Opening Setting
Before I dive into my discussion for today, I want to first put forth the setting, give some definitions to help clarify the story, and potentially talk about the parties involved.
Setting: I was running a game I had designed over the course of 9 months. During this time, I had also hyped up the game to a high level of excitement. People were asking for me to save a spot for them in this game. Signups for the game were filled within a day or two; this was unheard of for 36 player game. Anyways, I was running a mafia game with the biggest number of players the forum had seen for a game. The theme was personal to you if you were mafia regular, which made a lot of players want to show off their stuff.
Mafia is a social deduction game where players lynch and kill each other to meet their win conditions. Town tries to lynch or kill all the scum and still have one of them remaining alive. Mafia tries to lynch or kill x number of players to reach parity. SK or serial killer needs to kill everyone and be the last one standing. Scum in this instance refers to both SK and Mafia. The forum that this game was running used QTs (Quicktopic discussion boards) to receive your role and to talk with other players if you were allowed to do so outside of the game thread.
The theme was based around the idea that pretty much every mafia player regular would be made into a role. I would be taking my subjective knowledge of what I know about each player and trying to design a balanced game based off of the roles I made from them.
Difficulties of Alignment Changes
So in this mafia game, there was a role that would keep changing alignment. That role could never win, but the role would always pass to a new player each phase. Was the role itself fun? That part was controversial as I soon found out.
The problem with alignment changing is that a town person cannot grow to be comfortable in a state where there’s always a chance that someone could betray them. In a regular mafia game where there are no chances to change alignment, players can grow to be comfortable around other people. They develop some level of trust, where yes they still are betrayed some of the time, but the difference is that from day to day players alignments will remain the same. In this game, that was not true. Any player could result in having to counterintuitively play against or play differently to the progress that they had made so far in this game, by just one role’s actions.
So what does it take have alignment changes be successful? Well, sadly I don’t have all the answers to that question. But I can share some observations. These observations are taken from a single forum culture, so keep that in mind if you are applying or researching this elsewhere.
- Have alignment changes early – the players shouldn’t be too invested yet.
- The alignment change should not be an unknown element in the game.
- The best alignment change is one that the players have control over to a degree. If the alignment change is their decision, then it is all the better. This not to say that the other players will be happy with this player; but if it was their choice, it is still a progress, not a backtrack.
- Rerolls are not the same as early alignment changes. (I might do a different segment on this later on.)
- If you want to have a player change alignment mid game, establish that mindset/mentality from the start. Preferably next to or located near, where you talk about this person’s goal for the game.
Anyways, I hope you like this segment. I’m deciding to try something new by typing these, which might be something useful to share with others in the field. I’m not sure if I’ll stick to this format of providing a setting at the start. But yeah, we will see.
