I have some experience in running Mafia games online, via forum posts and private messages for scheming. But I’ve now run across something that’s never happened before, and I’m not entirely sure of the best way to handle it.
It’s the first night, and the Cupid – not a role I’ve used often – has chosen the two players to become the Lovers. She chose person K, one of the three villains in the game; and person F, an innocent… who is also the same person that the villains have already decided to kill this first night.
As far as I can tell, there are two basic options: first, decree that everything happens simultaneously and that therefore both K and F will die as soon as K and friends target and kill F. This doesn’t seem quite fair, however.
Second, I could ask the Cupid to choose a different player to be the Lover along with K, the villain, with or without any explanation as to why. Which seems like a better solution, though it’s still odd. This all happened entirely randomly, after all, so it seems like I should just let the situation play out, bad as it might be for the villains. (They’re having bad luck elsewhere already; the Seer chose a different one of the three to spy on tonight, so basically at the end of the very first night, they’ll have lost one of their number to death and a second will have had her cover blown. But hey, bad luck happens, and I once won a game as the sole surviving villain out of three when the other two died within the first three rounds.)
offhand, i’d say let it happen. those are the breaks.you may want to tell the villain linked to the innocent to suggest another target to the group. after all, love before war.
Actually, until last night, I didn’t even realize there were mafia games being played here – I usually post in Cafe Society and I hadn’t really looked through the games area before. blush
As I said, I don’t often use the Cupid role and I wasn’t sure of the usual procedures for such a case. For one thing, this exact problem can’t happen all that often. Heh. But I couldn’t find anything about a usual order to the events of the night phase, so it seems like everything must happen simultaneously, awkward though that might be in this case…
The way I think about the lovers is that they have a single life. So when one dies the other dies at the same time. It’s a simultaneous action sort of, but only because that’s how the lovers have to work.
When you get a second head over to www.idlemafia.com which is a splinter board that we have dedicated to mafia games. I think a game is starting up over there soonish.
The Cupid role is on Town’s side, right? Because what’s going down as you describe sounds like a best-case scenario for the role, and the player will probably be pissed if you prevent it from happening.
Plus, since you’ve now asked this question on a public forum, there’s a chance one of your players will stumble across it. In which case, both lovers dying is the only resolution that doesn’t involve serious information leakage.
I agree with NAF. Let things play out the way they are.
Though, simultaneous resolution of all actions is not the typical way of resolving, but kills typically are the last thing to resolve, and they usually resolve simultaneously with each other.
So the Cupid should succeed, and the bad guys just get screwed. It happens sometimes. Changing the result on your own is Bastard Mafia, and asking someone to pick a different target is overly meddlesome, is likely to give someone extra info they wouldn’t otherwise have, and is Bastard in its own way.
So yeah, leave things as are, and let the chips fall where they may.
Well, the game isn’t being played out here, it’s on another forum entirely (where I don’t have the same user name, even), so the odds of someone from the game stumbling across this are limited. But yeah, I also didn’t want to seem like I was changing the rules midstream, certainly.
I was just dumbfounded when I realized what was happening. What are the odds, right? Heh. But I guess the Cupid will be happy, at least.
In this case I’d say make the kills simultaneous. It’s only fair.
However, for the next game you run, you may want to put together an ordered list of action resolution. This has some benefits:
It gets you thinking about “action synergy” and it’s effects in the game.
It means all possibilities are covered before the game starts, which excludes any possibility of bias or the need to make subjective calls once the game is already underway.
It many cases it gives you more fine grained control of the actions without revealing too much to the players. eg, If I want to nerf a vigilante and prevent him from being used as a detective role in the post mass claim confirmed v non-confirmed situation, I can make the scum’s night kill resolve before the vig kill.
I also agree with Red about having a listed order of action resolutions for your own reference. It’s helped me immensely in the game I’m currently running on this very page.
Yeah, I think that ideally, the game moderator should never have to make a choice after the game has started. That’s not always possible, of course, since everyone makes mistakes that must be fixed, but you should strive to plan as much in advance as possible, and to have as light a hand as possible in those tweaks.
