First, congrats to Laurel on hosting your first (big) game. It's clear you put a lot of effort into the concept and resolving actions every night to ensure you didn't make a mistake. This didn't go as expected and provided you with a lot more excitement than you thought at certain junctures, so it speaks to your format that twists and turns were possible.
I will focus my post on lessons that future big-hosting hopefuls can take from this game, and the prior two bigs. If you are really needing some seasoning for your fries, you can certainly ctrl-f the graveyard channel.
- Do not post your sign-ups if you don't have a priority system established. You need to know who wins every possible tiebreaker of a disruptive or kill, and WHY. It's one thing to arbitrarily assign priority to roles, it's another to have spent the time to craft the reasoning behind each priority. If you want to host a game that asks 30+ people to commit hours to playing it, I think you owe it to them to have a functional priority system that is intentionally for a big, high-role game. Especially if you include a lot of disruptives. The more you add, the more likely it is you get caught in a loop where you need someplace to start from. There was a loop in this game, and because all of the roles in it were slotted into the same tier (bad system with so many disruptives), there was no logical place to tiebreak from, except to midgame choose one person to act first. This is avoidable by determining ties pregame to avoid impacting any team's chances during the play.
- Do not post your sign-ups if your role PMs look like Mekkah's. Internet, I love your creativity and you are one of the most ingenuous role designers in our community, but that PM was embarrassingly low quality. I don't even think hosts should be using ChatGPT to write role PMs for them. Part of hosting is crafting an elaborate stage for people to play on, which in a big includes hand-crafting the role PMs. Laurel intended for people to be able to catch moles by comparing the wording in their PMs even without copy/paste, but with no sample role PM in the OP, nobody could know this was 'a thing.' The quality in the PMs was dicey and led to confusion between Strawhat Crew and Friends as to who was on which team. I get there was some host intent behind this, but it was bad design imo that allowed DBD to accidentally claim as the wrong team in what might've saved the Friends if they knew he was trying to claim for their team.
- If your male ego looks at neutrals in a big and thinks "I can fix them!" STOP. NO. YOU CAN'T. SHE'S GOING TO GET YOU ADDICTED TO METH.
- These neutrals in particular, in a multifaction, did not really interact with the teams at all. Nobody had enough of an incentive to kill one of them and hamper themselves by using limited KP against a neutral, so they just sat around using their abilities to help whoever gave them a good enough bj. They seem to have existed solely because the host didn't want to give every team a nightly kill, but needed more KP. zorbees having 4 votes permanently while Mekkah had 1 is a sign this game was rushed to completion and shouldn't have gone live when it did. It gave zorbees far more influence into the vote than his role needed or deserved, while Mekkah, who needed to vote people, had virtually no impact on the one thing he needed to do. Nor did he have anything to offer teams to work with him. Night Emerald's role being able to feed info to Gov under the expectation he would be able to go back to it, while actively being on EP, is one of the most embarrassing designs in my personal opinion and I would have throttled this game back to the drawing board if I was approving it and saw that. Just a terrible neutral imo.
- This one is something that has come up in all 3 games as a consistent source of frustration but I don't think people have really put it into words yet: what is the core of mafia? What is the main mechanism by which the game works, even at its most basic, irl party level? The mafia kill at night, and at day the town votes someone out. This is often the only power that the town has, is the ability to vote someone. All 3 of these big games have altered that parameter far too much. IPL had the terrible Maushold role as well as several lynch-impacting oneshots. Sam's game had the terrible Wolf role that stalled out 4 lynches. This game has numerous terrible lynch-impacting oneshots, and a softer Maushold, and a neutral with 4 votes for no reason, and the frustration of people that they felt helpless during the day to whatever bs was coming next was palpable, as it was in MM3 when Bass simply didn't die, over and over again. It is my opinion that if you have a day cycle for a vote, you simply cannot alter "the majority's" ability to vote who they please to this extent without violating "the spirit of the rules" that people thought they signed up for when they joined "a game of mafia." They expect their vote to matter because it's when they have a say, and all these roles that take away their ability to have any power (see also, Vampire Mafia) will make a village despondent, salty, and disinterested in your game. Stop trying to make lynch-seizing roles. Just stop. You're all putting too many in and people don't have fun with them.
- That quick-hammer role that killed me might be the absolute most maidenless role in all of mafia and I WILL N1 or D1 anyone who puts a role like this into their game going forward. All it does, literally, all it does, is punish people in this year of our Lord 2024 for having a life and not camping their computer at deadline. Unacceptable. This is a pathetic role, ESPECIALLY when the hammer rule was such that even hitting majority on someone would not end the day early. Never again put this garbage into your game. Roles that alter deadline and punish people for having lives are truly maidenless. I don't even give a rip about bus driver, ban this trash.
I think this game has a glaring mechanical misplay which is, in fact, the quick-hammer going onto me by Gov Core when D2 absolutely, 1000% should have been a radical lynch, probably onto a SHF Radical instead of a Core, and almost certainly onto the stacking vote or the bus driver roles. The radicals + decimated SHF core took over the vote on D3 and the other 3 cores didn't win again until like D7 or something, and even then, only because UncleScam starts absolutely choking on all the dick he's been sucking to con over half the game into working with him or thinking he'll help them win. It is therefore fitting, then, that Gov Core loses the game when their greedy action to keep someone who had an alternate wincon to their own in power into SHF disrupted the natural killing structure of this game (using the day for lynching radicals).
Finally, the thing I like most about multifactions is getting to work with a team I know I can trust. I had this for about 50 minutes, when I inherited the kill and saw the SHF sheet, and thought "oh it will be fun to work with Bass we're never on a team, and sunny and DLE, and then our newbies." And then Gov killed me. So thank you, UncleSam, for once again ruining my experience in a mafia game and taking away the only thing that gives me joy about it, because this game was inexplicably ununited and there was no team deadtalking. Everyone clap for the MVP UncleSam, everyone's favorite player if your win condition is identical to him and everyone's least favorite hindrance to your enjoyment if it isn't.
Even more embarrassing, and probably one of the most gormless plays I've ever seen in a mafia, after completely ruining the game for one team and making it so the SHF core had no fun whatsoever, UncleScam doesn't even have the balls to take out either Gov Core or Radicals with dignity. Instead he fencesits and tries to pin it on Ecat to "self-vote or vote Gcat, you kingmake" when Sam is the one who drove the game into this position, AND the one who choked away his Radical or Solo win at other times. NO you pos you don't get to pin the kingmaking on some random dude who had about 500% less agency than you in setting all this up, YOU made the decisions, YOU snaked your allies, YOU deleted an entire team's enjoyment of this game, YOU don't get to sit back and blame the final call on someone else. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic and embarrassing behavior from you. Feckless. And after your pathetic little "I'M SO UPSET WITH THIS GAME, I'M GOING TO SUB OUT, I MIGHT RETIRE, I NEVER WANT TO PLAY AGAIN" public cry for sympathy after you got your idiot team to kill me D2, no, you don't get to act sad about my death. YOU caused it, because you have mental problems. YOU chose to mole. YOU saw that nobody from SHF had stepped up yet and YOU chose to sneak into that gap in leadership with a fakeclaim.
YOU
DID
IT.
You chose all of these things and then, at the end of the game, after you've snaked the Rads and the Gov Core, YOU want to sit back and try to make someone else kingmake so THEY are responsible for one of your two wincons losing? You don't even have the sack to choose yourself? You're such a huge pussy a whale could get lost in there.
Just really revolting to see that you didn't give either of your potential allies a dignified choice and tried to fencesit and wash your hands of the decision after destroying SHF's ability to play. This game has the absolute worst conclusion of the 3 so far, because the only positive way it could've ended is with not-you winning after you dragged it out trying to shove a fencepost deep up your butthole.
You want to be the big centralized player, screw over another team, rob them of their enjoyment, and snake all your allies?
You have the balls to finish one of your allies off for the final time instead of punting to someone else.
Don't talk to me until you find your spine.
e: for those who think I sound too salty over a game, here is why. when I died sam and I were in a discord call and he blamed "the gov cores" for killing me, said he didn't want to, and it was all their decision so he could keep moling. note I WAS ALREADY DEAD, literally had died, couldn't deadtalk, there was no reason to lie.
and what do we find in the gov server?
but in dms it's "all ditto, he's weird" "gov core killed you"
just be forreal and stop lying about stuff that doesn't even MATTER. i would respect saying "i ordered the hit because you're too smart for your own good and you were catching onto me" because that's true. but all i get is lies and deflections to try and save face and pin the blame on someone else like he does with ecat. not about it. thanks.