right?
WRONG.
How to add spice to your VFMs
1. Make everyone a PR.
It is possible to make a VFM game with no cits at all. As long as your game cannot be solved by claiming and the power roles are weak, the gameplay will still be very similar to those in vanilla games.
Let’s take “Guns with roses”, for example:
11 townies : 3 goons
All townies must secretly pick either a gun or a rose and a night they want to use it on.
A player who picked a gun is a 1-shot vigilante during his/her chosen night.
A player who picked a rose is immune to night kills during his/her chosen night.
Upon death, it will be revealed whether the dead player picked a rose or a gun.
Number of remaining Town-aligned rose players will be announced at the beginning of day 1.
If there are no Town-aligned player who picked a rose, Mafia immediately wins the game, regardless of whether there are any living Mafia members in the game.
Can this game be solved by PRs? - not really.
Are they powerful - well, no.
Gameplay type? - Def Vanilla.
Will this game be special for everyone - more likely than just some other standard, boring VFM lol
There was a similar VFM, hosted some time ago on the forums:
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=95748
Maintain Law Order and Shallow Relationships
1 cop
1 jailkeeper
6 compulsive visitor
2 mafia 1-shot Veterans
No cits, while still retaining the typical VFM game style.
An easy way to make the game slightly special even for those players who get the worst roles.
List of other, borderline vanilla setups, similar to those:
Bunker mafia
Docblock the clock
Guns and roses
diffusion of power
2. Change the very basics of the game.
Lynches, additional day/night phases, passive abilities all players have, crazy action requirements, win conditions, etc.
Shortly: things commonly present in SFMs.
Just think of purgatory:
6:3
nightless
There are 2 day phases: Heaven and hell phase
Mafia win if the majority of them is lynched to heaven or they outnumber the remaining townies
Townies win if they lynch the majority of the mafia to hell
Townies who are sent to hell are added to the dead chat. Townies who are sent to heaven become martyrs and join a separate martyr chat.
When 50% of the living players are scum, a Judgment Day occurs. All living players lose the ability to vote. The martyrs privately vote in the martyr chat to send a living player to hell. If the player is town, the Mafia win. If not, the game moves on to a hell phase.
Sounds interesting?
how about those ones?
Popcorn Mafia
Trust fall
Lynch or No-lynch
Ladder mafia
nomination mafia
Double Day Unlimited
Loser mafia
masons and mafia
Games like those are the most enjoyable and rememberable VFMs I’ve ever played. They’re fun, they’re unique, and will likely be remembered well by the majority of people who played them.
TLDR:
Go crazy! Think outside of the box!
Or even if you don’t want to, feel free to host any of the setups I listed here or add any of the listed mechanics to your games!
That’s the easiest way to make the game interesting and unique for ALL players, not only for the selected few who become PRs!