Brief Guide to Role-Crafting

role-crafting is a channel on the main mafia.gg discord that allows people to come up with roles and learn about the game of mafia while they do so. It is a channel to theorycraft and help each other to realize the problems with their roles, and others. If you make a good enough role, it might even be added to the game! This shouldn't be your main goal to role-crafting, but it certainly is the biggest prize.

## The One Tip

I have one main tip to give for making roles: Consider not what your role does, but what your role *causes*.

What this means is that you shouldn't be trying to make a role that looks cool, or a role that has chaotic effects. You should be making a role that causes fun things to happen. Let's look at a few examples:

Cop: Causes there to be a CC war in the game, where both sides offer conflicting reports of important alignment-relevant material. Town's job is to decide which set looks more plausible, and vote accordingly.

Doctor: Causes Cop to not die after outing.

Godfather: Causes Cop "Not Sided" reports to not be confirmed town.

Announcer: Causes town and mafia PRs to be randomly outed, and sometimes causes mafia to randomly be confirmed mafia.

Sleepwalker: Causes Announcer to not be 100% accurate in outing PRs.

Hooker: Causes Cop to not want to out, even when Doctor exists.

These examples aren't perfect, since every setup has a different usage for its roles. What you can see though, is that each role has an effect on the gameplay of a setup, beyond just having its role powers.

## Making of Roles

When making a role, start with what you want the role to cause. Then, design the role to fit the behavior you want to occur. Share what you want the role to do, when you are sharing the role. People can see what you want to cause as behavior, and help you create a role that does that.

So, let's create a role together. Let's say i want to create a role that causes town to have to focus on and sort the alignment of a specific player. There are multiple ways to go about this, some of which have been done before. I could make a role of great importance that mafia want to fake, to make town want to find which is real and which is fake. That's basically Cop. I could make a role that encourages faking of protectives, so that the real protective has to decide if this is gambiting mafia or a town trying to get a big advantage when they get night-killed. A similar role to this concept is Bodyguard. However, the way that i want to approach this is to have everyone sort this player, and have it be separate from that player's role. As such, the following role solves my problem:

I dont have a name for this | Town

Each night, may choose a player

The following day, town may decide in a vote separate from the main condemnation vote whether or not to kill the chosen player

Once this causes a kill, it may no longer be used

This role isn't perfect, but i believe that it accomplishes my goal of having a role that causes town to focus on and sort a specific player.

## Conclusion

The method of "ask what your role *causes*" isn't perfect. There are still many mistakes that can be made during the crafting of a role. What this does do, is allow you and others to have something to focus on when trying to improve your role. Most of the mistakes in the role-making process can be solved when others in the channel know what you're going for, and can be confident in the changes they suggest to help you achieve it. The hardest part is just knowing what to make it cause in the first place.

## See also

I made another (worse) guide but i figured that this guide covers much of the same stuff without being as long or confused.