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Fire's FFA Alliance Discussion Thread

Fire Emblemier

The Crests are to Blame
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Hello everyone, after enjoying Wolfie's and Redfeather's Game of Thrones mafia despite its flaws, I wanted to try my hand at a similar setup, with alliances and teams. Given the amount of feedback and critique the GoT's game had, I felt it best to make a thread for those that wish to address certain attributes that need to be adjusted for the setup, as well as compiling changes that will be public towards the setup. I also wanted these critiques to be organized in one place for easy reference. I really want to hear feedback on how this type of game style can be improved. I see a lot of potential and want to make something everyone can enjoy.

Before in the Temporary Graveyard of their game I made a list of stuff I felt should be changed for my setup. I'll post it here as well: Please be advised not all of these are set in stone and may be set to change with discussion
So far my plans are for my setup is:
-Have every team be the same size.
-Everyone has the same wincon of being the last team standing or with one allied house.
-Try to keep the powers balanced so that no team has a noticeable advantage over another team. (There might be some imbalance as it may be impossible to make it 100% fair w/o the game being completely or close to vanilla.)
-No abilities hidden from teammates of the same house, if you are part of the same house you guaranteed to be able to trust one another. (Note: this will not prevent players being ******** to their teammate, but if such an event does happen if would be left up to hosts discretion on consequences of said action depending on the offense)
-Cease-fire/Grace Period will be 2 phases long for both the first day and night phase of the game.
-There will be no Lynch proofs or bullet proof roles in setup.
-Teams can not use Malicious actions on a team they betrayed the same phase.
-All house/team names will be listed as a reference for where to send a request to. (This is to have more options in case you don't have any info to make an alliance you can at least gamble on a guess on a player/house connection.)

Those are some of the rules I've thought of to supplement the setup.

To note here are things that won't be discussed in this thread:
-The flavor I'm planning to use for the FFA
-Confirming Roles that will be in the setup.
-Discussion unrelated to FFA mafia style games, of course.


To start off discussion, how do you feel lynching should be handled in a team Free For all Setup?
 
Last edited:

BarDulL

Town Vampire
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Teams that have more members subsequently have more influence over the lynch which makes it pretty unfair.

That said, the dynamic of voting in the day phase allowed us to draw connections to establish who was in each team and it also allowed us to establish probable alliances going into the night. There is a lot of strategy involved in this and it made for a much more enjoyable game than first anticipated.
 

vaanrose

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So, I think we all see the problems with teams.

Once a team is down a member, it starts a downward spiral where they just get picked off by the whole teams. Starting everybody with teams the same size makes the game "fair" right up until the very first death, and then it's right back to being a foregone conclusion. And that's not really fun for anybody.

I have a few suggestions, not all of which work together.

  • Only one team wins. No joint, allied victories. Alliances still exist, but it's now done with the knowledge that only one team can win in the end. Now it's functionally similar to Survivor, and this has a few effects on the gameplay. It encourages flipped alliances. Two teams of three that are allied together know that they'll need to turn on each other at some point. Do they continue to work together to eliminate the smaller teams, or do they ally themselves with those smaller teams to take out each other before it's one on one? Likewise, one issue I had with Wolfie's game was that none of the smaller teams wanted to ally with each other, they were all trying to join up with a larger one, hoping to get carried to victory. Now it's an actually decent strategy for smaller teams to join together into a new team to level the playing field with the larger ones. Since you'll never be able to squeeze by with a joint victory, you have to actively work toward a victory.

  • Also taking a page from Survivor, shuffling up the teams when the numbers reach a certain point. If the game starts with 16 players, once it reaches 10, the teams are jumbled up back into new, evenly distributed groups. This has a few interesting effects. Since the team you start the game with is randomly selected, your original allies aren't earned, they're given to you. Jumbling up the teams has the chance to take those given allies away and put them on a different team. Do you feel like you've sufficiently built up trust with one of your original teammates? Then you guys still have the option to ally with each other, just without the benefit of a shared victory. You put that trust to the test.

  • No formal alliances at all. It became immediately obvious to all parties that forming an alliance was a considerable risk, since the betrayal mechanic meant that that alliance offered you no true, guaranteed benefit. All it accomplished with certainty was revealing your entire team to the team you allied with. Information like that is too valuable a commodity when you're forced to reveal it to another team for nothing in return. It just results in exactly what happened: a team turning on another team night one and attempting to wipe them because they know all their players. In its current form I see no actual benefit from an official alliance.

  • Actually make alliances useful mechanically. This is the other side of that coin. There needs to be some inherent benefit to an alliance that makes the risk worth taking. There are several different ways this could work. You could make it so an official alliance has at least one phase immunity from harm before a betrayal can occur. You could make some kind of powered-up ability that's only available to players in an official alliance, which requires both parties to work together to use. I'm partial to the idea that a formal alliance functions like a kind of pledge system. Perhaps in order to make an alliance official, you have to promise to vote a certain way during the next voting period, and that vote can't be changed, even if the alliance is broken. Your vote is pledged, so even if you decide to immediately betray your alliance, they still have some control over what you do in the next phase.

  • Teams share a vote. Whether you're a one man team or a three man team, your team only has one vote to cast in the lynch. This helps to offset the game turning into a raw numbers game, and could even result in some cool plays where two members of a team both cast votes in the day knowing that only one of the votes counts. That said, I think this probably swings too far in the other direction. Numbers should still be important, they just shouldn't be the only thing that's important.

  • And my personal favorite, a fundamental change to the nightkill system. One of the issues Wolf and Red ran into was that there were several potential kills that could occur at night, and so they opted to give players far too many means of avoiding death. This led to a kind of comedy of errors were people were hesitant to kill because they all wanted to use their protection abilities instead out of paranoia. In a standard mafia game, you get one kill a night, provided there's not a vig and the mafia don't get interfered with. This keeps the game from ending too quickly and increases the odds a player will survive and get to continue playing. And so, perhaps its best if even in a free-for-all, the number of night kills are limited. One interesting mechanic I've thought might be fun to try even in a standard mafia setup is a nighttime lynch vote. The day time lynch is public, and people are culpable for who they vote for. But a nighttime lynch is anonymous, teams and alliances could work in secret to eliminate someone with nobody knowing whether they were the one to cast the deciding vote or not. This changes up the strategy quite a bit, because you might be more inclined to vote for an ally at night where you can't be seen voting, or conversely, you might decide eliminating a threat is easier at night where they can't start a train against you in response to your vote.
 

#HBC | Nabe

Beneath it all, he had H-cups all along
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At first read, my assumptions of the game were that the Lannisters had a more restrictive win condition than other Houses were likely to have, that we were one of the few if not the only to have a Night kill, and therefore that we were one of the more mafia-like Houses.

Those assumptions were based on my knowledge of the material, but it was also because it never, ever occurred to me that every House would have identical House actions (kill and protect). When I found out that we really did all have this same toolkit at our disposal, I realized that the game was likely to go a lot more quickly than I had thought, because there were 5-7 kills flying around per Night.

This also heavily devalues alliances. If I had to betray my ally in order to roleblock them or make them lose their vote next Day or something, that's relatively low-value, and I'm not going to be betraying left and right to do it. But kills are so valuable, with such a large impact on the game, that betraying at the drop of a hat becomes the best play.

I think variance in win conditions and House actions are necessary and just make sense from every perspective. A Night lynch behind closed doors is a great idea, and IMO still leaves room for at least one faction with a restrictive win condition who have the disruptive and unusual ability to kill at Night.
 
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