Just cause they asked.
If you ask me, that Blaster Master looks mighty scummy!
You call this a thread…BAH!
I kinda wish the thread that didn’t have my name in the title had stayed open, but what’re you gonna do? 
CURSES!!!..you may have won this time Queuing…but the next thread will be mine!
That’s OK; I’ve modified the title to make it more clear anyway.
I’ll copy my post from the other thread here since it pertains to Mafia III, not II…
I hate to be a backseat hitman, but… oh wait, that’s what this thread is for. I’m not an expert on this game, but in modesty I do consider myself an expert on games in general. I’ve been watching all three games with interest, and while the latest version has some interesting ideas, unfortunately I think there are a few flaws. Specifically the Do-Gooder and the Night Watchman. Both are excellent in flavor, but lacking in rules execution.
The problem with the Do-Gooder is that they have no power other than being un-corruptable. Thus, they don’t really have a “tell” of any kind, so the Mafia is completely shooting in the dark. It’s essentially a random chance that their ONE AND ONLY recruitment doesn’t work. Seems a bit lacking as a “power role”.
The Night Watchman is really cool in concept, but again, with no “tell,” the result is a random 1 in 6 chance that the mafia kill fails as long as the NW is alive. Which is kind of disappointing for such a flavorful addition.
So, do I have a way to fix them or am I just bitching? Well, I have some suggestions. I would first of all give the Do-gooder some other power. I don’t know what, but something that would encourage them to behave differently enough that the mafia has some slim chance of figuring it out. Or combine the do-gooder with another existing role. (Do-gooder detective, or Do-gooder Mason for example)
For the Night Watchman, I would make the locations matter more. Maybe make some sort of system whereby the players have to publicly declare where they will be that night, and then the Watchman has to make his choice.
Now you’d have to make sure that they don’t break the system by everyone going to one place and having the watchman always protect that place. So there would have to be some limit on how many people fit in one place, which would have to be based somehow on the number of remaining players, lest the limit become obsolete when the number of players drops.
Then you have the issue that the NW just became a super-powerful doctor. So you’d have to limit his powers somehow. Maybe make him change locations every night, or only work on a limited number of nights. I’m not sure. This is a work in progress here…
You might make things even more flavorful by requiring the mafia to have at least one member on site to make the kill. That would certainly give the town a lot to analyze, and also make the mafia’s choices a bit harder. But if you did that, you probably need less locations total so that the mafia isn’t found immediately when 12 people are spread across 6 locations.
In the end, I don’t know if the book-keeping of who is where would detract from the game, and I’m not expecting the mod to make any changes now that it’s started (and certainly not recommending you use my suggestions in this half-baked form). Just making an observation and suggestion for future discussion…
Thoughts?
Thanks!
And gonzoron, thanks very much for your thoughts; I’m interested to see how the roles will work. I fully admit that the Do-Gooder role is entirely a balancing for the Mafia’s recruitment ability, so the Mafia can’t just wait until endgame and recruit someone with impunity. To that end, I don’t know that the Do-Gooder needs any additional powers.
As for the Night Watchman, I put him in just for a little extra randomness…so the Mafia’s not ensured of killing someone every night, and so they won’t necessarily know that a failed killing was due to the protection of the Doctor. I think it adds an extra layer of Rock-Paper-Scissors Cat and Mouse, if you don’t mind me mixing my metaphors horrendously, without complicating things unnecessarily. To put it another way, I’m not intending that the game be won or lost on the Mafia’s ability to figure out who the Night Watchman is. Given their ability to recruit, however, it made sense to put an additional role or two in there whose presence would serve the hamper the Mafia’s efforts.
Like I said, I’m interested to see how it works out. It may be that we decide that neither role should ever be repeated in future games, at least as they’re currently described.
I do like your proposed twists; I think they’d make a fascinating game in their own right.
Make a Fire Marshall Role 
Aaaaaand she’s off!
I can’t believe that of all the things SDMB offers me, it is this game that finally gets me to register (subscription to occur later tonight).
Anyway, I’m glad you guys started a new game. I very much enjoy reading the game threads and watching what happens. I don’t really know why, but I find the whole thing facinating.
As for this latest iteration, here are my comments (comments, not criticism!):
I like the nightwatchman. Totally random, yes, but adds nice flavor without impacting the balance too much.
I don’t think I like the recruitment idea as much. I think the ability is too powerful. Clearly, the optimal use of the recruitment is to wait until the second to last mafia gets lynched, then that night the final mafia recruits. Since the mafia obviously won’t recruit a dead person, delaying recruitment as long as possible essentially assures the safety of the recruit until recruited. (Did that make sense?) In otherwords, the best thing for the mafia to do is to wait as long as possible to recruit, but there is no balancing effect to push the mafia towards needing to recruit earlier. If instead the ability to recruit was tied to a specific mafia player, then there would be better balance as the mafia would need to consider the possiblity of that player not surviving to the next night. So they must consider, recruit now and possibly have the recruit lynched by the town? or delay and possibly lose the ability to recruit if the recruiter gets killed?
I also think recruitment has a large variance in the game. Presumably the game is balanced in number of mafia to account for the recruitment ability, if the mafia recruits the do-gooder, then they are pretty much screwed. If the mafia recruit a mason, the town is pretty much screwed. Very wide variance in the application of this ability. I’d hate to see the game won or lost simply by who the mafia end up targetting with recruitment.
Finally, recruitment changes the win condition of a player. I’d be annoyed if I was rooting out mafia, playing a really good game, and about to win the game only to be recruited near the end and wind up losing because of it.
I find the entire topic of this game’s design and balance to be rather facinating, so please forgive the overanalysis.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. It will be interesting to see how the whole thing pans out. And I’m happy that there are no beat cops!
Good idea about only one player (the Godfather) being able to recruit. From what I understand, that is the major balance factor in vampire theme games, where recruitment is the usual night activity, instead of night kills by the scum.
You start off with a vampire king, (maybe with a few guards to start with,) and the king can turn one townsperson to the vampires each night. However, once the king is staked, the vampires cannot increase their number or harm the townspeople at night.
I do agree with your analysis about delaying recruitment, and will add another detail - the longer the mafia wait, the more opportunities there are for ‘known town’ of hopefully non-do-gooder status to be exposed.
Then, the family can recruit one of them, and hopefully the new convert won’t be suspected much until it’s too late.
Am I missing something or wouldn’t it be best for the Mafia to recruit every time?
Thanks for the thoughts, sachertorte. And thanks for registering! Welcome aboard.
I’ve got to jet at the moment, so I can’t respond in as detailed a manner as I’d like. I agree with you that recruitment is potentially very powerful, which is why I tried to counterbalance it at least a little bit with the Do-Gooders. And you’re right that it might be unsettling for someone to get recruited and have their win condition change. Because of those and other considerations, it’s certainly possible that putting recruitment into a game is, on balance, a bad idea. Which is why I’m so interested to see how this goes. I did have one question for you, though. You say:
Why is that so? It seems like it doesn’t give the Mafia much of a leg up, does it? It narrows down their potential targets for power roles, I suppose, but is it that damaging to the prospects of the town?
Also, it’s interesting that the posters have pretty well unanimously so far agreed that lynching nobody on the first day is a very bad idea. I don’t know if I agree with that, given that statistically speaking you’re far more likely to lynch a townie than a Mafia with so little information. If I was the Town in a game like this, I’d FOS a bunch of people during Day One while keeping the prospect of lynching on the table, and then ultimately lynch no one and wait to see what the Mafia does during the night. Then you’ve got a bunch of information out there from the Day One suspicions, but only one townie dead rather than (probably) two…and a whole 'nother day in which your initial suspicions can be validated or otherwise bear fruit. Does that make any sense, or is lynching no one really as bad a play as everyone assumes it is?
They can’t. It’s a one-time option. If they’ve recruited once already in the game, (or tried to,) then they can’t do it again.
MadTheSwine:
It’s a one time only shot, even if it fails.
chrisk:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Of course, if they get a bead on someone they think has a power role—specifically the Doctor or the Detective—they should recruit them as soon as possible to minimize the damage they can do.
I think that the ‘accepted wisdom’ among mafia circles is that this sort of tactic is of limited usefulness, because getting information from the dialog and the FOS-ing is all so very subjective. Killing someone and finding out for sure what their role is is hard intel, no matter how much it costs the town to acquire.
Or that’s how I understand it.
Ok,so I guess I was missing something then.
Hmm… interesting point. Also prompts a question:
If a power role is recruited, do they lose that special status in the process of becoming ‘full-fledged Mafia’? Of course, the doctor working for the mafia doesn’t make much sense without a SK running around - but I love the idea of a detective using his investigations on behalf of the godfather. 
Probably that’d be too unbalancing, and thus he’d lose his special role powers.
I believe (and it is only a belief) that masons are pretty much unlynchable. Masons are the easiest “living confirmed town” in the game. The only time a mason gets lynched is when there is a counter-claim. If the mafia recruits a mason, the town will not lynch the mason because the other masons will confim masonhood. Of course the town knows that the masons could have been recruited, but there is no way to know that a mason was recruited or which one. The town will be in a very difficult place if a mason gets recruited. What is worse, as we have seen in both previous games, outing a mason will happen at some point. The mafia will clearly have the opportunity to recruit a known mason, and I’m guessing that the set of masons and the set of do-gooders have a null intersection.
Oooh, that might have been a better balance, get rid of do-gooders and just make masons unrecruitable.
If it is too unbalancing, I guess we’ll find out, 'cause the way I’ve got it working he retains his role powers and becomes corrupt.
True, but the information gained from the dialogue and the FOS-ing can come in real handy later, once people start getting killed. Of course, if the Mafia don’t actually believe that anyone will be lynched the first day, they have no reason to say anything that’s of any value anyway, so maybe that threat needs to be there regardless.