# Mafia Reunion Game Over: Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen \[edited title\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Thread Games\ **Created:** [April 4, 2017, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710 "2017-04-04T02:19:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![raventhief](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/raventhief/32/4_2.png) [@raventhief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raventhief)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/101 "2017-04-05T04:26:18Z")
> [@Sunny\_Daze](#): > > Hey now, for the record, I was an innocent Newbie. 😛 > > I know **Hoopy Frood** thinks I was playing, but I was actually that much of a naif. I’d like to thank my team mates for putting up with me and helping me out so much on the Mafia Board. If I hadn’t had the team to pester with questions, I wouldn’t have learned nearly as much. Thanks guys! > > I had fun, but I got killed way too early. _shakes fist_ I’d like to try this again. 🙂 > > Thanks everyone. Sunny, the offer has been extended before, but I would like to reiterate - come to GB. join us in more mafia! ---
**Author:** ![sinjin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@sinjin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sinjin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/102 "2017-04-05T04:45:39Z")
> [@Biotop](#): > > Sadly **Sinjin** , this is not so. Almost from the start all LUTHA players played for Town much more than necessary. I understand the need to convince Town that you were not a threat, but after that, you guys continued to play against Scum, something that was very much against the tenets of your stated religion. What did we do to make you treat us this way? > > You did not want to be left alone, you wanted to help Town. So what would any Mafia do after being so unnecessarily disrespected? We retaliated. > > If you go back and read \*\*Nesta \*\*'s posts after he claimed you will see my point. These posts made my blood boil. Why antagonize the teams that might kill you? We actually requested that the mods make **Nesta** ’s death especially graphic to illustrate the point. That’s what the Mafia would do. The mods did not follow through with that, which I totally understand. They couldn’t help us with game color. > > \*\*Sinjin \*\*, when you protected **MHaye** , I thought seriously about killing you extra that night. I could have. As Mook I had a chance to claim one of my dead teammate’s powers (something I never used BTW). I could have one-time killed you as Hitman when your protection of \*\*MHaye \*\* was announced. But I was still hoping Mafia and Lutha could work together. Alas all we could do was die together. You, MAFIA, were the guys who where killing us, did you forget that part? You didn’t offer us a chance to join you; YOU demanded, at end of day no less, that we join you or die. Given that you were killing us already, that we didn’t know who you were, that we didn’t even have a chance to evaluate your threat given late in the Day, how the hell did you expect us to act? Poor, poor planning and execution hon. I was actually considering going with scum for a lot of the game because of how much TOWN appeared to want us dead. But YOU guys were the ones killing us. We had no power, no communications, we didn’t even know each others roles. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 11:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/103 "2017-04-05T11:29:20Z")
I don’t see myself participating in a game this size again, either. When I was looking for all the switch claims, I realized that I simply had no memory of a lot of what happened in the first few days. Some of it was because there were too many conversations keep track of, but I also found myself being surprised at some of what I wrote. Just too much to deal with. ---
**Author:** ![NAF1138](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naf1138/32/3245_2.png) [@NAF1138](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NAF1138)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 11:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/104 "2017-04-05T11:41:22Z")
I don’t know that we could get enough people to sign up for another game this size anyway. Even this game wasn’t actually a game this size as we had something like 12 people drop out over the course of things. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/105 "2017-04-05T13:23:34Z")
> [@Mafia REUNION observation and comments ie the FORBIDDEN THREAD](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/410): > > Well deserved. Awesome game, **Johnny!** > > I was torn in that my gut was telling me Biotop was scum, but voting patterns told me that you were. The last time I was in that situation, at F3 in Death of Mother Nature, I went with my gut and lost, so I went the other way this time and …would have lost. “Try again, fail better”. Didn’t see a reason to bump a different thread. In a couple of weeks, I intend to go back and reread the game. I’ve never had so many people (y’all in the unspoiled thread but also scum in their private forums) incorrectly peg me as scum. I suspect it’s just because it’s been a long time since I played with this particular group of people and my usual style translated to scummy. Or it may be that my suspicion of a 3P was against the accepted meta of this group. Or it may be that my play was straight scummy until late game and I never realized it. Certainly a combination, but I wonder about the ratios. The really weird thing is that, despite it all, I never came under any real lynch pressure until the extreme endgame and even then Biotop was still the (slightly) stronger candidate. ---
**Author:** ![sachertorte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sachertorte/32/3727_2.png) [@sachertorte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sachertorte)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/106 "2017-04-05T14:51:42Z")
> [@Hawkeyeop](#): > > I think third party are inherently pro-town. They may lower the town’s odds of winning, but they hurt scum. And in a game that is 3+ parties, everyone is a third party, and thus pro-town. > > Basically take a game that is balanced between town and scum and add Lutha and I think it becomes 60-40 towards town, maybe more. Add a third scum team, and I’ll put it at 50-25-25. It hurts town, but hurts scum more. Add a serial killer and say we go to 49-24-24-3. > > There are two basic reasons for this. One is player motivation and most clearly happened with the Lutha. Finding scum is the most satisfying thing to accomplish in a mafia. Passively surviving isn’t especially interesting. So Lutha basically became town members, some ignoring their own role entirely, because it was the most interesting thing they could do, and in essence added a 5 person masonry to town. Even scum can have the fun of finding scum tells of the other side in this setup, helping town. I also think the majority of people tend like to think themselves as town even when not. Cookies didn’t help town on her way out, but plenty of other 3rd parties would have, and often they have lots of information to share. > > The other issue is communication. Everyone can talk to town, which means they can work with town. So lets say you are the mafia. You have not just town looking for you during the day. You also have wolves, Lutha, and the serial killer working on it, because everyone wants to look pro-town. Lutha can make deals with town. The town has enemies that can’t talk to each other, so they can’t work together. They can’t share information, make plans, or coordinate. They are left to make desperate plays like Texcat did on the way out in order to communicate with other groups. > > The communication issue is easy to fix. Just let everyone talk to each other. Imagine if the Lutha and mafia could have negotiate in private. Or wolves and mafia. Or the SK and anyone else. The mechanism isn’t that important, just that they have the ability to pass information. It would give all sides difficult questions on who to trust and what to share. I also think, as a reader, they would be fascinating threads to read. > > The motivation part is a little harder. I think you need to give all third parties something more interesting to do than hunt scum, and that can be hard to pull off. I agree with pretty much all of this. I recall a Conspiracy game where one non-Town faction was beat down pretty far and the remaining member of that faction worked towards a Town win rather openly. The one thing I don’t know if I agree with is the private communication. Private communication is fine and all, I guess, but at a certain point the game shifts away from mafia and becomes something else (mazalatan). That is fine, but it isn’t ‘mafia,’ private coordination isn’t something that can be thwarted. If two factions decide to team up privately, there is little to nothing the other can do. At that point you would need some sort of Town-scum communication to try to undermine any scum-scum communication and coalition, which is getting a bit crazy. I’m not sure I see a strong benefit to having two scum factions. It certainly is a change of pace, but I don’t know that it is worth the negatives. For all the reasons hawkeyeop states, the additional scum faction is problematic. For example, in classical mafia, the goal of scum is to become ‘trusted town,’ but in a two scum faction game, becoming ‘trusted town’ is a recipe for getting killed by the other scum faction. Not necessarily a bad thing, but as Hawkeyeop stated, tends to help Town. My takeaway is that bigger isn’t better when it comes to mafia games. Too many players bogs down the early days. Too many players makes the game too long. I think a game lifetime of about 6 weeks is probably good. 6 lynches, 6 Nightkills, maybe a few vig kills and a few SK kills and we are looking at a 18-20 player game. Pretty much what has been our bread and butter all these years. ---
**Author:** ![Biotop](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biotop/32/321_2.png) [@Biotop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biotop)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/107 "2017-04-05T15:44:27Z")
> [@sinjin](#): > > You, MAFIA, were the guys who where killing us, did you forget that part? You didn’t offer us a chance to join you; YOU demanded, at end of day no less, that we join you or die. Given that you were killing us already, that we didn’t know who you were, that we didn’t even have a chance to evaluate your threat given late in the Day, how the hell did you expect us to act? Poor, poor planning and execution hon. > > I was actually considering going with scum for a lot of the game because of how much TOWN appeared to want us dead. But YOU guys were the ones killing us. > > We had no power, no communications, we didn’t even know each others roles. Of course we killed you. We are the Mafia. That’s what we do. Please see several famous books and movies for confirmation. I appreciate your dilemma, **Sinjin** , but you guys gave us little choice. LUTHA needed to show Town they were not a threat. I completely understand that. But your teammates’ play (and yours, unfortunately) betrayed the very basis of your religion. For strategy, we had to keep the number of LUTHA equal to or less than Mafia. This was not personal, it was business. You guys also benefitted from us killing one of you because it pretty much confirmed to Town that you were who you said you were. Had Lutha not been so anti-Scum after it was necessary to be, we could have kept your numbers higher. But the rabid anti-Scum posting (again, see \*\*Nesta \*\*after he claimed) convinced us that Lutha would not have helped us unless forced. **Sinjin** , what did you do with your one use power? You protected Town watcher **MHaye**. You did this on the very Day we had finally decided to kill him. You had a once-available protection and you used it late in the game to protect a Town power. This angered us. I can point to several anti-Scum posts from several Lutha Members after it was no longer necessary to worry about Town lynch. I can also point to posts where the same LUTHA players lament about not being left alone. Do you not see the disconnect? Unlike Mafia, it should not have mattered to LUTHA that their members were getting killed. All you folks needed was to have one member alive at the end. Anything else was fat. Maybe among all those Pontiffs and Deacons and whatnot your Cult should have had a Theologian. Cult members dying for their cause is a symbolic and traditional act for religions. Please see several famous books and movies for confirmation. You should have been proud, even celebratory, of your teammates’ deaths. You guys consistently sided with Town. Though we lost, we at least settled this matter of Family business at the end. ---
**Author:** ![Hoopy\_Frood](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hoopy_frood/32/8452_2.png) [@Hoopy\_Frood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hoopy_Frood)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2017, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/108 "2017-04-05T21:08:58Z")
> [@Johnny\_Bravo](#): > > Or it may be that my suspicion of a 3P was against the accepted meta of this group. As one of the more vocal ones on the opposite side of that fence from you, I never found you scummy for that. Because unlike pretty much everyone else (who lazily voted for them), you went full out into why you thought they needed to die. I don’t recall ever thinking you were all that scummy while I was alive. Sure, I frequently disagreed with you on things, but you never pinged me. I might have shot you eventually since you were getting a lot of votes and removing distractions is not a bad strategy when you’ve got no one better to shoot at, but I had a lot of other people to work through first. ---
**Author:** ![ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710/109 "2017-05-18T06:57:42Z")
What? I’m only a month and a half late. Thanks for putting this game together, marvelous mods, and for herding us kittens along. I had a PFK solo survivalist role and I dropped bodies to pretty much every other factions’ benefit on my way. Sharing my actions and perfect information in a way that helped anyone didn’t seem fair. Why didn’t you help me? 😉 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-game-over-goodbye-farewell-and-amen-edited-title/783710.md?page=5)