Through back and forth discussion, of course.
Yep, those are all obviousnesses to me but thanks for making sure I was aware. My goal is of course to keep it interesting and to not have it be overwhelming for me or the players at the same time. I am quite good at logic and am finding that to be very helpful with all of the role abilities+interactions.

A lot of the issues I see in games seem to be player interest and balance of roles/existence of good roles that interact well together. The setup I'm working on has a lot of minor roles that are interesting but not unbalancing to the game and interact simply but interestingly, I think. Yep, definitely interested in running it all by a veteran modder and seeing what they think, once I have it all typed.

That's not me, but I'd suggest looking not just at whether the 'power' of the role is major/minor, but what each role tells you, if anything, about the others.

As a great example, the fake coroner in this last game. Or the Town Arsonist. Imagine the role were real. Have you considered how other players will react when someone claims a role you've put in the game? Do the roles that do exist give away just the right amount of hint regarding the game that you want?

Or go back to Vitek's game and look at the Town Nexus. Does inclusion of that role screw over a player in the way that you want as part of the larger setup, or are you just being mean to Leonard for the sake of being mean to Leonard. ;)

I was listening to an interview with John Irving today and he talked about storytelling as just the right balance of revealing and holding back, such that when the reveal comes, there's still a surprise, but not so much that everyone says "that's BS." Though obviously he said it better before he went off on a long tangent about Queequeg's coffin. But thinking about it in terms of modding, there is quite a bit of similarity, even if you can't "control" a group of players the same way you can control a reader.

And you're right that a player who loses interest can muck up the whole thing. The common practice here is assigning roles by RNG, though personally I'd tend to favor a modified RNG. RW's game was a good example of RNG punching a few holes in a good design.

Though we can't all just assign the SK role to Trent every time or it becomes predictable. ;)

Yep, certainly, no doubt, that is a huge part of the balancing! It's all about how they interact/affect each other and what can be discerned, etc. It would be way harder to handle if I weren't so good at symbolic+applied logic, I think, as it became rather apparent how difficult it could be if I was unable to keep track of it all just after having a few roles ironed out.

John Irving is a great writer and a master at holding the attention of his audience, giving plenty of detail to make it rich and have us feel like we understand all of the nuances of what is going on, but not too much to bog us down with it all and make it less accessible. Definitely a good example to bring up in regards to modding.

OOooo, damnit, I'm excited, and want to tell you all the variances I've set! Don't be afraid, be excited! And let's get more people involved here so I can run the 18 player game! Okay, sure, maybe it'll be good for me to run a smaller game first, but, I feel pretty good about having a handle on it all, really.

While not wishing to discourage you, I should point out that this is how I felt before my game started as well. :P

Lol

I think the problem is that whether a game is broken (or can be broken) isn't as important as if the players perceive it ti be broken. For example in Quads game mchack's role lacking station wasn't necessarily a guarantee he was scum as yogs role did have station and other player's didn't.
But the players saw it and if they had lynched mchack they probably would have hit the rest of the scum team pretty quickly.
Even if they hadn't, it gave town a block of people they considered confirmed and that's all it takes to make it nearly impossible for scum to win.

All it takes is for the players to wrongly guess something that correctly identifies town or scum.
Another example was CSPVGs game, we all thought that scum had planned their role bids and gone for a specific selection of roles, and used that logic to pin down the scum team at the end. But it turned out it was just random dumb luck that they had all individually chosen the roles we thought they had planned as a team to choose.

The problem with that is its very difficult to see those kind of scenarios and plan for them. It's easy to see the game isn't broken when you have the whole set up, but sometimes just seeing the bits you see as a player can make it seem broken in a way that hands one side the win...

I'm not sure any of that made sense.

FWIW, keep in mind that what you perceive as interesting, engaging, and whatnot may not be perceived the same way by others.

Sounds like fun. >_>

I thought every role is created with intent of being mean to Leonard?!


It never does.


Look mom, I am nice.

Damn. I knew you were all looking at me funny...

Hey wait, someone's ripping off JoeSapphire's prohibition theme!

Well that all depends on how good at time travel he is. I'll check with him.

Start at night.
Make sure there are enough killing roles to halve the population by morning.
Mmmm, compulsive 1-shot vigs.

/in

Fixed that for you.