Good/Liked Roles and Bad/Disliked Roles?

I want to use this thread to see what people's favorite roles are and what roles that they think should be used more often (so roles you like/think are interesting).

I also am interested in hearing roles that people dislike and what roles that you think shouldn't be included in games at all (things you dislike/shouldn't be used in games).

I'll start.

BPV - Strangely enough, my favorite role is BPV or some variant of that. I enjoy the security you have knowing that you are protected from a kill. It gives you a lot of freedom to do what you want and emphasizes trying to attract mafia kills. Probably my favorite NOC role (this and vanilla lol) because you just want to go out and be considered such a town threat that the mafia needs to kill you.

JAILKEEPER - While maybe not a classic "interesting" role, I do think the mafiascum jailkeeper (a BG that hooks target) should become standard/used more. I think jailkeeper is a good balance between a BG (which has no drawbacks) and something like a mafia safeguard (unblockable kill) where there's no counterplay for either role. Jailkeeper > straight BG IMO creates better gameplay.

Bad Roles

MOLES - these roles just are not very interesting at all. i think they can be done but i don't like roles that require the host to lie. i think it's okay for their to be some ambiguity, but straight up saying "this guy is TOWN" and that being a lie is not only annoying, but unfair to the people receiving the wrong result. like you already can't trust everyone else on the playerlist and now you add the host to that list? there's better ways to strengthen the mafia i feel then by using mole roles.

FULL ROLE PM COP - this is an "uninteresting role." i think it's uninteresting because it's brainless. you get way too much information for 0 risk. if we talk about smogon mafia as everyone having a role, that means that we should have ways to disseminate all the info that a full role pm cop gets into different roles. it makes the game more interesting when the information is more spread out, which this role does not do.

FREEZERS - this role has been well meme'd but now i think it's just not very fun. it's like no contact kidnap but just a tad bit less of a pain. only talking in thread isn't much consolation because you really can't do much of anything except "welp guess I just bandwagon" so i guess unless you really enjoy posting bandwagon votes it's pretty unfun.

SILENCERS IN NOC - this one is self-explanatory i think. you are taking away a player's ability to play the actual game. that's not good. it's like freezers/no contact kidnaps. (as an aside i think it's okay in insomniac because that isn't a true NOC game i would classify that as more of a cop5 variant t b h)

So what's your guys' favorite and least favorite roles? What roles do you think should get more love and what roles do you think should never see the light of a smogon game again? Feel free to post your past role PMs here too!
 

Ampharos

tag walls, punch fascists
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
mafia announcer is just a glorified goon and nowadays is a really good way to get yourself inspected because nobody trusts announcer claims anymore

as a rule i love modified info roles but results interceptor in particular is a concept that i really like - unfortunately it only really works in games with lots of info roles but it's still cool

tracker/watcher are just solid, dependable roles that require a bit more skill to use than inspector

mayor that gains votes as other players die is something that i've used a few times before and is a good way to maintain a faction's voting power into lategame

and this isn't really me disliking a role per se, but the next person to use the term "reverse martyr" instead of "decoy" is going to get dickpunched

addendum: including an expert killer is a good way to semi-thwart village leader system without resorting to jailkeeper
 

UncleSam

Leading this village
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
I've grown to dislike inspection roles of all kinds, I think people ought to have to be clever to determine who is bad

I think that vote negate/vote switch ought to be used in place of silencer/persuade in all cases; the first two get at the point of the role but without unnecessarily limiting how others can interact with the game

Generally I like roles which require skill to perform and dislike roles which require nothing; instakill being a good example of the latter X_X

Good examples of roles which require finesse would be tracker/watcher, ninja, and village hooker
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
Good examples of roles which require finesse would be tracker/watcher, ninja, and village hooker
this is a lowkey reference to all the games sexist dbag hosts like ln gave me hooker and sam's desire to finesse me into bed
 

UncleSam

Leading this village
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
In terms of my favorite roles ever I'd say my top five would be:
1. Dark Samus from Metroid Prime 2 (Yes I'm biased)
>2 Freezers 2. Pharmacist's Assistant from Mafia Mafia 2
3. Volke from Fire Emblem 2 Mafia
4. Early Day-Ender Palpatine from Electros Mafia
5. Lex Luther the action-guesser from Everybody Votes
 

vonFiedler

I Like Chopin
is a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnus
I've always disliked kidnappers because they are multiple roles shoved into one (BG/SG/Hook/sometimes even silence/freeze) and that's just accepted as a normal next to the standard line-up of abilities that are singular. Like Kidnap game from an alternate reality where every mafia role was multi-faceted. It doesn't make sense. Not that I haven't used them, I just use them cautiously and among other multi-faceted roles.

The prevailing notion that safeguard should block BG and thus be used to get kills is fucking bullshit, especially when multiple roles already exist to secure kills (if that's even needed).

Has the idea that Persuader and Silencer should exist just to get godkills gone away? It seems like it mostly has. Good. I cut out that nonsense ages ago.

Damage boosters, healers, and anything that indicates that a game has HP, because god fucking dammit fuck HP. Revives for that matter. Any role or element that means less players die per night is bad, I learned that game 1. Even BG isn't supposed to stop kills, just dissuade kills against specific targets.


I don't like any role common enough to be worth mentioning. Good roles exist once, maybe showing up again rarely.

I guess a compromise is the rare janitor? Oh yeah and I'll never not like moles or lying to players in general. It's in the rules if the host will lie to you, so you should be a little wiser to their shit

oh yeah and "don't let the player not play the game" ok let's just eliminate hookers and kills and play vanilla mafia. Waking up to find that all your team's actions failed at a critical moment is way more devastating than having to converse in a thread. Mind you I don't really like noc silence either, but isn't that where silence comes from even?
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
Roles I Like
Palpatine (Day Ender) - you can use this to the village's advantage or you can choke and end a day too early, plus it speeds up non-unicycle games
"Janitors" - the ones who can doctor what a role appears as on a flip. I think these add a great level of complexity to mafia fakeclaimers, village information and general chaos but they have to appear sparingly, if expected the impact is minimized
Active Mayors - whether they gain votes by making/recruiting aliases or some power up, giving a mayor something more to do than just "has two votes" and being able to possibly swing a lynch lategame is pretty snazzy
Twin Guards - roles that have to work in tandem to successfully protect people. this requires good cooperation and coordination from the village but can also make the guard itself stronger as a reward
Upgraders - a role that can augment/upgrade other roles which we don't see too much but I think is a fun concept to work with - who do you choose to augment on any given night/permanently?
Standard BG/SG/Hooker/Inspector - sometimes you need the basics in a game so newbies are oriented. Not everything needs a trick to it. I personally find stock inspector a very rewarding role for the player and the leader/coordinator - you either successfully find scum or you successfully clean someone barring mole roles and millers. It may be a low skill role but it's high reward and haters can put everything they own in a box to the left tbh
Alias Creators - I had a lot of fun making my Maxes as Samus in MP2 and I think it's a good role that allows creativity

Roles I Don't Like
Freezer/those weird "all contact" Kidnaps - the latter is very uncommon but anything that renders you unable to talk about the game with people is just dumb, if the problem is inactivity is encouraged by not getting info then forcing people to be unable to be contacted just makes that even worse
Silencer in NOC - see above but this is just brain dead retarded, it sucked huge dick when it happened to me in Troll NOC cause there is NOTHING quite so helpless as being completely unable to communicate/help your team as this and it sucks so hard. if riot games needed a proper example of antifun, it's silencer in NOC
Life Orb/piercers - can you just not? it makes villages feel SO frkin helpless and useless that even when they try and protect the right targets, lolbye cause some dick bag can pierce their BG/OG. this completely negates village strategy and good play and makes them feel like no matter what they do, they won't even be outplayed - just outroled by an item. there's seriously nothing to do about them except "kill it/thief it first lel" but when you have the expert/outspeeding killers or daykillers, piercing is just retarded
Retarded Wolves - STOP PUTTING NEUTRALS INTO YOUR GAMES IF THEIR ONLY WAY TO WIN IS TO HAVE A STUPID OP ASSORTMENT OF ROLES JESUS CHRIST WATCHING SOME DICKBAG NEUT DICK OVER A TEAM WHO TRIED REALLY HARD BUT ULTIMATELY WAS OUTGUNNED SOLELY BY THE WOLF OR WATCHING THAT IDIOT WOLF NEUTER A MAFIA TEAM VIA RANDING IS SO DUMB SO DUMB SO DUMB SOOOOOO
Poorly cohesive villages - jalmont's role in Metagame having like 2 roles it could be used with wasn't "a cool mechanic" it felt bad and it felt dumb and it made no sense. Villages should be able to do whatever they need to do to try and win without sacrificing their good roles for pointless crap like that. Either give the village enough roles they can trigger a vig with something auxiliary or make the vig standard. Overloading any team with too many of one kind of role (see Walrein giving a multifaction team 3 inspectors so the team got destroyed bc no role power) or not diversifying the village's abilities is just bad game design. They should be able to make a variety of plays against the mafia, if they can't without making convoluted and backwards decisions like saccing their thief or cop to trigger their vig, you did it wrong.
"Unkillable" Lynchpins - I personally believe a lynchpin game should be balanced around and expect the lynchpin to die once the mafia find him. He should be difficult to get to via information roles/track down but once the mafia have him in their sights, yeah, he should die easily and stay dead. Then the village splits and COOL CRAP HAPPENS. Lynchpins that are impossible to kill are just antithetical to a lynchpin game imo, just make it a standard village vs mafia lol, if you're not going to let the lynchpin go down easily once it's been hunted then don't make a lynchpin game
 
oh yeah and "don't let the player not play the game" ok let's just eliminate hookers and kills and play vanilla mafia. Waking up to find that all your team's actions failed at a critical moment is way more devastating than having to converse in a thread. Mind you I don't really like noc silence either, but isn't that where silence comes from even?
that's not a fair comparison though (and vanilla mafia is fun!)

the whole point of NOCs is that you put roles on the backseat and focus on finding scum through in thread behavior/posting/whatever. like you don't "play" the game by submitting your action, that's secondary to posting in the thread and what not. people don't get subbed out for not sending an action, they get subbed for not posting which is where the bulk of a player's participation comes from. if you can't post in the thread, it defeats the whole purpose of playing a game of no outside contact

getting hooked is entirely different. you can still talk to people, try and figure out why you were hooked/who did it. you still have agency to do things in the like post a lynch vote and talk to other players. you can't do that when you're NOC silenced. if you're whole team is getting hooked there's probably too many hookers for one, but also you can still do things (like talk to your teammates, talk to other people, post lynch votes). you're still playing the game. NOC silence is the equivalent of an inactive person and that's why it's bad.

doesn't really matter where it comes from, einstein could've come up with the role and it would still be dumb
 
Watcher is my favorite "standard" mafia role because it gives you complete information that is essentially orthoganal to inspection type roles. Not only do you know everyone who targeted them but also everyone that didn't, which is much greater breadth than the tracker can give. It requires help from the rest of the game to hit full potential though.

My least favorite mafia roles all probably affect the lynch in some way. A mayor, silencer, or persuader swings votes by 1 or 2 at most, but something that gains a lot of votes or more importantly something that survives lynches disrupts a few core principles which I feel should be kept relatively sacred. Lynches are inefficient, public, and necessarily accurate for the mathematical pace of most games, they're what allow us to say that an informed town should win most of the time.

I think just about any role can be fun in the right game (eg thinking about a game where a freezer is fun seems like an interesting challenge) and the most interesting roles come tailored to the game's specific mechanics and the soup of differential equations created by roles it already has.
 
Yes, but watcher is very broken and should not be slapped around randomly, especially in an organised situation. It's highly exploitable with a village leader and much stronger than tracker in all situations. Kidnapper is dumb too but I enjoy having one as a player because it's so brainlessly strong. It's bad. Diamond is literally the worst as previous mafias have demonstrated.

Jailkeeper sorta is kidnapper but not really, it doesn't silence either. I'm a fan. Doubler is impossible to balance around but very interesting. I would like to see more roles that interact with deaths.

I love one shot JOAT roles. I think one shot pierces are good honestly (village circle disruption) but they can be too swingy.

Roles I don't see here but enjoy are ones which affect the entire game state. Like making certain roles not work or making different things happen across the board.

I love day roles but they can be hard to manage in real time. They've always added excitement and tension to an otherwise relatively limp phase.

Older kidnappers which were inconvenient and strong but could kidnap for fixed long periods of time were better.
 

askaninjask

[FLAIL ARMS]
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
The thing about watchers is that there is a VERY wide swing in how powerful such a role can be. A watcher in a large (40-50 person) standard (2v1, 1v1) mafia game can potentially clean 10+ people per night as soon as the village is organized enough to send targets to people. Definitely a role that works better in smaller games than in larger ones.
 

zorbees

Chwa for no reason!
is a Forum Moderator Alumnus
honestly a lot these "bad" roles can fit in certain games, you just have to be careful how you use them. freezer and silencer in noc are probably the only ones i am strongly against because they take away such a huge aspect of the games that they are in (Although even then, i dont think silencer is too bad in amnesiac).

some of the roles brought up (watcher, wolves, moles) are hard to assess in terms of balancing, which is why i think they are generally disliked.

watchers i think are just underestimated by many hosts, so you end up with a village that has a watcher along with a full inspector and maybe some other stuff that leads to the village organizing very efficiently.

wolves are hard to balance because, due to the small size of the faction that generally has a high killing power, killing the wolf will have a large impact on the game, particularly if the wolf dies unexpectedly early. additionally, due to the small numbers, hosts often add many abilities into a small package to try to give the wolf a good chance of winning, and this can often bleed into the scenario where the wolf is too strong.

moles are hard to balance because they are incredibly strong when successful, but it is hard to count on getting the mole inspected. moles should probably be done in a way that isn't really based on roles too much, such as mekkah's role in mafia mafia 2 having a link to the masons and could get brought into the masons by the mason-recruiter.
 
Yes, but watcher is very broken and should not be slapped around randomly, especially in an organised situation. It's highly exploitable with a village leader and much stronger than tracker in all situations.
100% agreed, Watcher is arguably stronger than Cop in many cases, and it's certainly more flexible. It doubles as BG early/mid because it discourages kills ("can we afford to have a man get discovered by watcher in order to kill this dude?") but it can also just punch through fakeclaims. It helps that I don't think I've ever seen a Ninja on Smogon

Mole roles can be incredibly swingy, so even though I think abilities like that are useful to counteract the strength of info roles I don't think straight up godfather or whatever is that good of an idea

I'm a big fan of universal backups and gravedigger roles, since they lessen swinginess of the game and are only as overpowered or underpowered as other roles in the game.
 

vonFiedler

I Like Chopin
is a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnus
Paperblade I've had ninjas in my games, and I generally see them in other games as being optional enhancements to night kills.

You want to make good wolves? The first ability they need is a Win Condition. Getting down to three people at night doesn't cut it. For instance, Eddie Guerrero from Lie, Cheat, Steal had three votes when the userbase was reduced to 5 players or less. And his kill scaled by game cycle. So by surviving long enough, he could clinch victory. Darkseid from Everybody Votes was noted for having very little power, but automatically won in any kingmaker scenario, which was appropriate to the role overall. Figure out HOW a wolf is supposed to win, and then build a kit around that. That's better than piling actions on.
 
I enjoyed it when imperfectluck was in a game without being on the player list. And then someone figured it out.

Lots of roles lose their effectiveness/fun when they have been used more than once. Announcer on its own for example is garbage, it needs a twist to it. Like Nostradamus from Viva. The NOC freeze/kidnap thing too, when I did that in a game it lasted 1 night and the guy it happened to got to announce 1 time during the day so he wouldn't be completely left out. And then he'd be immune to it for the entire rest of the game.

Von Karma was the worst invention ever, especially the exploit of it. Never again.
 
Fool (or jester if you call it that) win best win. When the town lynches you and they realize they fucked up and you just won, it's one of the most satisfying feelings ever. Just... not in a setup where the players aren't told there's a fool, that's cheap as hell.
 
I've always thought that announcer is always seen as a very obv-village role and i've always thought putting it as mafia could trip people up? maybe not anymore. i remember there was some announcer in some game that announced info about the game like how many mafia members were left, one of the mafias were ninjas, which was kinda cool i thought?

i'm surprised people find watcher more broken than tracker. i've always thought that tracker is bs/basically an inspect because if you have more than one role you're essentially screwed when tracked (even if you only have one, oftentimes you just get screwed anyways)

My hosting philosophy is that the host should be the only source of truth that a player has in the game. I don't really think that should be messed with because it creates way too much insecurity. That's not to say that it can't work or that moles don't require skill. On the contrary, a good mole has to be to do a lot of work. But I still feel like it's a little cheap - you gain trust not because your ability to create/earn it, but because of "oh the host says he's good" (which is also why I agree with US about moving away from those type of roles.

I agree a lot with Blazade about the lynch. The lynch should be *the* way for the village to kill and to advance their win condition in games. I think this has become more blurred because of the fact you have so many strong villages - in order to nerf them in some way, people have gone to messing with votes and giving the mafias a little more leeway in fighting off lynches. Finding a good balance is difficult because if you nerf the village too hard, you end up with vanilla roles and that can get icky. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I'm creating a game that I feel kinda addresses this.

Wolves are weird because it seems to me a lot of people try to balance them as an overall faction which ends up with silly things happening like a wolf going 1 v 6. I'm almost of the opinion that it should be okay that wolves shouldn't be balanced to the extent that both the village and mafia are. It shouldn't be 33/33/33 between village/mafia/wolf but more like 40/40/20 with the wolf at 20 I feel. Maybe because it's 2016 some people will feel that wolves should be balanced so they are level with the other factions but I almost feel like that it should be okay if things are harder for them then the other factions. That's kinda the point of a wolf no?
 

Yeti

dark saturday
is a Community Contributor Alumnus
Announcer swings from "obv village" to then going onto the mafia to give the mafia a better fakeclaim then becomes "obv mafia" and thus goes back onto the village in order to make a Shady Village Claim that's essentially as sus and as strong as vanilla. Then the cycle repeats.
 

Ditto

/me huggles
is a Tournament Director Alumnusis a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnus
I think the way announcer works in most games is just useless. It gives you an ability you can prove, but people mainly just use it to post annoying things or song lyrics. How's that good design?
 

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