Firefly's guide to role-crafting

## Introduction

#role-crafting is a channel in the discord that allows people to come up with terrible role ideas and ask others how they look. Alternatively, one may directly post the terrible role ideas into the role-submissions, but that is not recommended for reasons i will address later. This guide is made ~~for pride reasons~~ to give tips on what to do and not do in crafting a role. We will go over the purpose, common mistakes, high points, and then i cant write conclusions

## Overview

The first and most important thing to know in role crafting is that your goal is not to get a role into the game. Making roles for the purpose of addition is setting yourself up for failure, for less than 1 out of a bazillion roles get added to the game. This is why roles should go in role-crafting first, so it isn't just a futile attempt to get it added. The more one pushes a role, the more chance you have for it to be personally denied by the staff team :)

The goal for making a role is instead the learning process, and design challenge. The channel is one of the best places to enrich knowledge of mafia theory and learn what makes the game and what is inside of it work. It is a great place to just have people discuss how things effect the game, and the possibilities for the game's future.

Additionally, it is actively fun to be able to make an idea and experiment with the outcomes that spring forth from it. You get to create something, show others, and get a reaction to help you improve.

## Making roles

### Central ideas

You should always have a situation, interaction, or general central idea to build a role around. These make it easy to remain confined to a singular point of interest in role making, and helps to avoid mistakes such as bloating your role.

Central ideas should be a starting point for your role, and the thing to build your role towards. They should be pointing toward some aspect of social play that is made different with your role. They should allow your role to be built as a component of setups. Some good examples of 2 different types of central ideas are following.

Situations: Social situations that could be effected by your role. Stuff like, "One of these 2 are mafia","Force mafia to fakeclaim in a different way", "meet privately with people at night to determine what they know". It should be something simple, that can be designed with instead of designed around. try to keep them relatively specific and fun as well, nobody will want to use "causes chaos" or "prevents person from speaking".

Interactions: Mechanical stuff that causes desired social consequences. Stuff like, "stop Cop from claiming early", "Gets rewarded when a target is lynched", "knows about being announcer". This has obvious overlap with social situations, because both have the same goal in making roles for unique ways to play in setups. This just has a more fleshed out idea of what youre going to do with that idea. Again, it should be specific and fun.

Sharing your goals with the role along with the role can be good. It allows people to analyze the role as you see it and provide feedback. Then, it can be improved to better fit the intended purpose.

When it comes to actually making the role mechanically, it mostly comes down to your knowledge of the game. However, there is one important thing to consider; always think about not only what your role does, but what people will do in response to it.

### Mistakes

There are several mistakes or disallowed things that people try to use as roles;

1. Bloating the role
2. Taking away BV powers
3. Lying about alignment
4. Unreasonable randomness
5. Overpowered role
6. Speaking with dead
7. Too dependent
8. Win conditions

Bloating the role: Generally, the more effects a role has, the less it can be used in setups. This shows a lack of central idea to the role. Roles with 4 or more sentances would almost always require the entire setup to be built around its many effects. The main purpose of a role is to be a building block towards a setup, not something the setup has to be specifically made around. To fix this, you must figure out the main idea that your role conveys and try to minimize the role until it hits that target most cleanly.

Taking away BV powers: Powerlessness in mafia never feels good. It's a bad idea to take away Voting & Speaking because these lead to roles that only have those 2 things having little to no impact on the game. If it is being used as the central axis of a role, then needs to be completely retooled, and if it is a balancing factor for a role (a example i've seen often is "Knows everything but can't speak") then the role is either broken or unusable.

Lying about alignment: This deeply disrupts the core of mafia as a game. Players play to their win condition, and the better they do towards that, the better their team does. If players are lied to about their alignment, then players may lose for playing well and may win for playing badly, which randomly punishes and rewards bad play.

Unreasonable randomness: The game should be decided by skill, not luck. A role that is based on randomness can rarely lead to interesting social interactions, as it is completely unknown what will occur from it. Nobody can fool the opponents into doing something when they dont know what theyre doing either. On the receiving end, it can feel terrible to lose just because of luck, especially after doing well. It's ok to have slight randomness in midgame things when those will rarely cause a win/lose scenario (see Sleepwalker) but random kills and such are instantly bastard.

Overpowered role: One role being overpowered allows for two seperate problems. Firstly, games become incredibly lopsided on how strong the player with the role is, and how early that role dies. A bad player with a strong as heck role can single-handedly lose the game, which is unfair for everyone involved, even the bad player. A good player, to contrast, will stomp. Same thing with the overpowered role dying night 1 versus surviving all game. It causes much swing and is heavily reliant on one player's skill. Secondly, the overpowered role will have to be designed specifically around by the setup to nullify it's overpoweredness. Once again, roles should be building blocks to a setup, not something the setup needs to be designed specifically for.

Speaking with dead: The spectator chat is naturally a cozy place to talk about the current game have general discussions, and just wind down after dying ingame. Having the chat be relevant to the game not only makes the chat a warzone, but also punishes players who want to leave the room after dying.

Too dependent: What it means for a role to be "too dependent" is that it relies on too many other roles being in the setup to work. While less of a mistake than the rest, this makes it hard to imagine uses for the role and social situations it can cause because there is simply less to use it for. A current example would be Handyman, where it requires multiple other specific roles in the setup to function.

Win conditions: Roles need to be able to win. Whether it's having one that is too tough, or just not including one at all, it provides a role that is hard to fit to a good central idea. Third-Parties should be built around how they play to win, not whatever chaotic effects they might have otherwise.

Once all of that is avoided, and a good central idea at the ready, role-crafting is a great place to construct a ~~horrible machination~~ great role with fun possibilities, while working with others. It gives a great sense of being with the community even when not playing games. It allows for all sorts of conversations to occur of mafia theory. You might even learn the history of the game. However, most importantly, it makes me feel smart.

## Conclusion

yes submit to me for role making muahahahahahahahahahahahahhahhahahahahhaha!!!