Each of the roles was in some way related to the "theme" of the game, the general idea that all is not as it seems: The fictonal characters were all from shows with a high degree of mind screw, the artists were all surrealists, and the mathematicians all developed counterintuitive representations of the world.
At least some of the roles were inspired by
this mafiascum game, in particular Mao and Escher. I quite deliberately made some changes to try to avoid the worst problems that that game ran into, and it served as a base point from which to balance the roles.
The three major subgroups (fictional characters, artists, and mathematicians) were all set up with alternate win conditions to try to prevent a stale endgame, especially with the thought that some of the scum might betray their scummates for the possibility of a fictional character or mathematician victory. Then, the VT and Mao needed secondary win conditions as well, though theirs were effectively SK win conditions. They didn't seem to get much play, though, likely because everyone was too focused on trying to figure out how the game worked to worry about a non-standard win.
The New Number Two: Glyphgryph
You are the New Number Two from The Prisoner, a Fictional Character. Upon arriving, you joined up with Vector, and from there recruited Leafsnail to rule this place together. Of course, the others didn't like that so much, but once you've got the majority of the votes you should be able to take over easily enough.
You have the following abilities:
The New Number Two: As befits the ever-changing nature of Number Two, each night you will be able to Roleblock, Protect, or Inspect one rule of your choice. An inspection of a rule will reveal the rule's text. Your ability will be randomly chosen (and sent to you) at the close of each day.
Safe Claim: You know that Number Six (also from the prisoner) and Aramaki (from Ghost In The Shell) are not present in the game, and thus are safe to claim.
Falseclaim: If at any point you send me a role name and a set of abilities, I will generate a role with that name and those abilities, should you need to use it to prove your innocence to the world at large.
Friendly Fire: If your night action would target Vector, Leafsnail, or yourself, you will do nothing that night rather than carry out your action. You may override this by including "Friendly Fire On" in your night action message.
Here is your Scum Chat.
You have the following win conditions:
Democracy at its finest: If you, Vector and Leafsnail constitute the majority of the players, you may elect one of your number Supreme Leader For Life, causing all three of you to win.
Fictional Character Utopia: If the majority of living players are fictional characters, you will be able to work together to leave this place for your respective fictional universes, allowing all living fictional characters to win.
The JOAT recast as a reusable scum role. There was only a one-shot town vig in the game, but the potential for a protection was meant to make the scum concerned with vigs as a possible threat. I considered the rule investigation to be the most valuable of the abilities, followed by the roleblock. Each of the scum had two given safe claims, each of which fit into their own subgroup but one of which could be claimed as a member of a different group (here, Aramaki can also be claimed as a world leader). Friendly Fire was also provided to each of the scum to prevent issues where the scum accidentally NKed themselves because of rule three, and was responsible for the lack of a kill night two.
Lain Iwakura: Alsark
You are Lain, from Serial Experiments Lain, a fictional character. You're not sure who can be trusted here, but this group of thugs trying to seize wherever this is must be stopped, for everyone's safety.
To aid you in stopping them, you have the following abilities:
Alter Reality: Each night, you may choose one person's actions to undo, effectively roleblocking them. Their actions will never have occured.
Freeze: Once, during any point in the day, you may freeze all existing votes in place. Unvotes or revotes by players who have already voted will have no effect, but players who have not voted are still free to vote and unvote as they desire. The time of the freeze will be the time that you message me saying that you are using it.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Fictional Character Utopia: If the majority of living players are fictional characters, you will be able to work together to leave this place for your respective fictional universes, allowing all living fictional characters to win.
Lain was a townie roleblocker, with the (intended) ability to hammer someone by freezing votes on them. Neither ability was used, though, so I'm not sure how the role would have gone.
Ikari Shinji: Pandarsenic
You are Ikari Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion, a fictional character. Even in this strange new place, you know that you've got to keep trying to matter what, and that you need to protect people from those that would hurt them
To aid you you have little, other than your (currently inactive) giant robot thing. It only has five minutes of power, though, so you'll only be able to use it once:
EVA-01: At any point, you may use your giant robot to kill another player. If you act at night, it will be handled as a standard night action. If you act during the day, they will die before the next mod update. If you kill an innocent with this ability, you will lose your will to live, and effectively be removed from the game.
Berserk Mode: If you are lynched before using your EVA-01 ability, your robot will go berserk, killing the first person to vote for you that day. It won't help you, unfortunately, since you'll still be dead.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Fictional Character Utopia: If the majority of living players are fictional characters, you will be able to work together to leave this place for your respective fictional universes, allowing all living fictional characters to win.
This started off as a simple one-shot dayvig, then had the "must shoot scum or die" restriction added to prevent simply shooting day one, and finally had super saint added to prevent the player from simply holding on to the kill until their death. I have no doubt that Pandarsenic would have used it well, if the scum hadn't gotten lucky and NKed him night one.
Salvador Dali: Toonyman
You are Salvador Dali, an artist. A Spanish surrealist painter, to be precise. Although you'd rather just get on with your painting, and you're probably crazy, it seems like the best chance for being able to work in peace is to get rid of these thugs.
Fortunately, you gave up on sleep a while ago (it makes it easier to paint), and so each night you may either follow another player (finding out where they go, if anywhere) or watch a house (including your own) to discover who visits it that night.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Artists Paradise: If the majority of living players are artists, you will be able to work together to transform create a place where you can all work in peace, undisturbed by any. This will allow all living Artists to win.
Dali was a fairly generic reporter. I knew that the town needed some investigative roles, but also knew that any sort of hard cop role would significantly cut down on the bastardry. Reporter seemed like a good compromise, since they investigate without directly revealing alignment.
M.C. Escher: Nirur Torir
You are M.C. Escher, an artist. Best known for your impossible figures, it seems like this place responds to your mind, warping it toward the way that you think about things. As long as you are alive, Rule 3 will be in effect. You have no other abilities.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Artists Paradise: If the majority of living players are artists, you will be able to work together to transform create a place where you can all work in peace, undisturbed by any. This will allow all living Artists to win.
The only real "anti-town" town role, Escher's only role was to keep rule three (and thus, more than half of the estimated voting confusion) active.
Rene Magritte: Shades
You are Rene Magritte, an artist. A Belgian surrealist artist, best known for paintings showcasing odd contrasts. Just because you've landed somewhere that certainly isn't Belgum isn't going to stop you from painting, though, and your talents may just be helpful.
Each night, you may paint portraits (after a fashion) of two players other than yourself. By looking at the contrasts revealed in them, you'll be able to tell if at least one of them is one of the scum causing all of this trouble
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Artists Paradise: If the majority of living players are artists, you will be able to work together to transform create a place where you can all work in peace, undisturbed by any. This will allow all living Artists to win.
The second investagative role, I was expecting this to act as a "narrow down to a scum every three nights or so" cop role. Unfortunately, the first two nights he hit people that Dirac (below) had entangled, and with only a single detectable scum left ended up effectively clearing three people a night. I wasn't that worried about it, though, since Vector was in among the cleared people, which I knew would make things interesting once the town finished lynching the uncleared people.
Kurt Godel: Redwarrior0
You are Kurt Godel, an Austrian mathematician. With your logical bent, the first thing that you did on your arrival was begin to delve into the logic behind the voting system, and managed to link yourself into it, at least somewhat.
Whenever you post a message with an even number of words in it (not including signature), the state of Rule 4 will toggle.
Whenever you post a message with an odd number of words in it (not including signature), the state of Rule 5 will toggle.
You're far from completing your investigations, but all these meetings during the day prevent you from doing proper theorem-proving during the day. At night, armed with only a chalkboard and your brain, you may choose three rules and determine the text of one of them.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Mathematician's Retreat: If all living players are Mathematicians, you'll all agree that things are fine the way they are, and happily head back to proving theorems, since what you prove will be as true here as it was anywhere else. All living mathematicians will win.
Godel was a role that I really liked, but which ended up being used very differently from the way I expected it to be used. Rule four was just confusing (although rule 4 + rule 5 was very similar to normal rules), but Rule 5 allowed interesting things like democratic lynching (FOS everyone you suspect), and potentially gave Godel mayor-like powers. I can completely understand Redwarrior's decision to simply leave rules 4 and 5 inactive, though.
Paul Dirac: Apostolic Nihilist
You are Paul Dirac, a British Mathematician. You're responsible for much of the math underlying Quantum Mechanics, and it seems as if this place allows you rather more control with those equations than the real world did. Each night, you may entangle a player A and a player B and arrange things such that any action that would affect player A also affects player B, and vice versa.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Mathematician's Retreat: If all living players are Mathematicians, you'll all agree that things are fine the way they are, and happily head back to proving theorems, since what you prove will be as true here as it was anywhere else. All living mathematicians will win.
Entangling: It's like a bus driver, but better! Responsible for the other half of Shades's amazing investigative abilities, and potentially a very powerful role. Originally it was going to make the voting non-deterministic as well, but I decided that that would just make everything too confusing.
Pierre-Simon LaPlace: Zai
You are Pierre-Simon LaPlace, a French Mathematician. Although you died in 1827, you seem very much alive in this world, and more importantly one of your more famous thought experiments seems to actually hold here.
At any point, you may become LaPlace's Demon, a being which knows the position and velocity of every particle in the universe. From there, it should be a simple mathematical exercise to work out all of their interactions, thus revealing the entire course of events in this universe.
When you become LaPlace's Demon, you will be told all of the rules of the game, as well as the names of all roles. If you have mentioned your abilities prior to your transformation, you will recieve only all of the rules. From that point on, you will only be able to post to vote, with no other content.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: If all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the innocents) will be able to declare victory.
Mathematician's Retreat: If all living players are Mathematicians, you'll all agree that things are fine the way they are, and happily head back to proving theorems, since what you prove will be as true here as it was anywhere else. All living mathematicians will win.
LaPlace's entire point was to tempt the player with information, which I hope it ended up doing. It served as a townie counter to the entire scumteam (which basically ran on WIFOM), but carried with that with an extreme post restriction. In the end, it did about what I had hoped it would do.
Lewis Caroll: Leafsnail
You are Lewis Caroll, a mathematician. Yes, it's a bit annoying that you're primarily remembered for writing children's books, but that won't stop you from continuing to do proper mathematics all the same. Shortly after arriving, you were appraoched by Vector and GlyphGryph, who offered you the chance to join with them and rule this place, an offer which you felt you couldn't refuse. To do that, everyone else will have to submit to you, of course, but that's just a trivial detail.
You have the following abilities:
Through the Looking Glass: Sometimes, nonsense can have its uses. Any votes on you will instead be treated as Fingers of Suspicion, and any Fingers of Suspicion pointed at you will instead by treated as votes.
An Adventure in Wonderland: Each night, you may carefully place a rabbit hole outside another player's house. If they undertake any night action after you have placed it, they will instead have a fantastical journey through Wonderland, emerging slightly confused but unharmed the next morning. This will prevent them from doing whatever it is they set out to do, but will also prevent anyone from taking action on them during the night.
Safe Claim: You know that Alfred Tarski (also a mathematician) and Aristotle (An artist) are not present in the game, and thus are safe to claim.
Falseclaim: If at any point you send me a role name and a set of abilities, I will generate a role with that name and those abilities, should you need to use it to prove your innocence to the world at large.
Friendly Fire: If your night action would target Vector, GlyphGryph, or yourself, you will do nothing that night rather than carry out your action. You may override this by including "Friendly Fire On" in your night action message.
Here is your Scum Chat.
You have the following win conditions:
Democracy at its finest: If you, Vector and GlyphGryph constitute the majority of the players, you may elect one of your number Supreme Leader For Life, causing all three of you to win.
Mathematician's Retreat: If all living players are Mathematicians, you'll all agree that things are fine the way they are, and happily head back to proving theorems, since what you prove will be as true here as it was anywhere else. All living mathematicians will win.
Aristotle was, of course, both a mathematician and an artist. Lewis Caroll had the advantage of being surprisingly difficult to lynch under normal circumstances, as well as being at least somewhat shielded from having an obvscum role name. Unfortuantely, circumstances conspired against him D1, so we never really go to see how he could use his powers
Paul Erdos: LASD
You are Paul Erdos, a Hungarian Mathematician. You are the most prolific (and one of the most significant) mathematical paper-writers in history, covering a wide variety of pure and applied math topics.
What this really presents is an excellent opportunity to author more papers, since nobody here has yet written a paper with you. Each night, you may choose someone, arrive on their doorstep, and offer to author a mathematical paper with them.
If they are also a matematician, they will allow you in and, working quickly through the night, finish a paper worthy of the finest journals in time for them to go about their nightly tasks.
If they are not, you will have to begin by teaching them the basics of the night's field, and while the two of you will still produce a worthy paper by the morning, they won't have any time left, and their nightly tasks will go unfinished.
You have the following other abilities:
Safe Claim: You know that Wilhelm Ackermann and Hari Seldon are not present in the game, and thus are safe to claim.
Falseclaim: If at any point you send me a role name and a set of abilities, I will generate a role with that name and those abilities, should you need to use it to prove your innocence to the world at large.
You have the following win conditions:
Papers for Everyone: Once all living players have authored papers with you, there is nothing further to hold you here. You'll wander off to find more people to work with, victorious.
Mathematician's Retreat: If all living players are Mathematicians, you'll all agree that things are fine the way they are, and happily head back to proving theorems, since what you prove will be as true here as it was anywhere else. All living mathematicians will win.
Somewhere between SK and Survivor, I was really interested to see how LASD used his role and win conditions, and the role itself (based off of Erdos and Erdos Numbers) was funny to me, in a really nerdy way. Since it wasn't a townie role, it to got safe claims (Hari Seldon is a fictional mathematician). I also had a lot of fun coming up with titles for his nightly papers:
Night One: On the analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean parameterization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds - With Toonyman. Like Dali's art, the title makes very little sense.
Night Two: A General Framework for Non-Bayesian Multivariate Statistical Methods - With Zai. LaPlace was one of the founders of modern statistics
Night Three: An exploration of partially differentiable closed spaces - With Nirur Torir. Escher's famous impossible figures seemed to fit well with the study of topology
Night Four: The Mathematics of Determinism and Causality - With Zai, again. Zai had demonized himself at this point, so something around determinism seemed appropriate
Night Five: Some old and new problems on additive and combinatorial number theory - With himself. Erdos was particularly fond of number theory, though his interests tended to run more toward set theory and infinite series.
Night Six: Reflections on progressive optimization of evolutionarily-stable n-player imperfect information games - With Neruz. Game theory (and particularly the type of game described) fit very well with Mafia.
Night Seven: The Prince Revisited: A Mathematically-Sound Approach to World Domination - With Vector. It's Erdos + Mao, what do you expect?
Mao Zedong: Vector
You are Mao Zedong, a world leader and leader of the communist revolution in China. You may no longer be in the People's Republic, but that isn't going to stop you from leading a small, dedicated group to seize power again, and live in peace (and luxury) with your fellow revolutionaries. When you arrived, you quickly made contact with GlyphGryph, who agreed to be your number two, and from there the two of you convinced Leafsnail to join in your struggle.
To aid you in that struggle, you have a wide array of abilities to assist you:
The First Rule: As long as you are alive, Rule 1 is in effect
The People: At any point, you may disguise yourself as a role that you have requested a falseclaim for. You will appear to be the disguised role to all investigations, including your death. This does not actually affect your abilities.
An Offer I can't refuse: Once per game day, you may draft a mod update and send it to me, which I will post in place of the next mod update. This may contain any information that you desire, though it may be edited to remove profanity, attacks on other players, and the like. The contents of the false mod update will not actually change the state of the game.
From the Barrel of a Gun: Each night, you may choose one of your underlings (or yourself) to kill another player. They will accomplish this kill in addition to any other actions they would take that night. If you are killed, this ability will pass to one of your underlings.
Safe Claim: You know that Provost Zhakarov (from Alpha Centauri) and Barak Obama are not present in the game, and thus are safe to claim.
Falseclaim: If at any point you send me a role name and a set of abilities, I will generate a role with that name and those abilities, should you need to use it to prove your innocence to the world at large.
Friendly Fire: If your night action would target GlyphGryph, Leafsnail, or yourself, you will do nothing that night rather than carry out your action. You may override this by including "Friendly Fire On" in your night action message.
Here is your Scum Chat.
You have the following win conditions:
Democracy at its finest: If you, GlyphGryph, and Leafsnail constitute the majority of the players, you become Supreme Leader For Life, causing all three of you to win.
United Nations: If all living players are World Leaders, you'll give up on this pointless fighting to argue and debate about the proper direction of the world, and all declare victory for yourselves.
Mao was basically a giant flaming bucket of WIFOM, and Vector certainly used her abilities well. Rule One made all of your lives difficult, An Offer I can't refuse seemed to be responsible for the vast majority of confusion over what was going on (Shade's death, Zai's apparent death N1, Glyphgryph's apparent win, the list goes on), and The People made Mao into some kind of demon-godfather to promote suspicion even after death (and was, incidentally, the only way to get inaccurate information into the first post). I was initially concerned about putting this role in, since so much of the scum's power seemed concentrated in it, but I think I'm glad I did put it in.
Vanilla Townie: Halmie/Neruz
You are a Vanilla Townie, a standard mafia role. Everyone else is going on about bastard mods, strange rules, and amazing abilities, but you're just normal. Such is life.
You are not affected by any of the supplemental rules. Each night, you may extend your normalcy to another player, making them unaffected by supplemental rules for that night and the following day.
you have the following win conditions:
Safety for all: Just like in a normal mafia game, if all of the scum are dead, you (and all of the rest of the town) will be able to declare victory.
Standard Mafia: If all surviving players are standard mafia roles, you'll join together to go play your own game of normal mafia, without all this sillyness, somewhere else. Regardless of who wins that game, you will declare victory in this game.
And, to add to the confusion, a Vanilla Townie who is actually quite far from vanilla. The ability to ignore the supplemental rules is a powerful one, and the night ability could work to either aid town or confound scum (or vice versa).
Night PMs coming tomorrow morning, since I'm quite tired now.
Author
Topic: Rysith's Semi-Bastard Mod Mafia (Game over, LASD and Vector win!) (Read 53241 times)