General ideas that framed the game:
I wanted to do a game with a Saulus (mafia becomes town) because I did not believe that one had been done on the site before. Saulus meant RMM, but other than that I wanted it to be fairly tame so I decided not to go too crazy with it. I also wanted to do a smaller setup since it was my first RMM and that felt easier to pull off. So I naturally fell upon 2 mafia, one traitor who can become town. Ashi became town either when Samurai Jack targets them or when they target Samurai Jack, which only happened in 1/3rd of the random simulations I did before running the setup. As it turned out, both triggers for the alignment choice happened N1 on this game.
I never intended to have a Judas (town turns mafia) role in the game, but I also needed for the possibility of multiple alignment changes to be open in the minds of the players so that when one player claimed alignment change or the potential to do so, they weren't automatically believed. Originally, I wanted the alignment change mechanic completely hidden, but Ashersky advised against that, which I think lead to more interesting discussions during the game anyway.
Some thoughts on each player/character in the order they died:
EFHW/The Scotsman
EFHW was the weak version of a restless spirit. She could vote, providing a small utility, but scum would still win if they got to the standard number of living players that they could win at without EFHW being in the game. I actually completely forgot to write wincons, but if I had remembered that I would have made them public so that everyone would be able to reference them and see that was the case. EFHW was not supposed to be a strong role. There were no strong roles because scum, at most, had 2 & 1/2 members on their team. faust also had an item for her that could make her a town roleblocker, which gkrieg also would have been able to use if Lalight stole it and gave it to him.
DatSwan/Rothschild
DatSwan's flip was the other mistake I made in addition to not writing win cons before the game started. He was actually what I should have called a "type cop" rather than a "flavor cop." As in, if he copped Lalight, he would see Lalight's items and see that he was a machine, but wouldn't get to see that he was Scaramouche. Also, if gkrieg was disguised, he would see the disguise's flavors. It was possible for him to catch scum, but only if they took scummy night actions. He could see the item thief hoarding items, or possibly the disguise-master lying about his type in a massclaim. He also could see what type of items everyone could use and possibly help someone get an item they could use with a 1-shot item redirect. In the end, it didn't matter because he died before he could do anything.
pingpongsam/the creature
PPS's role originally wasn't in the game, and faust's role was originally a straight bodyguard. But when this game had 11 players, scum was winning more than town in my simulations. So I split faust's role into two 1-shot roles, and gave IDPTG/Space an item that could make their roles nightly. Aku had a 1-shot jailkeep, and so he could have fakeclaimed this and hid among the protective people, and even tried to get IDPTG/Space to give him the 1-shot conversion item.
People doubted PPS because of the potential for multiple deaths - BUT. No one could sword-vig at the start of the game, which made multiple kills that way unlikely. Robz was not a lover at the start of the game (more on that later). And PPS role itself was unlikely to cause multiple deaths because it was 1-shot. In the end, no multi-kills happened and one night had no kill, so I don't feel like I over-did it on the multi-death roles.
Haddock/an ImaKandi
ImaKandi are a perfect flavor fit for being a tracker. That his lack of 1-shot-ness didn't fit with the others was intentional and meant to look a bit scummy so that he couldn't be as easy to trust.
gkrieg13/Aku
Aku had a lot of powers that he didn't end up using via his disguises. He had two good-aligned disguises that he could have worn in order to falsely IC himself if IDPTG/Space gave him that ability. These were a nightly motivator and a 1-shot jailkeep, both of which he never used. Between them, he would have also been able to use any item in the game except Samurai Jack's sword while disguised.
He also had a 1-shot strongman and a 1-shot ninja that he gained on N2 and N3 via evil-aligned disguises. (If I ran the setup again, I would have just given him everything N1.) Finally he had the mirror, which let him watch someone in the past, but only spirits could use it. It would have been the holy grail for town for DatSwan to item cop Aku and then swap the item to IDPTG/Space, the only other one who could have used it. In case that happened, I made the item secretly 1-shot so that town couldn't find the whole scum team with it. Secret, because I didn't want Aku to know that he could just destroy the thing and be rid of it. All the same, he used it as quickly as he could.
Finally, Aku also became a doublevoter if he passed on using disguises, and he became 1-shot deathproof for balance purposes after Robz switched alignment. So if he had survived another day, he possibly could have shut the game down.
I would have liked to see Aku use his motivator disguise or his jailkeep, either to get some towncred, screw with town, or at least motivate Lalight so that Lalight could steal town's stuff. But none of that happened.
Scum's power was very centralized in Aku, which fit the flavor of the show but did make it very hard on them when people started scumreading gkrieg.
IDPTG/Space - Tam Sung
So this role was spawned because I liked the idea of schadd's "anarchic cop" in schadd9++ but figured it would be way too strong. With an anarchic cop, the first player to say "hidey ho mary belle" in thread gets their alignment mod-confirmed. I tried to make it weaker by adding steps to the process that mafia would potentially be able to disrupt. So first Tam Sung sends out the ability, and scum could potentially jailkeep that. Then the player has to activate the ability, giving scum two chances to randomly kill the player or jail them the night they activate.
In the game, scum had a chance to Jail McMc because he claimed before he used the ability, but they didn't believe that jailing him would stop him. So that was a huge win for town in how McMc framed his ability. That, and Rob'z choice to be good instead of evil, probably decided the game for town.
faust/woolie
faust remarked that he had an incredibly boring role, and, well, he did. It was a little more fun before I split it into two different roles to buff town.
McMcsalot/Da Samurai
McMcsalot was my take on a sidekick role. If Samurai Jack died, McMc was meant to take up SJ's sword (literally) and become a samurai himself. So he would have been able to vig people with the sword. He also had the option to give the sword to Galzria and let him use it, becoming a Jack-enabler. But Galzria defied all odds by claiming the main character D1 then surviving through the whole game, and neither of those things ended up happening.
Lalight/Scaramouche
The item thief who kept targeting townies who didn't have items. All of town's items could have either buffed gkrieg, buffed Lalight (Hydrad's mechanical armor), or buffed Robz if Robz chose evil (more on that in a minute).
If I reran the setup, I would done somethign like give Lalight a watcher fakeclaim and make him an actual watcher in addition to an item thief. That would have made his fakeclaim potential a lot stronger. Sorry Lalight!
Hydrad / X-49
I dreamed up Hydrad's role based on ashersky's fakeclaim in Breaking Bad mafia, where he (as scum) claimed he was a miller that no matter what way you investigated him, it would return as scum. In my head, Hydrad's role was negative utility for town because he made the tracker and the IC-giver more faulty. But Hydrad claimed it and was instantly townread and that was that.
I never considered creating a way for Hydrad's character to become mafia, but damn, you guy's made me wish I had by talking about it to no end! The simplest thing would have been for Hydrad to automatically become mafia in the event of Ashi becoming town (in lieu of Aku gaining a deathproof). Anything else would have been inherently too swingy and hard to control.
Galzria / SJ
Samurai Jack's role was also based on a fake claim, actually my own fake claim in Breaking Bad mafia. In that game, I fakeclaimed that I could create a neighborhood and then commute both myself and the people in the neighborhood. In the show, Jack has a badass motorcycle, and I really liked the flavor idea of Jack being able to ride off with whomever he neighborized and protect them both from a kill.
His motorcycle was one shot, and he used it on the one night that scum targeted him for the kill. That opened the door for him to lie as town and claim he could commute endlessly, and scum believed him enough that they never got the Robz/Galz double kill.
Ashi / Robz
Hey, this is the role I built this setup around! I'll say a few things.
First of all, ASHI WAS A SAMURAI! But Robz never claimed this, lololol. If Robz had chosen evil, Lalight would have been able to give Robz Samurai Jack's sword and mafia could have started getting double kills that way.
Ashi starts the game as a traitor and a killsmith, with two attempts to guess a mafia teammate and get recruited with a correct guess. The killsmith was designed to help Ashi find scum and get recruited, but what I didn't want to happen was for Robz to collect a bunch of results as scum, then convert to town and share them. That was why I tried to make it fairly quick and easy for Ashi to find their partners and become mafia (which would have eliminated the alignment swap possibility from the game).
Scum converting to town is a big swing for town, so I balanced it by giving Aku a deathproof (if it happened after Aku's lynch, Scaramouche would have gotten to double-kill the next night), and making Ashi change from a powerful role (killsmith) to a negative-utility role (lover).
The goal was to make it such that Ashi's decision between good and evil would benefit the faction that Ashi chose is they were townread, and benefit the opposing faction if they were scumread. I believe that worked out. If Robz chose good, then got lynched or killed, all it would have accomplished would have been buffing Aku. But he survived, so in the end that helped town.
Robz was not pleased about how he lost his killsmith. But it did say explicitly in the setup "alignment changes may have consequences unknown to the players who cause them" and so Robz was thoroughly warned, if only he had looked in the right place.
Final Thoughts
I do think that running this setup with 12 players vs. 11 was the right call. With one less townperson, scum really had the edge. But I also wish that I had given gkrieg/Lalight a little more from the beginning of the game. So I would say the setup was slightly townsided, but also town did play well and things went well for them. So I wouldn't say that town didn't deserve to win.
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Topic: RMM49: Samurai Jack Mafia (Game over - Town Won!) (Read 130225 times)