The level of spiciness one should experience from a proper VFM.
What's in a VFM?
In a VFM are roles that considered to be very bare bones and not too complicated like the bullshit you'd see out of a Swords game. You've seen these types of roles a lot, such as Cop, Escort, Doctor, Strongman, Goon, etc. In these type of games you're not going to see roles such as Retributionist (or most Power Roles, for that matter), Investigator, Arsonist, Caporegime, etc.
What are we, the Balance Team, tired of seeing?
For starters, Follow the Cop setups, or simply 9p Cop setups. This is your standard 9p game with a Cop, a Doctor, 5 vanilla townies, and 2 goons. Occasionally you'll see a consig or consort thrown in, but that won't do shit really. This is an unfun setup and is considerably broken.
Next is the classic, most barebones setup: 9p Mountainous. This is a really good setup if you want a FM game based entirely on reads and skill rather than PR roles, but this setup is a total 0 on spice factor due to how simple it is. VFMs are meant to be simple, but there's a limit to it in my opinion.
Next is 10p Vig. Simply boring really, due to easy lynches and PoE with shots.
What can I use in a VFM?
Believe it or not, you can use more than just the roles listed in the rolecards thread. Most, if not all of the roles over here at MafiaScum wiki are viable for VFM. Not all of them are, however, so use your common sense when making your setup. Any questions, just ask someone from balance team or just send in the setup for a review.
What roles can I use in a VFM to make it spicy?
Just adding in random roles by themselves won't make the game spicy. To spice up your VFM, your entire setup has to be based around the roles for increased spice. Here are some pretty good examples of spicy setups:
- Would You Like To Be My Neighbor Mafia - The setup consists of 4 pairs of Neighbors, where two of them are pure town and the other two contain one town member and one scum member each, with a 9th player by himself that can confirm himself as Town to one player privately.
- Switch - Switch setup is a game where the stress is constantly on for the Mafia, as their roles are able to completely deactivate the Town's PRs for a night, but the Serial Killer can choose to reverse whatever their actions are for that night. It's a stressful but fun game of WIFOM and risky plays.
- Donner Party - Donner Party is a game where just about all night kills have a Janitor mechanic until those Cannibals who performed the kills are killed themselves by either lynching or being killed in a 1v1 with another Cannibal. Fun setup.
- Pick Your Poison - Pick Your Poison setups are usually pretty fun to play as Scum when it comes to strategizing and setting up the hurdles for you to get over in the game.
- Twin Trap - Setups like this and Switch are great due to the amount of WIFOM and mind games you have to play to be successful with your actions.
- Hope Plus One - Essentially the Anti-FollowTheCop setup. Town is unable to massclaim early on for a quick game and relies on WIFOM from the Doctors.
Another way to spice up roles is with modifiers. Role modifies can range from various things such as Odd/Even Night roles, X-Shot roles, Hated/Loved roles, Weak roles, etc. Similarly, the modifiers here are perfectly acceptable for a VFM.
Heed my Radiohead fueled words, friends, and make some decent VFMs. Love ya~
-Schultz
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