How to add spice to your VFMs?

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How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby ejjinami » Fri Dec 18, 2020 12:36 pm

As a person who plays pretty much only in VFMs, lemme voice a small compliant. Making Vanilla setups isn’t limited only to choosing 2 or 3 PRs... Joining a VFM will most of the time end in you rolling cit, so no matter what fancy PRs there are, the game will be normal/mundane for the majority of the players anyway...
right?

WRONG.

How to host SFMs undercover
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!


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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby ejjinami » Fri Dec 18, 2020 12:37 pm

Honorary mention, which I like but 100% won’t fit for a VFM setup:
peek a boo mafia


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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby Royee » Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:35 pm

I personally find these extremely tedious to play when reaching to mid game or even at day 1 (The sfm part).
Keep it simple.
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby Rickdaily12 » Sat Dec 19, 2020 2:19 pm

+support thread

I personally greatly dislike playing games with one or two PRs and a crap load of cits. Especially ones without a doctor. I've only had terrible experiences. Variants where the Mafia lose their factional kill or have to confront a gimmick while having fair winning chances make for exciting games in my books.

(I'd also move to put Paranoia Mafia as another example of a game like this, while quite different, certainly has a lot of basic game mechanics.)

But yeah, I might actually play more often if games with this kind of flair made more appearances on this site.
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby ICECLIMBERS » Sat Dec 19, 2020 3:59 pm

ejjinami wrote:Guns and roses

dunno much about ms but this user has made a lot of setups like the ones you described. Some could be copied over (the dance one seems popular there but the phase stuff probably wouldn't work well on this site) if we don't feel bad about taking the setups.
I recall a forest fire one that seems like it'd be good for turbos.
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby Varanus » Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:24 pm

ICECLIMBERS wrote:
ejjinami wrote:Guns and roses

dunno much about ms but this user has made a lot of setups like the ones you described. Some could be copied over (the dance one seems popular there but the phase stuff probably wouldn't work well on this site) if we don't feel bad about taking the setups.
I recall a forest fire one that seems like it'd be good for turbos.

Super secret information below, open at your own risk

Spoiler: half of the vfm pitches lemonader has sent me are just links to ms wiki pages on setups
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby cob709 » Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:27 pm

whats the difference between vfm, sfm, nfm, and standards(xx)?
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby Varanus » Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:30 pm

cob709 wrote:whats the difference between vfm, sfm, nfm, and standards(xx)?

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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby Varanus » Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:35 pm

The best answer I have for you is the complexity/uncertainty of the games

VFMs are primarily simple with number of PRs or mechanics, where you (normally) know everything there is to know about the game before it starts
Standards are the middle child we don't talk about, based on the poor design of typical ToS style games (though the definition for us has somewhat shifted over the years)
SFMs are for the "everything else", where the role lists and mechanics can be pretty much anything and everything
NFMs were old games we ran specifically for new players so they wouldn't get destroyed by accidentally joining an SFM where nothing makes sense as their first FM game

There have historically been many many games that were run under certain queues that arguably should have been under a different one, but I'm sure it's fine
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby JacksonVirgo » Sun Dec 20, 2020 8:44 am

Varanus wrote:VFMs are primarily simple


*looks at my VFM pitch*
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby lemonader666 » Mon Dec 21, 2020 12:04 am

Appropriate timing

you can email me at lemonader666@gmail.com if need be
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby Ezradekezra » Mon Dec 21, 2020 12:11 am

This'll be good to keep in mind if I ever host a game.

---
On the topic of the differences between different FM formats, I'd like to ask what a CFM is. All I know is that nobody runs them anymore.
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby lemonader666 » Mon Dec 21, 2020 12:33 am

Ezradekezra wrote:This'll be good to keep in mind if I ever host a game.

---
On the topic of the differences between different FM formats, I'd like to ask what a CFM is. All I know is that nobody runs them anymore.

I'm pretty sure they were short for Community Forum Mafia, and they were games pitched and designed by the community and not the mods, who are responsible for hosting Official games.

you can email me at lemonader666@gmail.com if need be
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Re: How to add spice to your VFMs?

Postby Varanus » Mon Dec 21, 2020 1:02 am

Ezradekezra wrote:This'll be good to keep in mind if I ever host a game.

---
On the topic of the differences between different FM formats, I'd like to ask what a CFM is. All I know is that nobody runs them anymore.

Back in the olden days, every single FM game was hosted by one of the FMMods
CFMs were the exceptions to that rule, and were the games where members of the community would host instead
Those aren't run any more since the host group was properly set up with the queue system, which now allows almost every game to be hosted by the community instead of the mods
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