Postgame
Game Design
So obviously, BYO's aren't designed to be very balanced. It's after all, a game where everyone submits roles of various powerlevels and then everything gets mashed together.
Off the bat, 7 people submitted roles that could vig. Some had conditions such as not being able to vig until N3 or until you guess a kill correctly. There were also a lot of strong information roles and control roles, with very little in the way of protective roles. With this in mind, I decided to have a single mafia and remove some of the kills so that mafia could attempt to outpace village with their lynch redirect, their redirection/role swapping shenanigans. Overall though, if I were to do this again, I would give myself more time to balance the roles and the factions as I don't think a few hours was enough time to go through everything.
That said, I think despite the lack of any real balance, every side had a real chance to win this.
Town
Town got amazingly cucked N0 when the mafia redirected Stealth/Vooper onto Moody. Because Moody was a miller, the mafia became informed that the alias William Minerva was a member of the mafia. In addition, because they had swapped AG and Heal, when leet inspected AG he ended up receiving Heals role PM and alignment.
This led to a lot of the lynch confusion D1 and honestly, I think if von hadn't been helping apricity, then town had a much higher chance of mislynching.
Speaking of which, town was unfortunately moled pretty early on and received most of the role information that town had. This was in part due to some terrific play by Von who earned hal's trust by helping to steer him onto lynching actual mafia members. While hal did catch at some point that some timing was awfully suspicious (he would say something to von about a person and a few minutes later that person would message hal), I don't think he would have caught on to von being mafia if the mafia's overall communication hadn't been so poor.
Beyond N1, town played pretty smoothly with some pretty solid night action play. They ended up suspecting Ullar for his role, despite the fact Ullar had publicly stolen the vote of a mafia member which was a bit ???
Re: Town's MVP. There's quite a few people to come to mind. But it would probably be
DLE for his great chess play and steady hand guiding town leadership. But Moody and Leet are also great contenders. Moody for guiding town's actions for when it counted (and how he not so subtly tried to get hal to use his hidden role) and Leet for not following the instruction of town leadership, but somehow managing to get better results than if he had listened to them. I do want to note though, while Apricity had some good deductions, I think his paranoia and panic ultimately ended up putting town into a risky position. While he caught Von this time, I feel there's also a few cases where Von is town in that scenario and hal just creates additional paranoia and fear in town. (Evident as well when they were considering mislynching Ullar).
Mafia
Oh boy this mafia. I think overall role wise, they had a pretty good chance at victory. However what really didn't help, was by the time deadline was called N1, only one of them wasn't known to town. Because Stealth was redirected to Moody, Amph was one of the people who got the result that William Minerva was mafia. She unfortunately went to hal with this result, which outed her as mafia once stealth claimed.
Meanwhile, with the terrific heal/AG switch. Om room unfortunately claimed to hal and told him that he had swapped heal and AG. This, combined with Dusk's 50/50 of Jalmont and heal, really incriminated heal. I think overall OM room could have became town after that mishap, but because the mafia wanted to take attention off of heal, they had OM room go to hal saying there was a "host mistake" and tried to sway the lynch to be on OM room. Maybe this ultimately jinxed them because of the mistakes I did make, sadly most of them negatively impacted the mafia the most. From there, DLE used his day inspect on Leonard, which should have been blocked because Leonard was in the village, but I had mixed up Mist and Mina while telling the mafia their results and as a result Ampharos was announced to be in the village when it really should have been announced Leonard was.
Then came Von, Von was absolutely the mafia's star. Putting together most of the action plans and trying to propel the mafia forward. Sadly, some of his teammates just didn't really work that well with the group and as a result, the mafia didn't really try to coordinate claims at all. Leading in part to OM room's snafu. But perhaps the biggest error in the mafia's communication came between Von and Heal. Heal, for whatever reason, became absolutely convinced that inferno had his role and that his role (which wasn't submitted as a wolf) was a wolf. He in essence told this to von (which I semi intentionally overlooked), but Von logically didn't act on this. Heal then talked to I think dusk (who knew one of heal/jalmont was mafia) and told dusk he had told Von he thought he knew who the wolf was. Well, Von hadn't told hal this, because, why would mafia tell town they think they know who the wolf is if it doesn't benefit them. This led to a situation where von said he hadn't talked to heal and heal said he had. Something pretty manageable given the excuse of "I didn't realize what you were talking about" but this led hal to demand logs from Von. Well, Von actually had tried in the past to create fake logs with heal, but heal almost entirely ignored von and didn't participate.
From there, the mafia had a bit of a rough journey. They managed to cleverly use OM room's role to let pidge redirect Oddish and Jalmont to DESTROY each other. They then attempted to use von's role to let heal have multiple lynch redirects. Initially I was fine with this, I went back to von's role PM and read the 2nd paragraph and it didn't seem there was anything in that which would stop it. Unfortunately though, von had switched the words night/day in Flyhn's PM, making him think he was a day vig and shot at Von. While I was posting Von's PM, I once again read through it, this time in it's entirety and realized the 1st paragraph said the role could only effect night actions. Even then, because I had presumed it could work with day actions and the lynch redirect, I would have possibly allowed it. If it hadn't been for the fact that the insertion part of the role doesn't insert the word until the following night. So ultimately, I kept it at the per-text instruction which prevented both the night kill and von from dying. Ultimately, just a sad situation as the role creator (Pidge), the person who had the role (Von) and myself didn't really carefully read the role which would have prevented this snafu.
Even despite that all, mafia still had a decent chance of winning going into N3 (aka the hell night). During this night, a lot of contradictory actions happened that I resolved through RNG (an imperfect but fair way to resolve it). Initially, mafia won that RNG which would have meant that OM room was able to swap away Aura Guardians role. But unfortunately, Pidge had made the mistake of having Leonard martyr all actions from him to D38. Meaning that OM was able to swap AG's role, but that role went to D38 (and Flyhn) instead of pidge. Meaning that Leonard had his role stolen, then died. Pretty much sealing the deal for the mafia.
Overall, I'd probably say both the Mafia AND the overall game MVP is
Von. His actions not only led to town being thoroughly moled, but his clever planning and word usage with his meme man role let the mafia still be competitive even after a few mishaps.
The Wolf
Not a ton to say here. A cool role I thought. But also rather weak initially (the base role was only able to curse). So I gave him some protection from inspect roles (largely, both dusk's role and stealth/voopers, and ullars, meaning only the full inspects would find out something was fishy). Also, because the game was thoroughly lacking any form of kill protection outside of BPV's, I gave the only doctor role in the game to the wolf. Which I thought would lead to him fitting comfortable inside town and bidding his time until he had the votes to declare victory.
Unfortunately for him, he was subject to some very unlucky night actions. Inferno randomly hooked him N0, then N1 his action failed because he was targeting someone in Jalmont's village then N2 the mafia fogged him, roleblocking him after town was nice enough to double his action. Then, there was the kind of hilarious mishap where Hal had asked Nuxl to try talking to von as if Nuxl was the wolf. Nuxl interpreted this as he'd been inspected and confessed to hal that he actually was a neutral. He finally managed to do something N3, where he racked up 3 votes from the kills. But that was too little too late and so he quickly bit the dust.
Most hilarious actions
- Hal putting a miller role in the game thinking it would be hilarious to see it get instantly lynched. Then he proceeded to almost auto lynch that role D1.
- DLE playing shogi against leonard, which would have leonards role with the chess one. But then AG switched the results on Leonard to DLE. Meaning DLE swapped his own role....to his own role.
- N2 Stealth/Vooper inspected Ullar. But due to RNG, the town results went to two town members, and then thank to AG, got swapped to the mafia. If Leet hadn't inspected Ullar that night, I think town had a very strong chance of misvigging Ullar which would have severely hurt towns chances.
For those interested, these were all the actions in the game:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...SFo91ACRCMpowQrCRHkmaN1M4k/edit#gid=824148548