Touhou Mafia: Extreme Shrine Makeover Edition

Kiradawea

And with that the Touhou mafia game is over. I want to thank everyone who participated, and I want to especially extend my thanks to Krackenor who went above and beyond the call of mafia-ing with excellently written Bunbunmaru articles. I also wish to thank Lehki for making good use of a completely new role.

There are a few things I've taken away from this game. The first is that stumping and large games do not work together as well as I had hoped. For larger games, a medium seems better since it allows for role-reveals, but still allows for continued participation within the game. Stumping also seems to have worked against the intention. The idea was that with stumping you would still be able to participate in the game, which would make the length more bearable. Unfortunately, very few made use of the stumping rule. And if people shut up after a stump, I might as well not use stumping at all.

Second, and this one is far more important. Rage-quitting like Tamashi did is completely unacceptable. I'll be putting my foot down hard on this and future such events. For now, Tamashi's banned from any future games I host.

Third. I still think that letting one of the mafia groups convert to the other mafia group if the head was lynched with only one convert was a good idea, I'm not quite sure I should've executed it as I did. The game was large, but I expected there to be two kills starting from night 2, along with vigilante eliminations. By allowing Luce to join up with Tremula's team, I removed that source of night kills, which made the game drag on way longer than intended. It still did allow Luce to be on a proper team, but I should probably have put a bit of a delay on it, or used some other mechanic for the conversion.

Fourth. I feel I should've dictated the spread of roles a bit better. I should've guided the Arsonist and Inventor and given them to more experienced players, considering the high inherent difficulty of those roles. It was... honestly a bit disappointing to not see inventor powers being handed out and the only sale was just there to recharge the coroner power.

Fifth. Seriously. Krackenor is awesome. He made great use of the bunbunmaru news skill. Personally, that's a skill I also found a whole lot of fun to experience as a DM. I will probably be making use of the newsreporter and genius skills in the future.

Finally, some parting trivia.

The Pollux/Ratatoskr was originally a rivalry between Ran and Mamizou. I also considered to make it between Iezuah and Mumumu from the Last Comer. But after the Monster's mafia, I had to reuse Pollux and Ratatoskr again.

Since this was a cult mafia, a typical investigator wouldn't make much sense. So I combined the cop and vigilante into one role. All but one night-kill immune individual would have been safe lynches for town, and even then Mokou was recruitable.

I made this a cult mafia because I wanted to experiment with the "build your scum dream-team" idea that I've heard bandied about. But with two different mafias I couldn't make everyone recruitable either, as that would cause issues if one person is recruited by both teams on the same night. Hence split recruitment lists.

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Finally, I want to once more thank you all for playing. I hope you all had fun with me, despite the size of the game. Big games are fun to make, but I understand that they can be exhausting to play. If you have any questions about the game, now's the time to ask em.

Vivet

Having played a number of cult games, I think I liked the way they were handled here best. Godfathers had some special edges, but also had to work around each other/unseen town lines, and probably would have had a harder time if so many role names weren't revealed early.

Lehki

I had a lot of fun with genius role to, it was fun trying to brainstorm up the perfect questions to ask, think I did pretty well on that front. At the start I was actually more excited about commuter because I was honestly worried I'd get picked as an early target because I'm refusal to die in the pokemafia. Then I didn't even commute till night 5 haha.

Breandryn

Krackenor's articles were great.

I'm not sure how I could have played my role better. We had no verifiable allies for me to give stuff to do I spent a lot of the game feeling like I wasn't doing as much as I could, but unsure how I could do more safely. Sorry town, I messed things up for us.

Never played a game with stumping or duels before. I'm used to studying votes in vanilla games so I know I did pretty poorly. Sorry again, but thank you for letting me play!

Tremula

I really wish I'd waited on some of the conversions and played my innocence a lot... better, honestly. Innocence obviously, but mostly tying to pin down conversion targets and keep them safe to protect myself from suspicion and pick heavy powers. Luce was luck on our part, but Krackenor and a doctor seemed great jobs. I'd really like more experience as head mafia, so I'll be playing more.

As to stumping silence, I didn't think I could speak well enough to not accidentally implicate Krackenor and Luce, who did spectacularly. Many props!

Lavinya

recruiting Krackenor was in itself a huge boon to the mafia I think. What a powerful townie role to have in the hands of the scum! I trusted him too, damnit. 

I feel bad that I legit started to lose excitement as the game dragged on. I had no idea if my hunches were right or way off and I did forget to send in my night action twice which sure didn't help the town. Very sorry about that. I admit I found it a bit frustrating as town to have no information (and also knowing nothing about the flavour) BUT that being said I really did enjoy the game. I just learned I really don't like stumping!

Lerad

Sidd's role was the best.

Lehki

He was the strongest AND the smartest.

Krackenor

I had a lot of fun writing the articles, and it was sheer luck that the ONE card battle I engaged in gave Tremula the information needed to recruit me (Sylandra was right all along about how risky those spellcards were). There was a lot of crazy luck in this game, a lot of it bad for mafia, and most of it caused by the hug monster. 

Seriously @Yarith! You have no idea how many times we desperately tried to get a kill and THERE YOU WERE.

Deichtine

Ohh if your starting up a new one I wouldnt mind jumping on one, it seemed fun.

Kiradawea

This game well and truly drained me. It'll be a long, long time until I host another game here. Not to worry though. There's a long list of others willing to run a game.

Sylandra

I loved my role and was frankly disappointed that I didn't get converted. I had the best arsenal of anti-town powers at my fingertips.

@Krackenor straight up bamboozled me. Props, man.

Tremula

@Veyils if you see me, @Sylandra, or @Kiradawea go crazy and try to host another long game, that'd be the time. These marathon 100+ page ones tend to be the craziest, but as Kira said, it takes a lot out of you to run one. With her spellcards and my pokemon, I don't know how Sylandra's eventually going to top us. Definitely keep playing, though, people love to see familiar faces!

Sylandra

I don't think my games are that long! Longest one was Shakespeare, and that was because of jailer shenanigans. I prefer intensity over slow burn. The more lynches and the more deaths, the better. Muaha.

Ushaara

Was definitely a harder mafia game than other ones on this forum with how little information we were getting and while it did drag on a bit, as you said if the cults hadn't merged so early, we might have seen more  deaths and flips.

Thanks for hosting.

Luce

I like to think I wasn't doing too badly playing town before Synkarin happened, but things went on  so long I don't rightly recall much of the middle of the match.

Niradnic

Ushaara said:

Should have listened to Cyndarin too. Off the traitor third parties early! Rawr!

Sylandra said:

Ps Celina was right, leaving third party around is just waiting for late game betrayals.

NO ONE EVER BELIEVES CYNDARIN. SHE'S JUST A GRIEFER. NOOOOO.

But for real, what a tough role. I felt my arguments were pretty solid, and Ileein's arguments (IMHO) were pretty non substantive. I got kind of frustrated towards the end. Luce railing against my third party argument with non arguments threw up every red flag in the book, I wanted to RL throw shoes at all of you for it.

Unfortunately, once it was made clear that Rat god was in the game, a large number of people locked in on that and I couldn't pry them off that. I think the rat god role had sooooo much baggage from Vivet destroying everyone with her god mode powers in the previous game, once it was out that Rat-god was in the game, people became too paranoid against me to be successful.

I'm not sure if early aggression was the right call or not, but I just knew that the baggage from rat god in the previous game would make it impossible be aggressive in any way against Ileein once it came out. He would become de facto unkillable because they town would want him around to kill rat god. In Pollux vs rat god, the town would choose Pollux, and I wanted to avoid that.

It was fun though, I spent a lot of time putting my arguments together. It was a real thought exercise. 

Kill third parties. I told you so jerks.

Sylandra

Yeah, I think if it had been Touhou roles instead of old mafia roles, it'd be way easier to get by. Your arguments were solid, tbf, and not listening to you cost town everything they loved. ;_;