it ultimately felt to us like it did)

like by itself i don't find the town roles to be particularly troubling; i think that scum needed more to counteract it

[implosion]

Spoiler: Some thoughts

I think if you add a 1-shot strongman this setup becomes scumsided, because it basically makes almost all of town's power worthless on one night. At least, certainly if this setup was

balanced

then this setup with a goon replaced by a 1-shot strongman is scumsided. Maybe goon->1-shot strongman and vanilla cop->neapolitan or something like that. But that's beside the point.

I think the NRG has a kind of gut instinct to distrust players' opinions on a setup after they play it, and that this instinct isn't actually misguided in a lot of cases (e.g., empirically the popular consensus on what is a balanced setup didn't match reality for a long time, though it's entirely possible that's changed over time). But in terms of how fun a setup is, if players didn't enjoy the setup then players didn't enjoy the setup and we as designers should listen. Sure, the rules don't

obligate

reviewers to design for fun, but they should definitely try to, and if a setup is approved that every player on both sides disliked then that's a failure at some level. There's a sort of exception of games that players think aren't balanced as their primary gripe, but that actually are; this isn't that, because the issue at hand here isn't one of balance primarily IMO.

That said, there's also a difference between players enjoying/not enjoying the setup and players making mistakes around the setup. I think it's simply a mistake to assume that there can't be three goons with this set of town power roles, and then base your play off that assumption in some way, unless I'm missing something; it's probably roughly balanced, even if it's unfun. Sure, scum got lucky dodging all the protective roles and things would have been harder for them if they didn't, but the nature of the setup is that stopping a kill doesn't give town overly much info, so that's not really an argument for it not being balanced. Un-fun-ness is something that reviewers will miss sometimes, perhaps more often than balance. And so I'm not really sure what I think about the whole mod-versus-players thing.

It's probably a bit bad to give town a conftown role together with all this protective power with no counterplay actually, since it could bait scum into killing them if they claim and are protected, so maybe the friendly neighbor is a bit of the setup that's a cause of issues.

I'm mostly spitballing, it's just been a while since I've really talked with random players about normal games so it seems like a good opportunity to gather feedback fmpov.

I think I agree that scum should have

something

in this kind of setup, though I think just an informed role informed of something like "there are three town roles that are capable of stopping a nightkill" (similar to what someone else suggested) would be enough to solve the biggest issue.

[borkjerfkin]

appreciate the engagement here and you've brought up a lot of good points. The informed thing sounds interesting and I think opens up some counterplay options.

The denunciation of strongman here kind of sounds like an indictment of strongmen in general - remember that shows up as a PR to the vanilla cop and that changes a lot, imo. Early flipping strongman lends credence to the existence of a town vanilla cop too.

[borkjerfkin]

but the nature of the setup is that stopping a kill doesn't give town overly much info, so that's not really an argument for it not being balanced.

i think two town roleblocking roles is just enormously swingy too if they block well and iirc correctly is why 8matrix got replaced w/ matrix6 before it could get adopted as a newbie setup (and that one DID have a strongman).

[borkjerfkin]

granted those are semi-opens and that's probably a much different conversation.

[fferyllt]

From my point of view, it's not how this particular iteration of a setup like this went. The biggest pitfalls for both teams didn't transpire but if some of those pitfalls has been triggered the game would have swung hard in various directions.

Normal games are part of the pipeline from new members to experienced players and mods.

I don't think the final design of this game was a natural outgrowth of the design that NPOM envisaged when he came up with his initial design. It was something almost completely different. What kinds of lessons in design and balance was this supposed to teach?

I'm not sure how a design like this would have felt to a less experienced player list with a few players moving up from the newbie queue. Is the normal queue a good next step for players coming out of a newbie game?

From my perspective, things went from "Wow, how lucky we hit the roleblocker on night 1" to "Wow, half of town were PRs. We had a 50% chance of targeting a PR on night 1 but there were FOUR different ways the kill could have failed. This game could have been all but lost after night 1."

That's a totally different kind of luck, and a TOTALLY different feel to a game.

[Prism]

I'm being a bit facetious but 1-shot strongman for sure makes the setup more engaging and mechanically rewarding for both sides to play. Scum are given some a very restricted-use counter that requires careful, selective use. The vanilla cop now has something to hunt for.

For implosion, I don't really want to speculate as to balance, I neither believe the setup was actually balanced nor think it would be redeemed by virtue of being balanced. My issue was that the setup included BOTH of the conflicting PRs and the red herring Vanilla Cop/no scum power. One was fine, both was absolutely not. This is what I meant when I said that the setup was Town v. Mod-

any idea of balance relied on town making bad setup speculation. Bad setup speculation was not incidental but was central to the setup's balance and functionality.

This is nonsense, and the role of the game designer is not to "outsmart" the town. The game was balanced around misleading town, and gave scum virtually no mechanical agency. I found the conflicting PRs an interesting concept, and didn't take issue with it from a design standpoint. I was LIVID when I discovered that the vanilla cop was a herring and that scum were given no counterbalancing power.

What Cabd said about agency is important. Incidentally, scum does have one more "mechanical" option in the game: CCing a PR to compensate for their lack of power. Ironically, this is the one thing that turns the red herring vanilla cop into something useful.

Town had to deal with the setup intentionally misleading/confusing town in two different ways. Scum had to deal with having no night agency, and in fact the only remaining mechanical counterplay would have actually been punished via the setup.

[Prism]

It looks like you understand it's not just a question of balance, but it's also not just a question of "fun". The setup's design was to mislead town in two separate ways while giving scum no counterbalancing power of their own. This is not OK, and the game designers should not be putting all of their effort into making town feel stupid for even trying to utilize mechanics.

[implosion]

The denunciation of strongman here kind of sounds like an indictment of strongmen in general

This is totally valid. One bit of design philosophy that I think is pretty commonplace in the nrg is the idea that scum don't

need

counterplay to town roles for a setup to be balanced; and this is in general true (because of course a mountainous setup is scumsided, so town power is necessary to get balance) but as a result roles like strongman and ninja that exist purely to weaken specific town power are sometimes viewed as worse design options. I think the better viewpoint is to look at them as a different way of gating town power roles instead of modifiers.

From my perspective, things went from "Wow, how lucky we hit the roleblocker on night 1" to "Wow, half of town were PRs. We had a 50% chance of targeting a PR on night 1 but there were FOUR different ways the kill could have failed. This game could have been all but lost after night 1."

I think part of my point is that in this setup, missing a kill on n1 isn't necessarily a death sentence for scum, because there are going to be two town roles with false information about what stopped the kill. Maybe a roleblocker or a jailkeeper claims incorrectly and outs themself and gets a townie killed for no reason, or forces the other to claim too, and maybe both of them were wrong and it was the doctor. In a way, this actually is good design that reduces swing; because there are so many kill-stopping roles, it's pretty likely that a kill will be stopped at some point but the impact of it happening is reduced.

Swing is something I didn't really address, and basically the main thing I have to say about it is that (and I may have said this publicly before, not sure) swing is like, the single hardest thing to design around IMO. Almost every single kind of town power role adds swing. Vigs add swing over hitting or missing, investigative roles add swing over hitting or missing or hitting "false" results (like a neapolitan targeting a town power role, or a gunsmith targeting a mafia doctor), protective roles add swing over hitting or missing, blocking roles add swing over hitting or missing or hitting town. Each of those different roles' swing can compound in really ugly ways; a doctor saved a strong power role with good reads? Well, that's pretty much game winning on its own.

The paradox is that to balance a game, you have to add a certain level of town power, and you're relegated to either putting that power in just a few roles (in which case, you're increasing swing because a few roles are very powerful and if they die early it has a larger effect) or distributing it among more roles, like in this setup (in which case, you're increasing swing because there are so many different interactions and roles that could cause different things to happen).

It's not *impossible* to design around but it's very, very hard.

I don't think the final design of this game was a natural outgrowth of the design that NPOM envisaged when he came up with his initial design. It was something almost completely different. What kinds of lessons in design and balance was this supposed to teach?

I think looking at the first draft of the setup and seeing how it grew isn't that useful in this case because he sort of redesigned it fully because the first draft was just too off the mark in balance.

My issue was that the setup included BOTH of the conflicting PRs and the red herring Vanilla Cop/no scum power. One was fine, both was absolutely not.

I think taking issue with the vanilla cop in this setup/your take in general is generally defensible. It is true that it isn't really serving a particular purpose and I can see that in conjunction with the unusual power assortment being an issue. It is kind of a subtle issue in a way that I can imagine being really hard to catch in review, though; it's hard to predict at the review stage that the town will see a vanilla cop and the rest of the setup and speculate in this particular way about it, even if now after the game it seems obvious in retrospect. There is somewhat of a fine line that I think mastina was getting at in that players shouldn't be able to

assume

that, e.g., there's at least one scum PR in a game with a vanilla cop. But this was probably not the setup for that to happen given the core of blocking/protective roles.

[NoPowerOverMe]

This is nonsense, and the role of the game designer is not to "outsmart" the town.

The players will always try and outsmart the mod, so the mod has to take this into account. Misleading the town was not the point of the setup, making it a challenging game was.

[fferyllt]

This is nonsense, and the role of the game designer is not to "outsmart" the town.

The players will always try and outsmart the mod, so the mod has to take this into account. Misleading the town was not the point of the setup, making it a challenging game was.

Do you think that happened in this game?

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

My meta on NPOM was also accurate :3

[NoPowerOverMe]

I think the game was extremely challenging.

If it were up to me, I'd have given scum a power role, but I'm extremely happy with how the game turned out overall, the level of participation and the game coming down to the final day.

Maybe as I gain more experience as a mod I will be more confrontational with reviewers about balance and fun but today was not that day.

[PookyTheMagicalBear]

I think the game was extremely challenging.

If it were up to me, I'd have given scum a power role, but I'm extremely happy with how the game turned out overall, the level of participation and the game coming down to the final day.

Maybe as I gain more experience as a mod I will be more confrontational with reviewers about balance and fun but today was not that day.

you did a fine job modding dude!

it was very fun to play

The town lost on dayplay - as they should.