Let's improve how we play "Mafia."

The Game Room
1

Now that the most recent game has ended, I wanted to start a general conversation thread where people can talk about strategies, ideas, and concepts without worrying about who’s lynching who! I’m hoping this will be a launching pad for better mafia games, where we can talk about what we like and dislike while we’re all on the same team.

To get things started, there are a couple of things I’d like to bring up. First off, our group definitely subscribes to “Lynch the Loud.” For good or or bad, this has made us predictable, and scum have an easy time skating by with minimal participation. In a perfect world, I’d prefer to see this solved by having the scum more active. However, as long as lurking remains a viable strategy, scum wi continue to thrive by following it. What can we do about this? Is it unavoidable? What do other boards do?

That, by the way, segues to my next topic for discussion. I’ve see new players criticize us (correctly) for being hostile and adverse to new players. Culture shock seems to get people lynched with regularity. What can we do about this? I specifically ignored Visorslash for a few days to avoid letting his play style affect my judgement of him (since I don’t want to scare off new players to our board), but that’s not really a workable solution. In my case, had Visorslash actually been scum, I would have been ignoring a serious threat to my team. So, what can we do about this?

My last concern (for now) are personal attacks. I feel like they have no place in Mafia, and I’ve tried to play that way. I know emotions run high, and our last game was particularly frustrating at times, but we’re all still just playing a game. Sorry to get high-handed here at the end, but it’s the equivalent of attacking someone for buying Boardwalk in Monopoly. Lies, obfuscation, disagreement, different levels of knowledge, secrets, disappointment… These are all part of the game. There’s really no reason to attack a player for playing the game.

So… I’m off my high horse now. What do you guys think? We’ve got a great group of players here, and I genuinely love playingafia with you guys. Let’s elevate our play, talk about the game, and see where that takes us! Feel free to throw out whatever you want about the game.

2

Last game was my first ever game of mafia, and I was overwhelmed to say the least. I was very self conscious and timid and reluctant to say too much.

That said, I think the best answer to the personal attack problem is to develop a game culture that lynches people who make personal attacks. I don’t particularly feel like playing with someone who takes the game so personally that their emotions take over like that. At the same time, we need to be realistic and recognize that feeling frustrated and getting annoyed is also part of the game. Complete meltdowns like what happened at least once in the last game cross that line though. We can name that voting strategy “Lynch the Spoilsport.”

Take my opinion for what it’s worth, which is not much, considering I was the very first lynch in my very first game over. I want to play again, but really complicated games like the last one are definitely beyond my skill level for now.

3

Mosier, you don’t need to disclaim your opinions at all. I’ve been in 9 games, total, so I’m no great expert either. Your opinions are just as valid, so please continue to let us know what you think. Your “outsider” opinion is vital, since I’m hoping mafia games at the SDMB will always be newbie-friendly in spirit, if not always in game mechanics. :smiley:

4

Re Lynch the Loud: on POG, lurking is considered a scum tell, and people are often lynched for it. Yes, you do hit Townies as well, but overall it encourages participation. The last couple of game I’ve played here, scum have not been lurking, so it may not be a good strategy for the Dope.

Begging for signups seems like a bad idea, because it encourages people to play who don’t really have the time. If we played smaller games, we’d have some subs available.

Personal attacks aren’t allowed anywhere else on this board except the Pit. This seems like a mod issue to me. If we don’t want to get board mods involved, then game mods could modkill or apply penalties for personal attacks.

If we want better Mafia games, the best way to do it is to play more Mafia.

5

I agree about modkills for personal attacks. I’m building a game to eventually run (not for a long time… I think we need a break from DND themed games), and I want to add in the rules that personal attacks will be aggressively moderated by me, AND reported to game room mods, and modkilled.

6

On your first point, there is also such a thing as “lynch the lurker”, and for the first Day or two, at least, that seems to often be a major influence on the lynch. Maybe we just need to start giving that more weight, as well as participation compared to a player’s usual baseline.

On the second, I don’t think that it’s actually that we treat newbies harshly. Rather, we treat everyone harshly, and some newbies take it personally. Sometimes, a newbie will get lynched for poor play, in which case it’s an opportunity to learn better play, and sometimes a newbie will melt down from the general background level of suspicion that everyone gets. I think that’s an inherent part of the game: You will be suspected sometimes, even for apparently baseless reasons, and you will be attacked for play that seems counter to the best interests of Town. About all I can see to do here is perhaps to emphasize that in the pre-game a bit more so people won’t be taken by surprise, and so folks who don’t enjoy that sort of game know to stay out.

And I haven’t seen any significant amount of personal attacks (maybe there were some in the most recent game, which I didn’t follow?), so I can’t comment there.

7

The personal attacks have been a recent phenomenon. In (I think) Thrill of the Chase, we had a guy flat-out breaking several board rules in his attacks, really bringing the game down. It’s just been a slowly-simmering thing, I think.

8

By the way, this thread doesn’t need to be about meta things like this. We can also discuss strategies that work, strategies that don’t, and so on.

For instance, something that frustrates me in mafia is when someone has decided you’re scum, and therefore everything you do is scummy.

9

Not entirely sure what its called, but I think its confirmation bias. If someone thinks you’re scum, they will of course interpret your actions in a negative light.

10

You’re spot on, it’s definitely similar to confirmation bias. What drives me nuts is that this often leads people to contort perfectly rational, non-scum behavior into an indicator of scummyness.

11

Since when are we rational people? :smiley:

12

I’m speaking hypothetically here. :smiley:

13

Personal attacks aren’t new. I ditched my first game here due to things getting too yucky. That was in 2007.

Participation has always been a problem too. Not a new phenomenon in the least.

Pace has always been a problem as well. Day One is usually well attended, but we tend to hit a wall at Day 3 or 4.

Board culture does have a big effect I think. In reading Pizza’s game summary I see that he expected Thieves to steal stuff. I think that is a misunderstanding of SDMB protocol. It would not surprise me in the least that (A) SDMB players would avoid becoming a thief (B) Any townie (which was apparently nearly everyone) who was a thief would avoid thievery because thievery would inherently appear scummy.

Finally, I would say that a game with no alignment feedback (or worse only a single scum to catch) is going to create massive amounts of frustration… by design. Frankly, I’m impressed that so many of you kept focus at all.

14

Vanilla games with no death reveal can be quite fun, at least with small games.

And I really wanted to be a thief in that game, I wanted the evil path, and a few others did too.

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What compounds that issue, Sache, is that in the game the only scum was untrackable. So all those trackers would only be catching our (apparently game-critical) thieves. That’s a recipe for a lot of mislynches.

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Are you SDMB? I thought you were from somewhere else originally.

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I am from somewhere else, but I signed up to this one.

18

The only problem with this is that personal attacks are not indicative of scum. And therefore, lynching based on that loses the game. You might argue that it will work in the long term, except that A) you will drive away players by playing non-optimally and B) new players won’t be aware of the policy and will be unaffected by it. I don’t see it as a long term solution.

This is something that has to be mod-controlled. Be willing and able to suspend players for bad behavior (Take a timeout, player X. No posting for 12 hours until you cool down.) Be willing to modkill them. And beyond that, be willing to blacklist them from future games if they can’t keep it under control.

19

Biggest strategy for town: realize that everyone else is most likely to be town, too! In a vacuum, each other person is Town around 75 percent of the time (depending on the setup, obviously). It’s a probablistic game. Use the numbers to your advantage, and work together. Reflexive skepticism is very, very anti-town.

20

Wait, there was only one Scum in that game? That strikes me as terrible game design. If the first, essentially random, lynch happened to hit the Scum, it’d be game over immediately. What fun is that?

Weedy already mentioned this, but I think part of the low-participation problem is people signing up who don’t actually want to play. Consider Idle Thoughts in the Arkham game, who said that he literally only signed up because he felt an obligation to fill the roster. Better for a player to never sign up at all than to sign up and then not play. If this leads to short rosters, then the mods need to either tweak the game to work with fewer players, or wait a little longer in between games.