Masquerade Implementation

This is assorted notes for how Masquerades actually work in the game as currently programmed, their concept doc is here. You probably want this if you're implementing new masquerades or fine tuning their balance.

Authoring

Mask selection

A masquerade's mask collection is defined by a list of masks to add and remove at given player counts:

...
  6: ["#Traitors", "ESInfiltrator", "#Oracles"]
  7: ["#Softsafes"]
  8: ["ESVIP"]
  10: ["-#ESInfiltrator", "#Traitors"]
...

Each entry has a list of "masquerade entries" (MasqueradeEntry). Masquerade entries come in two forms, a list of masks to pick from (Foo/Bar/Baz, Foo, etc.), in which case it picks one with equal probability, and a maskset to use (#MaskSet), in which case it has the mask set pick a mask. What masks an entry represents is not decided until round start time, and until then they remain "unresolved". You can prefix an entry with a - to remove that many masks from the final tally (for example -Foo/Bar/Baz would remove a single Foo/Bar/Baz, or decrement a Foo/Bar/Baz(2)), and can suffix an entry with a number of times to repeat it in ( ), for example #MaskSet(2) or Foo(2).

Some examples:

Foo/Bar/Baz(2) Pick a random mask; Foo, Bar, or Baz; twice.
-Foo/Bar/Baz Remove one Foo/Bar/Baz from the tally, one less mask will be picked from that set.
#Traitors Pick a mask from the "Traitors" mask set, how this is done is determined by the mask set itself.
-#Traitors Removes one pick from the Traitors mask set.

If you, for example, wanted to swap out a specific role entry (say, ESVIP) for another (let's say #Softsafes), you would do

  69: ["-ESVIP", "#Softsafes"]

to remove the entry and add a new one in the same list. The order does not matter.

Note that subtraction works on exact match. If you have an entry Foo/Bar/Baz and then try to -Foo/Bar, that subtraction would not affect Foo/Bar/Baz at all, only an exactly matching Foo/Bar entry. The number of times to repeat the entry (3) is not considered as part of whether an entry matches another entry, and duplicate entries are automatically summed.

Mask Sets

A mask set is a collection of masks to pick from (like Foo/Bar/Baz is) with much finer control. Mask sets are prototypes, and can either use a weighted list of masks to pick from, or special mask set providers like ESTroupeMasksProvider to determine what masks they contain.

Balance

Traitor Masquerade Balance

Currently, traitor rounds are expected to have no fewer than 2 traitors at 6 players, and the "baseline" for traitors is one every six players, starting at 13 (so a new traitor at 13, 19, 25, and 31 players). Additionally, one "high strength" traitor (the PowerTraitors maskset, as of writing) may be introduced at the 20-22 player mark. These are not hard rules, just the guidelines currently followed as of writing.

Minimum and maximum players

The minimum one can feasibly play the game with is around 6, and masquerades aren't required to support more than 35 players. Masquerades for smaller player counts likely need very specific focus and design around those player counts, as the game doesn't really work with so few people.

Keyboard shortcuts