I think I speak for a lot of people that don't really enjoy the "everyone follows the village leader" aspect that most OC town vs mafia games lead to. I'm not a huge fan of town vs mafia format because most hosts do not do enough to discourage that type of gameplay.
To me, the interesting thing about town vs mafia, particularly as town, is the uncertainty in every decision you make. I don't want to just blindly follow someone else, I want to talk to people and try to figure things out myself. I think one thing that happens too often, is that its often very trivial to have people be cleaned, and even if the mafia can kill some of the cleaned villagers, they will just clean more people. This is obviously also frustrating as mafia because, unless you have a particularly good start to the game in terms of moling, it can almost feel like you're just going through the motions, just hoping that one of your players can sneak into an endgame situation where all of the village's information roles are dead and the last few players alive just hope they can figure out who the last mafia is.
This is often further enhanced by having aliases: the initial village leader cannot simply be killed, you must also find their alias, plus if they are protected by some sort of bodyguard, you have to find a way to get around that. I feel like too many hosts tend to make this an arms race with things such as unblockable kills or the mafia having a very strong amount of information gains, which in my opinion tends to lead to more a frustrating experience.
Additionally, I feel like everyone hates recruiting abilities, but recruiting abilities are a huge hinderance to the village leader system, as you do not want to concentrate all of your information into one source if that source can just be recruited off of your team. I know that in MM3, Yeti and dak were very afraid to include other villagers into their circle of information because of the fear of recruitment, but my argument is that Yeti and dak shouldn't have had that level of information in the first place.
I think a lot of the reason why towns started doing better over the years of smogon mafia is because we started removing some of the uncertainty elements because they felt unfair (also because we started giving the town better numbers buffers to make it harder for the mafias to take control of the vote), but we kept in, and often increased, the ability for town to confirm people's alliance. Look at the mafia's complaints about MM3: They killed the inspector night 1, but the village had so many backup type roles that it actually increased the information capabilities for the village. Plus, the village pretty much had a built in leader role that was very hard to distrust, who by the way, was immune to the recruit ability that is in theory supposed to destabilize leadership.
I think its very hard to make an OC town vs mafia setup that is enjoyable to play for most of the players in the game without including bastard elements. The major exception is if you make it low enough power to where its very hard for the village to get people mechanically cleaned. For example, in my game Big City Mafia 2, I didn't give the village any way to just target someone and determine their alliance. I did however, include a role that could learn if the amount of town players in their district was odd or even. This can potentially gain a lot of information the more times you use it, but since the only way for town to verify someone's alliance was to see their role PM flip upon death, it is still hard, particularly early on, for it to clear someone with 100% certainty.
I think things like this are a way for a low power village to get information. Another thing I could think of is parity cop, particularly in a 2 mafia 1 town game. The reason why I think it'd work well in a low power 3 team game is that it is harder to solve with a single flip, as one target being on a different team than a confirmed mafia does not confirm that target as town.
A thing I like to talk about in terms of game balance is that it is important for actions to have counterplay. This is why things such as unblockable kills or high priority bus drivers or whatever feel so frustrating, because you feel like you had no way to play around it. To me, it often feels like inspector/alliance checker has no counterplay nowadays. People are cleaned, they lead, and the only thing the mafia can do is try to kill the inspector along with everyone they've cleaned to destabilize leadership.
To me, town vs mafia should be about scumhunting first and foremost. I'm not saying roles should play no factor, I don't particularly enjoy vanilla NOC, but I think role management, information trading, negotiations, etc, are better suited for multifaction games.
I am working on a game currently that follows the philosophy of this post, so stay tuned for that (if I ever finish it).
I am interested to hear what you guys think about this, and what are good ideas for hosts to use to discourage the village leader system.
TLDR: village leader system sucks, town vs mafia should be about uncertainty and scumhunting, either don't have alliance checking mechanics or include more counterplay, or make it harder for town to concentrate all of their information into a small group
To me, the interesting thing about town vs mafia, particularly as town, is the uncertainty in every decision you make. I don't want to just blindly follow someone else, I want to talk to people and try to figure things out myself. I think one thing that happens too often, is that its often very trivial to have people be cleaned, and even if the mafia can kill some of the cleaned villagers, they will just clean more people. This is obviously also frustrating as mafia because, unless you have a particularly good start to the game in terms of moling, it can almost feel like you're just going through the motions, just hoping that one of your players can sneak into an endgame situation where all of the village's information roles are dead and the last few players alive just hope they can figure out who the last mafia is.
This is often further enhanced by having aliases: the initial village leader cannot simply be killed, you must also find their alias, plus if they are protected by some sort of bodyguard, you have to find a way to get around that. I feel like too many hosts tend to make this an arms race with things such as unblockable kills or the mafia having a very strong amount of information gains, which in my opinion tends to lead to more a frustrating experience.
Additionally, I feel like everyone hates recruiting abilities, but recruiting abilities are a huge hinderance to the village leader system, as you do not want to concentrate all of your information into one source if that source can just be recruited off of your team. I know that in MM3, Yeti and dak were very afraid to include other villagers into their circle of information because of the fear of recruitment, but my argument is that Yeti and dak shouldn't have had that level of information in the first place.
I think a lot of the reason why towns started doing better over the years of smogon mafia is because we started removing some of the uncertainty elements because they felt unfair (also because we started giving the town better numbers buffers to make it harder for the mafias to take control of the vote), but we kept in, and often increased, the ability for town to confirm people's alliance. Look at the mafia's complaints about MM3: They killed the inspector night 1, but the village had so many backup type roles that it actually increased the information capabilities for the village. Plus, the village pretty much had a built in leader role that was very hard to distrust, who by the way, was immune to the recruit ability that is in theory supposed to destabilize leadership.
I think its very hard to make an OC town vs mafia setup that is enjoyable to play for most of the players in the game without including bastard elements. The major exception is if you make it low enough power to where its very hard for the village to get people mechanically cleaned. For example, in my game Big City Mafia 2, I didn't give the village any way to just target someone and determine their alliance. I did however, include a role that could learn if the amount of town players in their district was odd or even. This can potentially gain a lot of information the more times you use it, but since the only way for town to verify someone's alliance was to see their role PM flip upon death, it is still hard, particularly early on, for it to clear someone with 100% certainty.
I think things like this are a way for a low power village to get information. Another thing I could think of is parity cop, particularly in a 2 mafia 1 town game. The reason why I think it'd work well in a low power 3 team game is that it is harder to solve with a single flip, as one target being on a different team than a confirmed mafia does not confirm that target as town.
A thing I like to talk about in terms of game balance is that it is important for actions to have counterplay. This is why things such as unblockable kills or high priority bus drivers or whatever feel so frustrating, because you feel like you had no way to play around it. To me, it often feels like inspector/alliance checker has no counterplay nowadays. People are cleaned, they lead, and the only thing the mafia can do is try to kill the inspector along with everyone they've cleaned to destabilize leadership.
To me, town vs mafia should be about scumhunting first and foremost. I'm not saying roles should play no factor, I don't particularly enjoy vanilla NOC, but I think role management, information trading, negotiations, etc, are better suited for multifaction games.
I am working on a game currently that follows the philosophy of this post, so stay tuned for that (if I ever finish it).
I am interested to hear what you guys think about this, and what are good ideas for hosts to use to discourage the village leader system.
TLDR: village leader system sucks, town vs mafia should be about uncertainty and scumhunting, either don't have alliance checking mechanics or include more counterplay, or make it harder for town to concentrate all of their information into a small group
