Town wins!

Congratulations to Mag1cman, ILikePie5, Kohai, Vader, and Mag2cman/Mikal/Casey_Risk.

Most Valuable Player: Pie

If for nothing else, then for making the right call in the final three. It was observant of you to note in day 5 that Rex, who had flipped scum, voted for Wryly on day 3, refuting whiteflame's point that scum would have known due to their fake-claims list that Wryly was a third-party and lynched Pie to set up Wryly's auto-lynch on day 4. This was a textbook case of, "Sometimes the truth is stupid." Scum apparently forgot about the fake-claims list. I know that people were surprised at a neutral being in this setup, but scum knew Wryly was not one of them and had mod confirmation that she was lying about her character.

That spectacular oversight notwithstanding, I almost want to call whiteflame a candidate for MVP due to his useful theme analysis on day 1, his success at keeping suspicion off of himself after conversion, and his late-game attempts to shift the scumlight to Vader that came shockingly close to succeeding. I suppose it would be against standard operating procedure to award MVP to anyone on a losing team.

Night Actions

Night 1

1. Mikal substitutes for Casey overnight.
2. Mag1c doctors Wryly.
3. Vader redirects Mikal to Mag1c.
4. Mikal inspects Pie, is redirected to Mag1c, and receives a positive result because Mag1c was visited by Vader's Redirector and Rex's contract offer.
5. Wryly waives her Commuter.
6. Rex correctly guesses Mag1c as Madoka, whiteflame as Homura, and Pie as Mami, in that order, then incorrectly guesses Kohai as Sayaka. (If you don't know what this means, see details of Kyubey's recruitment mechanic below.)
7. Rex submits the following ranked-choice list for recruitment: whiteflame, Mag1c, Kohai, Pie, Wryly, Casey, Vader. (He was only told that Wryly was the unrecruitable player after he submitted the list.)
8. whiteflame, Kohai, Vader, and Mikal accept the contract. (Kohai changes his mind, but, in keeping with the lore, there are no backsies.) Mag1c and Pie decline. (Isn't that redundant to point out?)
9. whiteflame, as the first accepting player on the recruitment list, is converted to scum.
10. Since someone higher than Wryly on the recruitment list accepted the contract, she does not get a choice of dayvig.
11. Rex acquires Madoka's 1x Permanent Roleblock and uses it on Pie. It does nothing because Pie's Bulletproof is passive.

Night 2

1. whiteflame kills Mag1c with Juggernaut.
2. Mag1c doctors Mikal.
3. Vader waives his redirect.
4. Mikal inspects Pie and gets a negative result.
5. Wryly Commutes.
6. Mag1c, having died, reincarnates as Mag2c and substitutes for Mikal overnight.

Night 3

1. whiteflame kills Mag2c.
2. Vader redirects Kohai to Rex.
3. Vader is randomly chosen to receive his choice of Permanent Roleblock or Rolecop, to be used that night only, from Kriemhild Gretchen. He chooses Rolecop and uses it on Rex. (Vader was also the witch's mislynch target. I rolled the witch target and who got its ability separately. It's a coincidence that Vader got both. Check out post #28 from day 1. Wryly made the most accurate observation in the game.)
4. Mag2c inspects Rex and gets a positive result because Vader's Rolecop visited Rex, but, alas, he cannot share this information on account of dying.

Night 4

1. whiteflame kills Kohai.

Lessons Learned

This game was the third I have run, the second I have run online, and the first with non-basic roles, without co-mods, or without having someone sign off on the setup. That in mind, I daresay that I made a good first impression, and that people enjoyed playing my setup. I made mistakes, including serious ones, and my goal is to learn not only from what went wrong, but from what could have gone wrong, so I can make my future games better without avoiding unique, flavorful mechanics like I had so much fun designing in this game.

A few concrete lessons in setup design that I learned from this game:

1. All characters, or at least all townies and all neutrals who are likely to claim their real character, need watertight justifications that can be clearly understood by someone who knows nothing about the source material. This was a problem for Kohai / Hitomi.
2. Ensure that it is impossible or very unlikely for the game to reach a state where there are no night actions, or far fewer night actions than the number of players. The only action on night 4 was the night-kill.
3. Ensure that the loss of a single player can never deprive town of an entire category of power, especially not investigation. When whiteflame's conversion deprived town of its Cop, they lost most of their investigative power, and got compensation in the form of a Rolecop only by the luck of Madoka becoming the witch. Kyoko's weakness was a separate mistake that I will talk about later.

If you had told me any of these things before the game, I probably would have replied, "Well, yeah, duh", so I suppose the real lesson is to be more vigilant about following simple sanity-checks.

Setup Design

I don't remember every thought I had while making this setup or when I made every change, but I believe that everything I have written below is correct.

The theme split, so to speak, was that the girls started as non-magical, and Kyubey could convert them into magical girls, after which they might eventually fight Walpurgisnacht. While not everything fits, I would describe this game's lore as mostly the first timeline in episode 10, including things that happened before the time loop, with characters being drawn from different points in that timeline.

I originally wanted to theme this game as the first timeline in Episode 10, but I changed it because I couldn't find pictures for all the characters' role cards. Even after dropping that idea, my selection was none too varied since the only time Homura appears in the show before becoming a magical girl is in that first timeline, and for Mami and Kyoko, I was limited to one brief flashback each. (Of magical girl Hitomi, wickedest of magical screenshots, we shall not speak nor give direction.)

I was extremely miffed earlier because I thought nobody noticed that all the role cards had pre-magical girl pictures, but apparently whiteflame did catch it. All my effort was not for naught.

I wanted to give Hitomi's Emissary to Homura because, in one of the timelines in Episode 10, she went back in time to tell the other girls that Kyubey duped them, but that wouldn't fit with the theme since Homura was already a magical girl. I shifted it to Hitomi because I wanted it in the game and didn't have any better ideas for her role, and, completely my fault, I did not give her a justification for it. The Emissary was supposed to turn day 1 into a battleground, since they would know that claiming characters would harm town, whereas Kyubey would want to elicit character claims to help recruitment. I knew this role could make the game swingy since scum's options for conversion would largely be decided by how many characters they could figure out, but I included it anyway because I really hoped that it would make for a spectacular tug-of-war. Alas, the battle of claims never materialized, maybe because Rex only posted a few times on day 1, but maybe also because Kohai's warning against character-claiming matched with some people's suspicion of a recruiter. By the way, Mag1c, you were right that I was stretching jargon by calling this Emissary. I had seen Emissary in Pie's Ranger's Apprentice game, thought this was similar, and didn't know what else to call it.

Hitomi probably should have been Popular. It would have fit with Hitomi being a rich girl, giving Kohai some justification where he had none, and, when people inevitably tested his Popular claim, it would have baited votes that could have triggered his hidden ability.

Kyoko's role was probably the worst mistake in this setup. I was going to give her a solid investigative role, probably 1x Tracker/1x Watcher or every-night Watcher, but I was afraid that it could make the setup too swingy because she could see the conversion if she was lucky. I could have Ninjafied the conversion, but I felt like either would defeat the point of Tracker/Watcher, so I gave Kyoko a much weaker substitute. I probably should have, at most, made her ability unusable on night 1 like I did with Homura's Cop, and effectively with Mag1c's Doctor since recruitment replaced the kill on night 1.

Between a Doctor, 1x Bulletproof, and 1x Commuter, I wonder if I included too many protective roles.

I don't know whether or not including a third-party was a good choice, but I thought it was a cool way of working in the lore element of magical girls fighting witches, and I designed Walpurgisnacht to set them up for conflict with scum. The obvious part of that was their possible dayvig. I also figured that scum would infer that they were likely a third-party after learning they were unrecruitable, and I gave Walpurgisnacht and scum the same fake-claim list and warned both of them that the other had the same list. I figured that this could make all of them more cautious about claiming anything on there: Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung. It played out more violently than I anticipated. If only because of the flavor I was going for, I don't believe it was bad form of Wryly to out Rex as lying about his character. She asked me if it was alright, and I said, well, witches and magical girls fight each other, so you might as well screw them over.

Sayaka had a hidden justification, so to speak. She succumbs to despair in part because she believes that her actions harmed her friends, so I gave her a role liable to hurt town, although potentially usable for good. Pie was right to call it negative utility (day 3, post #87). Homura's recruitment made Sayaka an even bigger contra-asset, since Sayaka's main way to help town would have been by moving the night-kill somewhere better, and Homura, being a perma-Commuter, was immune to this.

Speaking of Homura's Perma-Commuter, I think it was more powerful than I anticipated. I meant Madoka to be scum's prize role, and it was no good for town that Mag1c/Madoka tripped the wire for Hitomi's hidden ability, but scum may have been better off recruiting Homura and acquiring one of Madoka's abilities than they would have been recruiting Madoka.

I probably should have revealed Kyubey's recruitment mechanic when he died, regardless of when or why. I made it only reveal if he died on day 1 so he would have extra incentive to avoid being lynched on day 1, but the inevitability of being relynched on day 2 was probably enough motivation. Pie was right that not knowing how the recruitment mechanic worked made it much harder to form retrospective reads.

Recruitment mechanic

Is this the recruitment mechanic that launched a thousand ships' worth of speculation? Yes, yes it is. In its original form:

Conversion mechanic

On night 1, you must convert a player to scum. Note that you cannot die before then. Conversion replaces the night-kill.

The conversion action targets the player you convert, but cannot be blocked, redirected, or otherwise interfered with. Conversion takes place before other night actions. If the converted player had declared a night action, it is canceled. Upon being converted, the player loses their current ability, if any, and gains a new one.

Before conversion, you may guess a player's character. You will then learn that player's character and what abilities they will gain upon conversion, but not their current ability. If you guessed correctly, you can do this again, and so on until you guess incorrectly. If that player was unconvertible, you can use this ability again as though you had guessed correctly.

You then list all players but yourself in the order you will offer to convert them. The first convertible player on the list will receive this message, which is fully true but conveniently leaves out that accepting the offer will scummify them:

If that player declines, the next player will receive the same offer. If all convertible players decline, Mami will be converted. One player is unconvertible, and will be skipped in your list.

After conversion, you must choose one player you did not convert. You will learn which abilities they would have gained if converted and choose one of them to gain for yourself. If that player is unrecruitable, you must choose again.

On night 1, you can use the ability you gain, but the person you convert cannot use an ability they gained.

I originally planned to send contract offers one at a time, so if one person declined, then the next person got it, and so on. When the time came, I got scared that the night phase might not end in time if I did it that way, so, with Rex's blessing, I sent them out simultaneously and added a disclaimer that the contract might fail even if you accept it. The fail condition was just if someone higher on Rex's ranked-choice list had accepted.

Game analysis

I'm not going to analyze the game much in this post for two reasons. One, it's way past even my bedtime and I want this post out before I go to sleep. Two, I bet that what y'all can say about the game is better than what I could because, dare I admit it, I wasn't paying that much attention in some parts. I will be glad to discuss the game with y'all tomorrow once I return from the land of Nod. In the meantime, a few notes.

Kohai's Emissary was warning against the character-guessing part of Kyubey's recruitment mechanic. Rex got a lucky guess on whiteflame/Homura and a lucky semi-informed guess on Pie/Mami. He figured that Pie, who had complained about the show being creepy, probably had a very young-looking character, so he guessed Mami because he thought she looked babydoll-like. Ironic since Mami is probably the oldest of the bunch and is a big-sister figure to Madoka and Sayaka.

Do y'all know how hard I had to bite my tongue to say nothing when scum missed that Wryly had to be lying about her character? I'm going to be tasting iron for weeks.

If this is still a point of confusion to anyone, all recruitable players got the same contract offer. The only difference was that whiteflame got his disclaimer about how the contract might fail even if he accepted it in a separate message, since he was first on the recruitment list and I decided to send contract offers simultaneously after he got his. Vader's talk about there being two types of contract was based on a misunderstanding. The hidden abilities mentioned in the contract were the ones you would gain upon conversion. They had nothing to do with the hidden abilities mentioned in the day 1 OP, which were the ones that Hitomi and Walpurgisnacht had. I apologize if I was unclear.