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What makes a third party good?; Setup design analysis
Topic Started: Oct 31 2014, 07:37 PM (740 Views)
Zaazaa0
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I've always had a hard time coming up with worthwhile third parties to add to a game. I've made good third parties, I've made bad third parties, and I couldn't figure out what it was that made them good or bad. But now I think I've finally come up with something.

Keep in mind that this is by no means a set of guidelines that must be followed in order to have a good third party. You can include a third party that I label as "Bad" and still have it turn up as a good third party, or you could include something that I label "Good" and have it wind up not being good, depending on the setup.

Now then, in order to discern what should be done to make a good third party, we'll look at existing third parties and decide whether they're good or bad. From there, we'll look at why they're good and try to build a pattern.

We'll start with the good. For this example, we'll use the Viral, Fool, Cultist, and Mastermind.


Viral
Basic concept: The Viral is designated one PR, usually village, that they must kill. Their method of discovering this PR is through investigation every night. If the Viral kills the PR, he wins and the game continues. If the PR dies by other means, the Viral loses and leaves the game.

What's so good about the viral? Why has it been used so many times?

One of the great things I see in the viral is its ability to cooperate with either side. If his early investigations yield a Mafia, he can choose to do one of two things. Option one is to pair with Mafia, where he learns who the mafia are to give himself less players to investigate, therefore giving him far better odds at finding his target. Option two is to work with village. By this method, he outs one or two of the mafia, and the village outs the Viral's target PR, who the Viral then kills.

This ability of cooperation is one not often seen in a third party. Not many third parties are able to work together with either side, or sometimes anyone at all.


Fool
Basic concept: The fool wins when he is lynched. The game ends when this happens.

The fool is an interesting role, in that its mere presence causes the village to play much more cautiously. That guy's acting a bit scummy, is he the fool? We could go for it, but if it's the fool, the game's over and we lose! The fool has to manipulate the village to think that he's scummy enough to be mafia, but not to look like a fool. Whether the fool wins or not is almost entirely in his own hands, if he chooses to do so. But then he doesn't have to choose to do so. If village has no way of killing outside of lynches, fool can claim in thread safely, wait until LYLO, and joint with mafia effortlessly. Mafia have no reason to kill him, he isn't a threat to them.


Cultist
Basic concept: There is one cultist at the start of the game, named the Cult Leader. Every night, the cultists convert one player into another cultist. If the cultists outnumber the rest of the game, they win. However, if the Cult Leader dies, all the cultists die, and all of them lose.

What makes the cultist a good third party? The way I see it, it's because it doesn't exactly fit the same style of a third party, in that you are cooperating with others. In this way, they almost play like a powerful but more fragile mafia. A few phases in, when the leader is suspected the other cult members need to back him up, as their entire group rests on the chances of the player who recruited them.


Mastermind
Basic concept: The mastermind and the mafia are in contact, but none of them know the roles of any of the mafia or who the mastermind is. The mastermind wins if he is alive while the mafia achieves majority. If this happens, the mafia does not win.

What's good about this role? Manipulation. It puts a significant spin on the game if the mafia know that while they're working on manipulating the village, the mastermind is manipulating them. It's sort of a smaller mafia game within the full mafia game, except not exactly. In a larger game, the mafia can probably not worry for a while about the mastermind, but when it gets close to the end, they'll need to start killing each other in order to determine who the mastermind is.





Now, let's look at third parties that I deem "Bad." For this part, we'll cover the Survivor, the Killer, my own Wordmaster, and the Autocrat.


Survivor
Basic concept: The Survivor's goal is to, of course, survive to the end of the game. His way of doing so is by hiding behind players. When he does this, he is immune to all visitors. However, if the person the Survivor is hiding behind dies, the Survivor dies as well.

What I find bad about this role is that your chances of winning are entirely reliant on the actions of other players. You have no idea who the Mafia is trying to kill, and therefore don't know where to hide. It's a helpless situation. In a game where every player is of equal skill, you have no idea who is going to die, and your guess as a result is completely luck-based. It's not luck-based like the viral where investigating a villager narrows down your options, because if you guess right and don't die, you have to do it all again the next night, and your chance gets smaller and smaller each phase.

On top of that, despite all your struggles, you aren't really doing anything to impact the game. Occasionally you save yourself from death, but other than that, the only thing you can really do is vote with the Mafia at LYLO to claim your win, if you manage to get that far safely.


Killer
Basic concept: The killer kills one player every night. He wins by being the last one standing, or among the last two remaining players. Sometimes the role is allowed to joint with mafia, but it's impossible for it to joint with village.

What's wrong with the killer? Well, have you ever been the last living member of the mafia early on in the game? The tension is high, and you've got nothing but a night kill and maybe a weak action each night to save you, and unlike when the whole mafia is around, your win is all on you. That's what the killer is, except the killer is put in this position from the very beginning of the game.

Like the survivor, you feel helpless. Despite being the role that village wants to get rid of as soon as possible, your chances are far lower than the mafia, even if the host gives you an extra hit and makes you investigate as village. In the end, you're just a smaller mafia who can't really joint with anyone realistically.


Wordmaster
Basic concept: The role is a gimmick role from Verbal Tics, a game of mine which has a gimmick that is interesting but not necessary to win. That is, unless you're the Wordmaster, who kills players when he guesses their tic.

Why did this role fall through? Well, part of it was due to the gimmick itself. Due to the strategy that everyone started using, not one player was able to guess a tic the entire game. This includes the Wordmaster, the role that cannot win without guessing tics correctly. As a result, it was nigh-impossible to win at all, and the wordmaster stood no chance.


Autocrat
Basic concept: The autocrat wins if all opposing forces die while the autocrat is still alive. When this happens, village loses.

What's so bad about Autocrat that doesn't exist in the Mastermind? I mean there's nothing that could go wrong from having a basic villager that the village wants to kill, right?

Yeah. You are a villager. But if you die, you don't win. One thing a villager does is soak hits for the village. Another thing the villager does is make a player sigh in disappointment when they are assigned the role, as they'll be taking part in the large backseat of the game, offering ideas and discussion while the PRs call the shots. Here, you're doing the exact same thing, but you could lose out of nowhere at any time. Once again, we have a feeling of helplessness, but coupled with it is the villager boredom. The mastermind doesn't experience this because he takes on the role of a goon. Being a goon is fun, because you're cooperating with the rest of the mafia.




So we've discussed all these roles, so now let's pull this all together into something we can work with. Here are what I think are qualities that a good third party should have.

1. An ideal third party should have a decent chance of winning. A lot of talk goes into whether a setup is balanced for many setups, and the third party is no different. It needs to have something going for it that can let it win, though not as good of a chance as village and mafia. The chance should be higher if victory does not end the game.

2. A third party should not feel helpless. No one likes feeling like there is nothing they can do to put the odds in their favor in a game of wits like Mafia. It's why we have the game end when mafia outnumbers village; Village just can't feasibly win at that point.

3. A third party should have the ability to choose their course of action, and strategize. This isn't absolutely necessary, but I feel it makes a great impact. Not just "Who should I fall in love with N1," mind you, but something that happens later in the game, a few phases down the line. Should the Lyncher go for an early lynch before village is organized, or wait until many of the smarter players are dead to start putting up suspicions? Things like that.

4. A third party should affect not just themselves but the game around them. If you're struggling to survive on your own and both village and mafia aren't even giving you a passing glance, that isn't particularly fun. At least one of the sides is your opposition, if not both, and you want them to know you're there, and to act accordingly. Well, maybe not that much, because that could hamper your chances of winning. But if the Prophet dies N1, there's no "Whew! Glad we don't have to worry about that guy!" going on. The Prophet doesn't matter to village or mafia, he's just fucking sitting there waiting to see if he's right. He doesn't even care if he dies, he's literally waiting.

5. Above all, a third party should be fun to play. At the end of the day, we all came to this forum because it looked fun. If you're sitting around more bored than a villager, either you're a bad player or something is wrong with the third party you were assigned.


So, with that in mind, let's see if these ideas hold true. We'll look at each third party I mentioned individually and see how they hold up. However, I won't be looking at whether the third party is fun to play as, as that's a matter of opinion and I haven't had much first hand experience with most of these third parties outside of the occasional EM game.

Third Party Analysis

Again, these are my opinions. If you can think of something you disagree on, whether it was one of my five points or whether specific roles are good or bad, that's fine.

Discuss. See if my points hold true to other third parties, come up with your own points, disagree with me, whatever.

Further information:
The difference between passive and hostile third parties
Edited by Zaazaa0, Oct 9 2015, 10:18 PM.
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Zaazaa0
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So my third party that I thought was good just got destroyed D1 and he made a pretty good point afterwards.

Zephyr
 
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Guys I think I have a plan to find the Third Party. Everyone give a gun to someone separate.

Brodioh, give yours to Jessi.

Jessi, to Letter.

Letter, to Dax again.

I'll give mine to Hyp.

Nobody, to ATS.

ATS, to Day.

Dax, to PSN.

PSN, to me.

Hyp, to Nobody.

Dayafter, to Brodioh.

How this works is that everyone should get a separate gun- so everyone should have 1 gun, right? Except the Third Party has a two-part gun right now that he cannot separate. So he's either forced to give his double gun or give no gun- so we can trace it back to him regardless.

Please stay active tonight and remember to hand your guns to the assigned person.

Tomorrow will hopefully determine which of Jessi or Brody have the Crystal gun, which should be helpful in revealing further clears (or Mafia.)
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

no

Tip for future hosts - make your third party someone who doesn't always have a giant target on their back. I feel the love.

This has caused me to think of another bullet point to the original five things I mentioned.

6. The third party should not be the most threatening role in the game. This is a bit tough, and it seems almost counter-intuitive, but if this rule is followed, suddenly village can focus on the mafia and the third party can keep to themselves for a while.

Of the eight third parties above, the ones I would consider threatening enough would be Fool, Cult, Mastermind, Killer, and Autocrat in the late-game.

That's... More than half of the ones I listed. It's also every role I listed that can't joint with village except Wordmaster.

Thoughts?
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LetterSequence
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it can be a big target if you want but that doesn't mean shit if it can die before it can even accomplish anything

you need to give it a way to be a threat, while also being able to actually play
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Zaazaa0
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Hmm... There's a thought. See, the way Gun Hoarder was supposed to work was he would be a threat in the late game, once he's gathered plenty of guns. That makes village want to get rid of it early, whereas with mafia, getting rid of them early is good too, but it makes more sense to get rid of the guy who isn't tough now but will be later.
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bloodrayne03
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Part of this is that the third party needs some sort of way to avoid detection and get what it needs to do done. This is why most third parties investigate as village. Protection (such as from guns) can work either way depending on what kind of role it is. If it's a threatening role that can't joint win/joint win easily, that protection being triggered is a pretty big red flag. The more specific the protection, the more likely you just stumbled across the third party and so you'll try to kill them next time. Same thing goes for easily identifiable mechanics such as passing out a wonky gun/not being able to hand out a gun at all when everyone else can.
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Zaazaa0
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Good point. With that in mind, it might not be the role itself, but rather the nature of the setup that makes it so difficult to come up with something balanced. Because guns are being fired constantly, I made the third party immune to them because if he got shot and just died, that'd be it for him. But that fix opens a new problem, in that if a person never dies no matter how many times he's shot, it's not hard to guess that they're the third party.
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LetterSequence
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An example of this is the cult.

Cult loses when the cult leader dies, and he starts off weak, but gets stronger over time.

So why doesn't cult leader (usually, ignore Battle of the Bands on nuzlocke where I destroyed cult) die super early usually? That's usually a good start to making a third party.
Edited by LetterSequence, Nov 3 2014, 02:51 PM.
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bloodrayne03
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Cult doesn't usually get killed super early because they keep village from connecting properly, and there's plenty of other people alive for other people to target early on. Because they don't kill, they maintain the large numbers for longer. If they hit a connected PR or one of the mafia, they immediately gain a power spike, but really, they don't get any less fragile over the course of the game. They just gain access to more avenues of influence.
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Aviana
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Oh by the way I was looking through your analysis and I kind of laughed at "the viral" because Viral is just the guy's name. :v
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Zaazaa0
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yeah but when I say the viral I refer to the role not the character
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Aviana
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I know. It just amused me.
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Zaazaa0
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It's been nearly a year since this thread was created, but I wanted to make a post here because I realized recently that I neglected to mention something very, very important about third parties, and that is that there are two categories of third parties, namely passive and hostile, and the way they interact with the game is massively different. The opinions I've formed about these differences answered my previous questions about the failures of some of my own third parties, so I felt the need to post here.

Here's my interpretation of which roles fit into which categories. A passive third party generally poses no immediate threat to the village's chances of winning, and usually poses no threat to the mafia either. These roles generally only serve a small purpose in the game, or none at all. These roles rarely imbalance a game, often have a high chance of winning, and are always able to joint with at least one side, usually the village, or they leave the game after reaching their win condition. On the other hand, they're also often the roles that are perceived as boring. Common examples include Survivor, Amnesiac, Angel, and Viral. Hell, even Mistletoe might fit here, though I wouldn't throw it into just any game.

A hostile third party is a role that causes every player to breathe a collective sigh of relief when it dies. These roles are the roles with the last-one-standing win condition, the ones that end the game when they win, and the roles that can't joint with either side easily, if at all. Unlike passive third parties, hostiles must be integrated into the game's purpose to succeed. All too often I've seen hosts have a completely balanced game with a weak hostile third party that ruins the experience for that one player (And I'll admit to having done that more than once in the past). Very careful consideration should be taken if you're deciding to add one of these into your setup. Examples include Fool, Killer, Lyncher, Cultist, and *shudder* Autocrat.

Passive roles are often the correct category to choose from if you have a complete and balanced setup and don't know what third party to add in. This is because hostile third parties are an entirely different faction on their own, and therefore need to be balanced against the village and against the mafia. If the hostile is unable to stack up against the other sides, or is far more powerful than the entirety of either side, it's not just an imbalanced role, but an imbalanced faction. A passive third party can get away with having an easy win condition, because the passive's win condition rarely goes against the purposes of another side, being an inconvenience to one side at most.

Something to keep in mind.
Edited by Zaazaa0, Oct 9 2016, 08:46 AM.
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Aviana
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I kind of disagree with how Viral is categorised. He actively does stuff and can impact things. Can you explain why he's considered a passive role?
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Shinigami02
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Actually, with the definition he gave, Viral is totally a Passive role. That said, Passive may be the wrong term for it. It's more "Threat vs Non-threat" roles. Viral is not in and of itself a threat to either side, unless the player decides to run a certain playstyle. Compare this to, say, a Cult or the Overseer in the current game, and you can see why it would be considered less threatening.
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Zaazaa0
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Right. While Viral's goal generally goes against one side's interests, there isn't anything that side can do about it in most cases, since it's invincible and lynching your own PR is even worse than leaving the Viral to its own devices. This is why village often negotiates with the Viral, if he can find some Mafia PRs for them. The Viral achieving its win condition doesn't automatically spell doom for the side it has to harm in the process, it's just an inconvenience.

I still say Viral is a passive third party, but it's definitely one of the more threatening ones (though that depends on the PR it's looking for).

Passive might not be the best word for it though, yeah.
Edited by Zaazaa0, Oct 10 2015, 03:12 PM.
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Aviana
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While I can agree either way that passive is probably not the right word for it, I still don't think Viral fits with your definition.

Zaazaa0
Oct 9 2015, 10:10 PM
A passive third party generally poses no immediate threat to the village's chances of winning, and usually pose no threat to the mafia either.
Viral poses a threat to either side depending on what he wants to do. He inherently works against the village since he wants to kill their first line of protection, but the investigation factor basically weaponises him against whatever side he chooses to work against.

I mean, if the definition is supposed to be that he's not a built-in threat to either side, I guess that fits, but there's yet to be a game where he wasn't a thorn in anyone's side.
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Shinigami02
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Aviana
Oct 10 2015, 05:05 PM
Viral poses a threat to either side depending on what he wants to do. He inherently works against the village since he wants to kill their first line of protection, but the investigation factor basically weaponises him against whatever side he chooses to work against.
An interesting thing to note here is that this (the bolded part) has, IIRC, only actually been the case in the originating game. In games outside of that it's been other PRs of Village side, PRs of Mafia side, Randomized (theoretically even capable of targetting a 3pp maybe) so yeah. And even across games where the target is a Village role, I think I've seen it team with both sides. That said, who it's a threat to and how much of a threat still depends more on the player in the role than being an inherent effect of the role itself, so I would argue that it still fits. I mean with the right player a 'nillager can be a dangerous threat to the mafia, and with the wrong player can be a serious threat to the village.
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Aviana
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I don't know about variations on the role, but it does have a built in I want to kill this person. I think that would at least make it a threat against whatever side has that person, regardless of if it's a big threat or not.
(I'm sorry I really wasn't intending to derail the thread this much.)
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Zaazaa0
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Yeah I guess the Viral doesnt really fit into either category super well but here's another way of thinking about it.

The main reason I wanted to distinguish between the two types is to help decide what kind of third party one should try to include in their game. The main difference between the two being that one is an extra role that can be thrown into most games and work well, while the other is an entire faction of its own that needs thought put into it before deciding even if one should be included in a setup, let alone what it would do. I see Viral as more the former, as it can be included in a game pretty easily without too many changes needed to balance it out.
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Aviana
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I can see that, yeah. I'm not sure how I'd categorise those into clean labels.
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Zaazaa0
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I think all we need is like a category to act as a spot in between the two categories. The hell would that be called? Aside from Viral, the only thing I can really think would go into that category would be Mistletoe.
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