Toonami Mafia: Game Over

[Elieson]

Lol yea last night I ended up getting distracted by a certain thing that's been distracting me for a couple of days now.

I'm working on it now, and have locked myself in my bedroom with my phone shut off until I finish Postgame.

[Elieson]

Dun Dun Dunnnnnnnn

Postgame!

Pregame Postgame:

Helios and I obviously designed this game a long time ago, and for the record, everything was pretty set in stone for a while, so not really any last minute changes were made. The idea behind the setup was obviously, follow a Toonami theme. Helios had the idea for a Cowboy Bebop-inspired "Bounty Hunter" role, and we actually ended up building the game around this role. We wanted it to be a powerful variant of a Serial Killer, but not have the same typical wincon, so we ended up generating Bounty values for all the other (at the time, undecided [show] roles). They were probably the most difficult thing to balance, because we didn't want Bebop to necessarily townside or scumside. The intent behind the bounty values was always to have scum be pretty much a 2-kill win for him, while town would require more kills over the game.

We decided on including a 3 person scumteam for various reasons that I vaguely recall. It seemed simple enough, and a 11:3:1 setup seemed pretty generic and acceptable. BUT WHY BE LIKE THAT WHEN WE CAN THROW CAUTION TO THE WIND AND FUCK WITH EVERYBODY'S HEAD, RIGHT? We threw in another ITP (Yugioh! Survivor), and decided that with a three person scumteam, a hostile ITP and a nonhostile ITP, that things would be active and sporatic enough to keep people on their toes once claims started coming out.

Which brings me to the next phase of our game development. Show & Role Dev! First, I took a look at Toonami's old show lineups (and most of it came from memory anyway). Helios and I spent an entire day texting about what shows to include, and eventually decided to include the 14 non-Bebop shows. Using these, we organized our Bounty sets from Highest to Lowest, in ordinance with general ratings/reception results. More popular shows got a higher budger, and less got lower budgets. This helped us organize our claiming for Bebop, and is the reason why we gave mafia Fake Show claims. Boron figured this out after she subbed in on D3 and other than Snike, I think was the only one to do so.

On to role discussion. Helios and I wanted an abnormal set of roles. Intentionally. I personally thing SF relies too much on Roleclaiming and Rolefishing and Rolespec, so we ended up building lots of roles with modifiers like Loved (Watcher), Hated (Day-Vig) and Compulsive (Roleblocker). Our Cop was a Full Cop, but with Paperblade's discretion, we dropped him to Alternative Night Full Cop. We alerted the Safeguard that he was number 1 in the priority line to give him a mock Modifier, but never titled it as such because it just seemed unneccesary. The Doc role seemed like it needed a boost, what with multiple night kills existing for who knows how long, and with the inclusion of the Kidnapper/Persuader combo, we ended up giving it a Multi (Read, +1 or 2) targetting with Cooldown modifier to try to boost its effectiveness. It's early game effectiveness would be improved, but its lategame effectiveness would be hugely successful, which is why we didn't include a rule regarding mafia No-killing. Other roles were pretty basic with mild modifiers, if any. The inclusion of a Miller seemed absolutely necessary, and with a Virgin modifier, we thought that it'd make a good lategame discussion-forcing role. BECAUSE LATEGAME PROCESS OF ELIMINATION IS KINDA LAME. Self-Voyeuring Voyeur just was a gimmicky modifier more than anything else, and Insomniac Bomb was actually designed to help draw in a night kill from either source. At a loss for a final town role, we opted for a Question Asker (blame Haze having this back in what, SFMM2 or something). Obviously it needed better restrictions, but I wasn't thinking of that at the time, and I guess Helios and Paperblade weren't either, so it's OP-ness was sort of an oversight.

Town looked powerful. With mafia being a three-person team, they needed to be kinda OP as well. We had decided on a vote-altering role originally, and bumped it up to a full on vote fucking role (Mafia Kidnapper/Persuader), giving mafia control of two votes for a while. A *YLO restriction wasn't included in development, and added during the game after we realized that it was a bit too overpowered, even for mafia, with both being usable at any point. I'll get to *YLO later though. Standard Jack of All Trades (Strong/Ninja/Janitor) seemed like a solid base for a general killing role, but with the potential of being left without a team following D1 at worst case scenario, we issued a Redirect just to make things a bit more fair. The Most unique role here was the mafia Role Cop. We modified it by adding an optional Courier to it (Ala Manix AKA Courier Doc from...some game), and decided to buff it a bit more by building it with a mock Tailoring role. This would help protect mafia a little bit, but didn't seem like it'd be that powerful of a modification, since only two roles in the game could be affected by it (one being ITP!Bebop).

After that, we prepped our Survivor. We flipfloped on this one a lot. We originally wanted to make it a role boosting sort of role (ala Motivator), but couldn't quite pin it to town (fear of being too OP), or ITP (Not sure how to balance), so we ended up going with ITP survivor set, and allowing it to recover X-shots instead of boosting other roles themselves. Giving say, Bebop, two kill targets per night, seemed a bit ridiculous, and aside from the Safeguard, there were only two information based roles that could benefit from it (well, 4 really, but when I say 2 I mean 2 Role-related checks, one on each primary side). With there being only a few X-shot roles in the game (Town!Day Vig, Mafia!Jack being the biggest ones), we figured three non-duplicatable recovery shots would be fair to either side. Wanna side with town? Restore the Vig and help keep yourself from getting shot as you'd be a valuable early Vivor claim instead of just getting shot off like every other potential early claim. Midgame looking scumsided? Give mafia a reason not to kill you and aim at town instead. Added a LPV to the Survivor and a BPV to Bebop, and we were set. Wincons generated (Survive with a primary side/Acquire One Million Bucks) and it looked like a game). A reverse Vest inclusion seemed like a good idea at first, but not we switched it up just to see more or less the outcome.

Deciding shows was easy. Pick shows people would likely know. Then, pick the top 3 and set them to mafia. Pick #4 and make that the miller. The rest, town, with one around #5-7 being the Yugioh Modified Value). Yugioh's value increased by 50,000 per night. Not a necessary thing, (and it was hidden, so meh), but it would essentially be a nice surprise for Bebop should he roll a kill on the ITP. Flavor was all from Wikipedia, (which ended up all being deleted anyway), and there you have it. More popularity made sense to have larger budgets, which we hoped that Bebop would figure out.

Last up was the Fake builds. Bebop was a night killing role, so we offered him Night Vig. Afraid that something regarding Bounty collection would somehow come up (as in, the potential host meta for why specific shows were included), we offered it Rave Master. The Survivor got IGPX, but no fake Role, because a Role Recovery was easily provable as well as pretty damn town, so it was fine in our opinions. Mafia got fakeclaims of course. Fake shows (Cardcaptor Sakura, Big O and Inuyasha, as well as a few roles :PGO, Courier, Bodyguard: Bodyguard seemed general as heck, but Courier was at least provable, and PGO claims vary in use so that was an easy decision to add.

Paperblade overlooked it all, and aside from the Full cop adjustment to Alt-night, everything seemed fine. Bounty Values were a bit of a discussion, but we felt like it was balanced optimally, and Paper seemed torn either way but couldn't think of a better balancing process for Bebop's Bountys. We originally had a Day Bounty Check, but Paper had us switch that to Night. I dunno how that would've affected anything really, but it worked out for the best I think. It's a potentially useful backup checking role. Catch liars and find mafia (Look town), but also risk scum being lynched (and thus, missing out on higher budget acquisition).

10:3:1:1, with a wacky set of roles that people would hopefully not look too clearly into. Seemed like a OP versus OPer vs OPest game. Everyone would enter the game hopefully satisfied with their roles, and actually give a fuck about playing. Be honest, if you get what seems like a lame role, do you lose motivation a little bit? That was a lot of our incentive behind game development.

Last but not least, rule setup. RolePM posting was allowed in my old Shining Force 2 Mafia (and we saw how that worked out), but I wanted to see people handle claims in a game where literally, every role would look weird to see. It was complex in thought because newer players would have unique looking roles to claim, while veteran players would have to decide if their claims are legit or not, while also considering the validity of their own strange roles.

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And there you have, Toonami Mafia Pregame Postgame. Coming up; Player and Game Analysis, and then Wrap Up/Host Error Analysis. Those parts won't be pretty.

[Prims]

always bet dbz

[Zkirsche]

Elieson Postgame.