真・女神転生 SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI Mafia [DAY 4]

Cure, I'm really sorry you feel like you're not enjoying the game anymore. I assume the rest of the mafia feel the same way about it, and, like I told Ninfia in private before, I can totally understand why. I'm calling this game to an early end so that I can go full disclosure here (and since you already outed yourself and 50% of what happened in the course of the game anyway).

DSP/COS - The Demon Summoning Program (DSP) and Cathedral of Shadows (COS) are mechancis that I've wanted to play around with for a long time. But they also literally meant that this game would be hard to handle and rely heavily on the RNG. The first PM I sent to Kotakia about balance literally stated that "I don't know where to start because everyone can become anything at any point". This meant that town could lose their dedicated doctor at any time (it did), or that the mafia could become very OP very quickly (it didn't).

neutrals - They were supposed to make the general game mechanics more real, enabling players to experience the role shift that is the core aspect of this game. I'll be honest and say that I created them mostly because I wrote two roles for every player and I didn't want to see them wasted; I wanted everyone, or at least half of the players to experience their two roles. After acting on a town target, nautilus received an immediate failure PM; when acting on a mafia target, her PM was delayed, as it was reliant on the target's acceptance of the PM's conditions. This established her (and chinomi) as pseudo-detective roles as well. When I first wrote them, I expected both of the neutrals to either behave like cops or not at all. This went to shit really fast.

The only reason why nautilus wasn't able to play as cop is because both herself AND chinomi acted on t3t on n0. When chinomi called T3t out, it pretty much immobilized nautilus for the rest of the game. A quirk that prevented either of them of outing their results maybe should have been established, but it wasn't, and I wouldn't retroactively add one. I wrote these roles with an expectation that wasn't fulfilled, but I don't think chi's playstyle was game-breaking or unfair -- she just wanted to win, and that's ok.

mafia - It makes me upset that you don't think the mafia's roles were good enough. You were all pretty powerful from the get-go, and if the RNG had been any nicer, you could have flipped the game on its head pretty quickly. T3t could have recruited someone; Cure could have gotten a blanket protection for all the mafia; Ninfia could land a 100% effective kill at any moment. While not as useful, the bus could mislead the town. Ninfia's demon (who was a counterpart to Rasei's secondary role, and would reveal her alignment to Rasei once both demons were in play) was shitty. But read what's in parenthesis -- for it to hurt you at all, you had to 1) get Ninfia the DSP; 2) get Rasei into the COS, which I thought she wouldn't ever even accept because her role was too fucking useful for her to risk have it changed.

Honestly, it was really small and unpredictable factors that didn't allow the mafia to win the game really fast. Blaire investigated T3t on N0, and he showed up as a demon, which is why Blaire voted on alca for two consecutive phases and made her look scummy af (and then u killed her). Ada stunned you out of a NK twice, and once out of a recruitment. Even if ada hadn't stunned you the second time, you were about to hit alca, who was bulletproof, so that wouldn't have gone through anyway. I'm afraid if the things hadn't gone so horribly wrong for the mafia, the town would be accusing me of hosting an unbalanced game towards the town. shrugs

town - if town had an early powerful build, it was only to counter the possibility of mafia turning things around as soon as N2. Honestly, ada was supposed to be a turncoat after she went into the COS, but we decided to make her miller bacuse that would make the mafia too OP. Either way, ada fucked you up badly, and she was yet another thing I had no control over, pre-game. She was literally the only role, other than chinomi, to effectively cockblock you repeatedly -- while all the other town roles were useful, they all had quirks and limitations that the mafia never initially had.

Kiyoko would only receive results every other night. Rasei, after reviving someone, would be killed by any action targeted at them (except for chinomi), Sammie couldn't repeat her actions every night. The only seriously OP roles on the town side were alca, who was multi-use bulletproof and would downgrade into 1x bulletproof after fusion, and drandahl, who could be outed as townie anytime they'd like and was a dedicated doctor on top of that. Alca was never successfully targeted. Drandahl never asked to be outed. plot would skip the next phase whenever she was killed, and, after fusion, I was hoping she would maybe use her one-shot kill and misfire (not because you'd misfire plot but I have a feeling thats just what vigs usually do). Blaire was a cop that first investigated the miller, and next investigated the semi-miller neutral.

conclusion - SO................. I've said this repeatedly but I understand the mafia's frustration, but I simply don't agree that it's because the game was inherently broken. Sure, it has flaws that I can't deny, and I messed up a couple of times, but I was hoping everyone would have fun with their roles (I especially had a lot of fun with the whole process of writing and executing mafia roles, and putting time and effort on those PMs was one of my favorite things in the game because the mafia and NPCs had the best PMs, while demons would usually only get simple ones saying "X is a DEMON!" or something). I'm sorry you guys didn't have fun and I hope you won't be angry at me for too long because of this game. Personally, I'm not very affected by these reactions because I've gone through a lot of stress the past few days and now things are starting to look a little better and I'm not willing to let this bring me down again.

So I guess what I'm saying in the end is I'm sorry for not caring so much about bringing the game to its natural conclusion?? I already predicted this would happen given what was going on in private, but I kind of hoped you'd stick around for the finale. In any case, I do hope everyone else had fun with their roles and its mechanics, at least for a while. I know I did give some good laughs, backstage. And I hope that you'll still play future games hosted by me? Well, anyway...

I don't know what's the forum current policy about failure games, but I'll contact Kiyoko about achievements for this game, if it applies. I recall that T3t achieved the You Go, Glenn Coco award on n0, after being targeted by... four? different players at once; Nautilus got the Boat and Flag achievements; chi also gets a flag I think (and a boat? if achieving a secondary win condition counts, and that's only if we're counting this as a town win). And alca another Thine Heart Be True achievement??? yea

Thanks for the game, everyone!

Thank you Lucas for the cool game; I really enjoyed my role. ): Sorry it ended this way. why did my smiley disappear

SO: HERE IS MY AWESOME PIECE OF EVIDENCE THAT ALLOWED ME TO PROVE, DEFINITIVELY, THAT TET WAS MAFIA N0:

Alright, no one vote T3t ever because he posted that vid first. I was gonna say he was MVP for this thread but that...doesn't...really...translate well...here..... . . . .

I thought the mention of the word vote vs the word kill was actually a slip on the part of Mr. Alice, so I targeted Tet just to see what would happen lol. this was also my reason for targeting blaire the next night which I regret??? I also forgot Ninfia, adawg, Rasei, Sammiya, and drandahl were all playing the game on n1, which was probably a bad idea. I could've sent a message to Tet n1 and communicated to him my role (and chinomi's) but I decided to try and knock out my win condition ASAP and instead tripped and fell onto the ground.

My hands were seriously tied for the majority of the game, because chi repeatedly outed her targets, and while they were great for me on one hand (because I could narrow down who the mafia was pretty quickly), on the other hand I ran the risk that if I made any mistakes regarding who I thought were the mafia (which I did make on n1 and which is why I got seriously jittery on the following nights), I would be blocked out of a win (x2 because my secondary win was that the mafia would win). I couldn't actually play as pro-maf or input speculation because it would either damn the mafia further than the stuns and chinomi had already damned them or if I played very obviously mafia (and stopped the lynch on Tet d2) I would've... uh, my alignment would be called into question. Or my true alignment. The pro-mafness would've seeped out from me.

For what it's worth, the reasoning as to why I claimed true neutral after I claimed was because I immediately recognized what chinomi's role was and what she was going to do with it, and I felt that mafia didn't need two neutrals swinging against them (+I couldn't waltz into thread and be all MAFIA... COME... CLAIM YOURSELVES TO ME).

I wasn't going to pursue my secondary win at all because of what was going on with people being cleared all over the place, which is why I never bothered mentioning the fact that I could still win.

I did float the idea of being ~fakedetective~ because I show up as Nyx upon investigation/death, but:

1) I was really wary of the existence of a legitimate detective in the town, and was worried of a quick CC/death
2) chinomi got to Tet first before I could defend him

I was actually blocked from winning despite acting on Ninfia n2 because she already had the DSP, which was infuriating to me and also somewhat depressing. I got a Mariah Carey video from Lucas after I did the thing instead of a u win.

thanks lucas

lmao like i didnt even read the other posts before posting so i didn't even notice anyone suggested a pause. but with things the way they are right now and? ?? my general not caring because i've already had enough bs this week????? yeah its better to just close shop

I'm sorry you didn't get your win, chi, the fact that this game had to drag for so long before you achieved it completely slipped my mind. I debated on lowering your objetive to 3 townies instead of 5 but I guess I was too late. Like Kotakia said, the neutrals were supposed to act every phase, but with only 3 mafia we were worried nautilus would win too quickly. We changed it without considering how long it would take for you to win and I'm really really sorry. In any case, I laughed a lot with how you played your role and had a lot of fun watching you aggressively meguca everyone.

Well since the game is established as over.

Kotakia wrote:3) You had a RECRUITER. They didn't have a crazy high shot at success, but you had a recruiter who was a miller who was also your bus driver. They were also a message sender which is usually a town aligned role.

I was a message sender? What I got in my role PM was that I had a % chance of a lot of things happening. I essentially was a miller with a 50/50 chance of having something good happen and a 25% chance of stunning myself. It was written that I could negotiate with a demon as my action, so if that was meant as message sending none of us really read it that way. Welp.



I'll be the first to call how unlucky those stuns were for maf. That really did lead to a lot of problems for us and that's by design. That just went well for town and was general eagle eyed good play and great luck, no reason to complain about that at all.

Most of the balance issues of the game were rooted in what seems like unexpected elements and oversights mostly named Chinomi. She immediately negated the biggest aspect of my role and just acted as a town detective that was not able to be touched by maf without sacrificing ratio. Even if that was by design, and you guys already stated it wasn't, Naut didn't have anything comparable as a maf-leaning neutral to balance it out. Which is kind of a bummer since I know it's something that wasn't intentional. I think that's the gripe I do understand, maybe Chinomi could have had a hotfix where she could have the information she received, but can't directly share it. I don't know, that's a hard mistake to make an emergency fix for after it's live, it is what it is. These things happen.

I also kind of understand the gripe on Ninfia's demon specifically screwing her over and having no other ability. That came at a time that we were already getting taken apart by Detective Chinomi (Good work Detective) and at it's basest I don't really agree with crippling disadvantages by themselves being given as balance with no advantage accompanying it. We were in a position where 2/3 mafia members had abilities that had a high chance of simply doing nothing (From what it seemed) and to me, that balanced enough possible disadvantage into things if that was the intent. Those combined kind of made a perfect storm of us feeling "What the hell is this now?".

I think other than that it was a really high powered game all around and it just ended up stacked a bit hard in town's favor because of unexpected things coming up. It ended up that town could just systematically clear each other with perfect clarity and control those they have yet to clear, there's not much anyone can do about that in the end.




Town played fantastically. I really loved the theme of the game. The Demon Summoning Program PMs were hilarious, hopefully high seraph can post some. Thanks for running it and all the work involved putting it together high seraph & Secretakia. Sorry it kinda farted out at the end there.

Here's a list of all the roles in the game:

DEMONS/TOWN:

HUMANS/MAFIA:

NPCs/NEUTRALS:

Fun facts:

• Lucina is my favorite role ever -- but it would need serious work in order to be implemented again. I could go into detail on how it worked and the limitations it had, but it was pretty much a 100% effective kill.
  
• If T3t had ever gotten any items from his negotiations, he would have been able to use them. It would have showed up in the thread. And the goggles would do nothing.
  
• Originally, Seiryu and Alice had to name their "targets" by typing in size 24 Comic Sans MS. But Kotakia made me cut the crap (sobs).
  
• The PMs that invited players into the Cathedral of Shadows or offered them the Demon Summoning Program looked different if they were issued by chinomi/nautilus or happened naturally with the RNG. Maybe in a future post I'll dig them up and put them here.
  
• Flynn was one of the most fun roles to reply to, because I wanted play around as Burroughs and started each PM with an image like this one.
  
• On the other hand, I figured demons wouldn't care about flair and so i just shouted "PLAYER is a DEMON!" at them, very demonically. Tbh Blaire and drandahl were the funniest demons to reply to because they sent playful PMs ; w;
  
• I actually drew a few charts (as usual), this time to act as guidelines on how to host the game. They were basically reminders to check for conflicting actions (i.e. one of them goes as "Is Cure being lynched for the first time? If Y, she survives, if N, she dies"). None of the scenarios I planned ahead for ever happened. None of them. Not a single one. Nada.

If you guys are curious, a semi-complete action log can be found on this link. It's semi-complete because I wasn't feeling very well the past couple of days, but most of the relevant information is there! One of its failures is not noting when Ninfia time hopped backwards to kill Blaire, for example (also I was really hoping you guys would react a little stronger to that. pouts and cries a lil)

Anyway, thanks a lot again for playing everyone!!! There's still a lot of behind-the-scenes I would like to share but I need to go to bed >--(o

I really liked my role! tbh, opening my PM and expecting a SMT character I didn't know and getting my favourite FE:A character was a beautiful wat.png.

plus!!! my role!!! is really cool!!! I wish I'd gotten a more dramatic use out of it. I also wish I hadn't shot myself in the foot! oops!

props to Ada for her incredible stun radar? like??? nice??? how did you do that.

high seraph wrote:One of its failures is not noting when Ninfia time hopped backwards to kill Blaire, for example (also I was really hoping you guys would react a little stronger to that. pouts and cries a lil)

I literally stole this from you.

My bad.

Going to make the admin call. Still awarding stats/achievements. Lucas, hit me up via PM or Skype. Not tonight. Go to bed.

We can use this thread to discuss ways to keep swingy games balanced in the future.

I'm on a train right now but I'll get to all of this later.

I'm glad you enjoyed our tiny pm convo, Lucas!(?)! If you don't mind, I'll be posting some notable tidbits from it on my journal, but the highlight was a lil line about peeing on graves or something, but I'm glad u had fun. I'll be including my death pm there too! It was pretty cool and I'M ALSO KINDA POUTY THAT MY DEATH/REMOVAL WAS LIKE....WHERE WAS THE REACTION.....did u guys not care...about me....cries....i guess i found out who my real friends are....(no one)

I was veeeery wary about receiving false investigation results, and I tried not to actively say anything about people I investigated before finishing my plan to confirm the validity of my results, but I was....retroactively?? killed?? WHICH WAS ACTUALLY REALLY COOL. And I can't believe T3t was the one to visit me like oh my god no wonder my demon thing refused because who would agree to talk with a half naked man, dANG. So even though I didn't get a chance to do the upgrade thing which would have been cool, I STILL FEEL VERY PRIVILEGED AND HONORED TO HAVE BEEN ALMOST-CONVERSED WITH BY T3T AND REMOVED FROM THE TIME LINE BY FIA. Those were really cool effect things like man I was fucked up. :9

It was a fun game with a interesting concept, Lucas!

But mafia definitely had horrible luck in this game.

Mr. Alice wrote:like oh my god no wonder my demon thing refused because who would agree to talk with a half naked man, dANG.

YOU'D BE SURPRISED.

We were trying to recruit you so hard, we wanted your Blaireisms.

LMAO @T3t I guess it's ok that u stole my thunder on the whole blaire thing since this was an all-around quiet and not very dramatic game anyway ; w ;

also since T3t asked for it, here are the different versions of the PMs!!! I wish I kept the PM titles a little more consistent over the course of the game, but I guess that's just a detail??? anyway

- Demon Summoning Program PM (Random):

ERROR: UNRECOGNIZED PROGRAM DETECTED:

- Demon Summoning Program PM (nautilus):

DO YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD THE DSP?/You've got e-mail!:

- Cathedral of Shadows (Random):

Will you step into the Cathedral of Shadows?:

- Cathedral of Shadows (chinomi):

Welcome to the Cathedral of Shadows, where demons gather...:

THErE'S NOT MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RANDOM VS CHINOMI but thats just because I literally couldn't think of anything. in the end i accepted the headcannon that chinomi is the HD Remaster of the CoS and it just worked

Also here's a sample of what Cure's PMs looked like (the jarbled part wasn't jarbled anymore towards the end bc it was a pain to actually do that):

Here's what I've found, Master...:

And I hope Cure doesn't mind me sharing something else from her role, but this is what she got once she investigated chinomi:

Here's what I've found, Master:

I

I'm gonna cry that makes me feel very happy. ; u ; I'm not sure how useful my role would have been, but I'm positive you guys could have thought of some really sinister things to do ahhh come here just

hug

shh

come on in

yes

shh

we're hugging now everyone yes

yes

also just one more thing before i go to bed for realz: i really wish i had written the role that t3t claimed to be, with kagutsuchi crazyness and the bs "erase from the timeline" thing that is totally ooc but whatever???? dang

that WOULD have been so cool omf....

t3t wth....i feel so conflicted like....i'm kinda upset you didn't actually have the role you made up....but your actual role was also a really cool concept wtf...