[LoM] Aftermath

[Kaden]

Edit 2: One more thing, we totally would have rolled your asses if you hadn't caught Meer. We'd have used Kaden to play you guys against each other.

I had three different people IM me, asking if I was the Ghost. Everyone knew. It was unfortunate.

Close. I was 80% sure. I actually remember coming up with that figure XD

Damn. I knew I should have rounded up!

Eh, but if Karthas had been killed day one, not much would have happened differently. Maybe two lynches instead of one. Maybe. He's only OP late game.

It's not a matter of whether or not he's OP. It's that he breaks the game. Completely. OP is fine when it has limitations to justify it. Warwick's ability is actually a great example of this. I learned EVERYTHING about a person. Alignment, champion, power, the works. If that was just a power that someone had the town would crush every single game. It's balance is finite.

The Karthus balance is speculative. Yeah, it could do nothing on Day Two, or it could (and probably would, given the luck the town always seems to have) knock out two mafia because of random voting nonsense.

The idea of a power scaling off of the duration of the game is really interesting and I fully approve of Ashe using that as a mechanic, but the rest of the game didn't really support an ability with that kind of power. The sheer number of abilities that killed other players made "late game" completely unpredictable.

Look at Day Four. Going into it, three people had been killed. Now look at Day Five. Between the two days five people had died. That's ridiculous. If Karhus had been one of those people, it would have taken two votes to knock someone off.

The flavor is good and interesting, but it doesn't work in a game like this without being seriously toned down. He basically had three powers. 1) cast three votes on everyone, 2) stay in the game to post and vote for an extra day and 3) remove the one-lynch-per-day cap. When I found out about Doe's power I specifically asked what would happen if two majority votes were reached and his response was that he would probably random to see who died. (EDIT: Looking back at it, I think removing 3 would be the way to balance Karthus. The number of votes will still "scale" into late-game and he still has the flavor, but it doesn't break everything.)

I said this somewhere else, but I don't have a problem with the town having two information gathering roles. Warwick's is completely uncontrollable and only useful for one or two shots. It actually ended up wasting one of Mal's investigations because he went for the same person that I got with Bloodscent.

I would probably scale down the amount of information TF got, though, and that I say because of the knowledge built into this format. If he found out only the name of someone's character, I think that would be plenty of information.

I don't want this, or anything else I've said, to detract from the fact that I greatly enjoyed this iteration of mafia and I hope that Ashe does another one.