Capo di Tutti Capi IV [Concluded]

[El Barto]

Me?

[Jarema]

no way :)

[El Barto]

Silly Eastern European, don't steal my thread!

[GamezRule]

/thread

[El Barto]

You stop it as well, colonial.

[GamezRule]

I refuse, Takhisis!

[seireikhaan]

Alright, gents. Less spam.

[gibsonsg91921]

Seamus bless us, everyone.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

....As for the Shyster, that role is a crime. As much fun as back room dealings are, the meat and potatoes of mafia is the game thread and public debates to lynch people and avoid getting lynched. The shyster makes the day phase pointless and kills debate. Without lynchings, it's not really a mafia game. It also makes continuing play as a dead townie totally pointless, as a dead townie's only ability is to influence lynchings.

I ended up regretting that choice. It seemed a neat twist at the outset, with the various Dons cutting deals to try to get that "service" etc. Instead, it was suborned (my mistake. I should have predicted that one person would "corner the market" with this and limited it or left it off) and very definitely marred play balance. If it is ever used again, I would suggest a once/twice and then gone version of this power. It wasn't as thought out as the other roles.

[classical_hero]

Well overall the Shyster was used only three times throughout the whole game and ATPG only ever used the role twice, so even if you did limit the usage of the role, it was used sparingly anyway, so the role was not that badly thought out, just that people complained about the role by thinking that the lynch should be sacred, but I don't think that is true, especially on such complex games where things are different from the norm. The balance of the game was marred by so many townies wanting to become mafia, not this role.

[Askthepizzaguy]

Even so, both sides have a serious point. A basic townie's power is the lynch and townies who have no other influence on the game but to hold an opinion as to who should be lynch, lose their interest in the game once you strip that away from them.

How this could have been negated: If the shyster role was known about from day one; then you could predict that a scum could pull off a tactic where they intentionally get lynched just to disable the town's main weapon against the scum.

If there was a heads up on that, Tincow/GH et al would not have tried to lynch me twice in a row on those critical rounds where the town still had a numerical edge, and they would have gotten a scum instead. It also would have started the hunt for such a role much sooner, possibly causing folks to cooperate on that point more, leading to a collapse of that power structure.

It is just a nasty surprise, sort of like holding a vanilla mafia game and having a godfather you cannot lynch until the henchmen are dead, but not putting that in the rules.

Try to lynch the godfather over and over, and then lose... but if you knew the setup, such a bad end wouldn't have happened.

Really, the strength of the shyster role was that it was not an announced role. If it was publicly known from the start, the whole game would have been different.

Some do have a point about it being less a mafia game and more a faction-oriented game. Town barely existed here except as the potential to be not town. For balance, the game needed more incorruptibles or zero incorruptibles, so everyone could have gone mafia. The town investigators kinda got the shaft there.