I made three big mistakes in this game.
(1) Assuming there would be a lynch on Day One. I talked about this in the dead chat, but the No Lynch Day One is a common fallacy that propogated from epicmafia years ago and seems to be in most mafia communities now. It’s bad, don’t do it people. The simple line is “You miss 100% of shots you don’t take”, the town’s primary way of ending the game is by lynching–unless there’s a very dire pressing reason, even lynching someone randomly is better than doing nothing. Power roles are a perk, not the main way of winning the game, never forget that. I designed the setup around the idea that there’d be an even number of players each day(baring doc saves, which give a +1 to the day count, and the vengekill, which would put things even permanently). With the no lynch on day one, that was thrown out the window and the game became immensely scum-sided.
(2) Forgetting terminology and conventions. Friendly Neighbor(for example) is a very common role where I play that would have been immediately town-confirmed day two with zero doubt. Other things like Witch/Mafia, etc etc, all play into this as well. I’ll endeavor to fit in better next game I design here.
(3) I forgot to add the LyLo clause to the Vengeful clause of the mafia. Usually, these abilities turn off if the game is in a LyLo situation but I just blanked out and forgot to add that.
That all being said, the setup(scrubbed of flavor, as I said the flavor was literally off-the-cuff and random) was as follows.
2x Vengeful Mafiosos+factional 1-shot roleblock
vs
Town Friendly Neighbor
Town 2-shot Doctor
Town Vanilla Cop(Vengeful does count as a power role, so this was intended to catch all the scum)
5x Vanilla Townies
So, the town gets one protective role, one confirmed town, and one quasi-investigative role(which Vyse played very well by the way!). The roleblock was a fail-safe in case we got into a “protect the cop” situation that often happens, and the Vengeful kill was to put the game back to odd numbers.
Of note, only the first vengeful kill mattered. The town win condition was killing all mafia, while the mafia wincon involved having at least one person alive. The situation that happened here(going into LyLo with both mafia alive in an odd day with X/X-1 alive) was the absolute worst case scenario. I was worried going into day three that this would happen, but I knew Vyse had the soft guilty on Kari, which almost panned out. I’m surprised by that actually–with the Friendly Neighbor already revealed, a 1-S cop+vanilla cop would seem to me to be way too much. But, alas.
Anyways, I had fun moderating this game and being a cold-hearted cannibal, so there’s that. I hope everyone involved had fun as well, despite how the game ended up playing out.