[pr;;y (Canceled)

Discussion in 'Review' started by jahildebra, Jul 11, 2014.

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  1. jahildebra

    jahildebra Starman Jr.

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    Yes, you read that right.
    Yes, that is a typo.
    Yes, it is on purpose.

    (This is a non-peak theme. Just throwing that out there before you start reading and immediately judging what are probably poor design decisions on my part.)

    Note: The flavour of this theme will be generalized if the mechanics behind it find overall approval.

    Code (Rev 1):
    pastebin.com/tpB5Zcxw

    Summary:
    This is the Typo theme! (Also known as [pr;;y!) I made this theme after Ninja Kirby made a horrible typo during a game of mafia, misspelling "Prolly" as "[pr;;y". After jokes upon jokes upon jokes from spectators to the catastrophe, I joked about making a theme out of the situation. This led to a long conversation with Ninja Kirby, which led to good ideas, which led to this abomination of a theme. I hope you like it. c;

    "Can you survive the typo epidemic? The tribe of Innocent Words is being invaded by Ninja Kirby's clumsy fingers! Not all hope is lost, though, as all members of the typo tribe are born with the innate ability to distract other people at night! Can the Innocent Words coordinate their distracting efforts in time, or is it too late to save the world from terrible spelling? Theme by jahildebra; PM with any comments, suggestions, or concerns."

    Roles Summary:
    This theme is very simple, but revolves around one central, interesting idea. (Similar to Space Invaders.) There are two sides and three roles:

    Innocent Words (Village)
    Prolly (Villager/Distractor) -
    "Prolly" is an abbreviation of "Probably." This lovely little word enjoys being spelt properly, and is born with the innate ability to distract people. The Prolly role only has two charges on the distract, however, and cannot distract the first night. (This is so the mafia can make one conversion before the villagers start distracting.) The goal of the Prolly role is to coordinate their distracts to hold off the mafia, and find out who Ninja Kirby (Head Mafioso) is through the process of elimination.

    Clumsy Oafs (Mafia)
    Ninja Kirby (Mafia Boss/Converter) -
    Ninja Kirby is a regular on the PO Mafia chatroom and has extremely clumsy fingers. In this theme, he's developed a hatred for words with proper spelling, and wants to eliminate them completely. The Ninja Kirby role accomplishes this with the convert command, allowing for one villager to be converted every other night, starting on the first night. The goal of the Ninja Kirby role is a relatively simple one: Convince the villagers to vote eachother out while converting them into horrible typos. The Ninja Kirby role is fully aware of all teammates and their roles. That is, once Ninja Kirby has converted some villagers into teammates.

    [pr;;y (Disfigured Mafioso) -
    [pr;;y is what you get when Ninja Kirby horribly mutilates a poor, unassuming Prolly. The motivation for the actions of the [pr;;y role is made interesting by the fact that they can be converted back into a properly-spelled Prolly after a thorough spellcheck. (Spellchecking = Lynching) It's because of this that a [pr;;y can have two different goals, one being to help Ninja Kirby succeed in exchange for the buffed vote of 1.5, the other being to convince the village to vote you out so you can return back to your original role. The [pr;;y role is also a psuedo-killer, because if the Prolly role attempts to distract a [pr;;y, they will die of fright upon witnessing the horrible spelling mistakes Ninja Kirby hath wrought upon their ex-ally. Because of possibly mixed motivation, the [pr;;y role is unaware of its mafia teammates to prevent immediate backstabbing.

    Spawn Summary
    The spawn is stupidly simple. Especially because this is a non-peak theme. I [pr;;y forgot to mention that before, so I apologize. Anyways, the spawn list:
    List 1 (5~12 players):
    1. Ninja Kirby (mafiaboss)
    2. Prolly (villager)
    3. Prolly (villager)
    4. Prolly (villager)
    5. Prolly (villager)
    6. Prolly (villager)
    7. Prolly (villager)
    8. Prolly (villager)
    9. Prolly (villager)
    10. Prolly (villager)
    11. Prolly (villager)
    12. Prolly (villager)

    One Ninja Kirby spawns. Up to eleven Prollys spawn. Gameplay ensues.

    Priority List:
    Okay, this one is REALLY long. I hope you're viewing this on a fast computer, because there is A LOT to see here. Spoiler'd for your safety:
    [1] Prolly (Distract)
    [2] Ninja Kirby (Convert)
    I hope that didn't crash your browser or set your computer on fire.

    Conclusion:
    Whelp, that's about it. I'm hoping that this theme is so simple that there honestly can't be much wrong with it, and I see it as being a neat idea. I feel like there are a lot of unspoken problems here, but none that I can put my tongue on, so feel free to point them out. I also hope that the flavour of this theme isn't so ridiculous that everybody laughs it off. (I'm just kidding; I already know almost everybody will.)

    Also, Roild: Joey said you would stab me. Please don't. That's mean. :c
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2014
  2. Fuzzysqurl

    Fuzzysqurl baa baa mareep I do what I want Server Owner Developer I do what I want Server Owner Developer

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    I'll take a stab at this, ignore my obvious tiredness in the reply.
    [EDIT: Didn't notice the recharge on the convert, so my review is slightly off, but my decision remains unchanged]

    How does village win in a 5P game?
    Night 1 = Convert
    Day 1 = Village voting power = 3, Mafia = 2.5. Assume no one gets lynched.
    Night 2 = Someone is bound to either be converted or dies on the distract. Lets say only one of these happens
    Day 2 = There is no day 2. The game is over because Mafia is >= 50%.

    Let's see what happens with some lynches
    Night 1 = Convert
    Day 1 = Village voting power = 3, Mafia = 2.5. Assume a villager gets lynched
    Night 2 = There is no night 2. The game is over because Mafia is >= 50%

    Night 1 = Convert
    Day 1 = Village voting power = 3, Mafia = 2.5. Assume the converted guy gets lynched
    Night 2 = Now you have a bunch of distracts running around, one clean guy. It's literally Vanilla, without a mafia kill, for the next 2 nights (or until Mafia gets lynched I suppose)
    Night ??? (Maybe 5? Maybe less) = If any one player got lynched in the preceeding votes, The game is over because Mafia is >= 50%

    There's no strategy to the game, you just rand around with your distracts and there's almost zero opportunity to gain the upperhand as a single mislynch results in a loss at such a low player count. Distracts will prevent other distracts from working, on a basis of who joins the theme first (if I have my mechanics correct). This means anyone who joins the theme at the start will have priority in distracts.

    The killing distractors is what contributed to the removal of Magikarp. Village's numbers will just bleed if someone gets converted and more than 1 person targets them. This bleeding is made worse when 3 Mafia can tie 4 villagers, moves the winning threshold up a whole player, which is very significant in a non-peak theme. Mafia is too strong too quick and there's nothing village can do against a connected force. And there's absolutely zero way you can break the connection between the Mafia with your set up. Its doomed to fail.

    The base of the theme is around a player and a silly mistake. The former is a big "no" for themes. A non-peak game should also support less than 5 players. This isn't really non-peak, it's more of a "lazy attempt to churn out a theme with only 3 roles." Simple isn't always better. Vanilla and Space Invaders have had long winded discussions on their acceptance and balance. Many themes that aimed to be simple ended up not being up to the standard for the channel because they were "too simple" preventing any tweaks in the off-target balance and ended up declined.

    This will join them Decline [1].
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2014
  3. jahildebra

    jahildebra Starman Jr.

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    Thanks for the thorough critique; the situation you pointed out is one I haven't considered. I'll go ahead and think of possible workarounds. Regarding the 5-player game, though, it doesn't look like you took into consideration that the mafia can only convert once every other night, not every night. Then again, we're both tired at the time of writing this so I'll leave it up to the sober, well-rested QCs to decide on that situation. c:

    Though, regarding what you said about the theme being based entirely on random guessing, that /is/ almost exactly what Space Invaders is. In fact, Space Invaders doesn't even use the distract command, so without an inspector or even a PL role there, it isn't even possible to deduce who's what. Doesn't mean it isn't played and it isn't fun, however, so I can see why there's a bit of debate there. I might want to reconsider the non-peak classification of the theme, because Space Invaders seems to be the most playable around peak hours.

    And, regarding what you said about the flavour of the theme: Yeah, it's definitely laughable. If the concept of the mechanics behind the flavour draw up enough attention I'll turn it into a more generic "Typo" theme with a Clumsy Typist in place of Ninja Kirby and something more generic in place of Prolly and [pr;;y. ("Word" and "@otrd", maybe.)

    Thanks again for the thorough critique; it helps to have someone point out the flaws in something that I've overlooked, even if they're otherwise glaringly obvious. ;3

    If anybody else wants to try to take this theme seriously and drop in some critique, I'm happy to welcome it.
     
  4. IceKirby

    IceKirby A.K.A. RiceKirby

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    Saying SI is entirely guessing is highly debatable.
    There are ways to actually to actually make reasonable deductions on SI, but let's suppose this was not possible in any way. Even in that case, what makes SI is the resource management aspect of the theme. Keep LC safe or keep yourself safe? Save protections or use them quickly? There are lots of ways of playing which can lead to lots of different situations. Can you say this theme has something like this?

    A question I have is: If I am a Prolly, why would I even bother using my distract? Since I can't use it N1, if Ninja converts someone N1 he won't be able to use it N2, so no point in using distract unless I want to accidentally get killed by the typo. That means the only opportunity to actually make a good use of that is N3, but even if you actually distract the Mafia Boss, you cannot be sure if you got him or if you distracted an innocent while someone else distracted the Boss.

    On a side note, initialrecharge: 1 is the same as no recharge at all.
     
  5. jahildebra

    jahildebra Starman Jr.

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    Good point. It would be a good idea to reconsider the initialrecharge on my part, especially if the theme is reconsidered for larger non-non-peak games. The point of the initialrecharge in small non-peak games is essentially to prevent the mafia from being discovered n1, as it would be easy for 3-4 villagers to deduce who the mafia is based on their distracts.

    For further motivation on distracts, it also might be a good idea to make distracts publicly announced, like in Math. (A Prolly distracted ~Player~!) This would make deductions easier for the village by helping them to see who's being distracted instead of having to rely on who people say they had been distracting. Hopefully that would remove a lot of the generated confusion like in the situation you described, as well as make it easier for the village to organize their efforts.

    On my own side note here, it might be interesting to take into consideration making the typos win with the villagers, though I'm unsure as to what effects this could have on the typos already-blurry motivations. It could lead to interesting situations in which the typist claims to be a typo to avoid being distracted, and because typos win with the villagers the village wouldn't need to lynch him until he was the only supposed typo left.

    It's almost 2 A.M. here so I'll scoot off to bed. Maybe with a few tweaks this could be an interesting and fun theme to play. A change/generalization of flavour is practically mandatory, as well.
     
  6. jahildebra

    jahildebra Starman Jr.

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    Right, so Roild is going to lock the thread. I'll put this theme back in the workshop to reconsider the underlying mechanics when I'm done adding content to Narcotics, and it'll [pr;;y resurface on some later date as a spellcheck theme, with (Hopefully) fixed mechanics. c:

    Thank you to all members of QC for being patient with my insufferably annoying personality. 'x3
     
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