Maybe instead of free communication, a scum role that can send one message/cycle to the highest-ranking living member of the other team (or just posted directly on their board).
Make it a message to the recipient of their choosing: Posted on the regular game board for Town, on the other Scum team’s Scum board, or to the third parties. In a multi-faction game, any two factions might potentially want to (temporarily) ally, after all.
Or maybe just make it a PM to the named player of their choice. That’d still allow for some coordination, but they’d need to guess who the other team is to send it to.
I recall a game where players could write graffiti at Night, so that their messages would be public (i.e. put in the Day opening color) but anonymous the next Day. That would make it a little less powerful, since Town would also be able to read any communications between them.
That was Storyteller’s game here. It was my first game of Mafia ever and I somehow drew the Alpha Wolf role.
Actually I think this would have been amazing. Not full communication maybe, but a message per real life day or something via proxy. I genuinely think both teams would be too paranoid to coordinate well enough to (for example) share names of team mates.
4 months ago today, NAF, story, and I started planning this game. It really has been a great collaborative achievement and journey.
Oh yeah, we absolutely were only 95% ready. But next time will be better. I kind of dig the idea of opening communication lines. Maybe we keep the switches too but totally open mechanics.
But doing another game with 2 open scum teams, open town roles and then a large number of hidden third parties… I like that basic structure.
Yes, and I’m aware the switches were not popular this go around. I think that their “fun factor” relies on their existence and powers open to the whole game.
Me too. If we are rerunning this in several months I think we should take this idea.
If switches are fully open, though, then one holder will know when the other dies. Which means that if switches are held by opponents of the power, then all power roles are neutered as soon as either switch-holder dies.
And of course if there’s any cross-faction communication allowed, as is being discussed here, then the whole switch concept becomes completely unworkable. First message from Wolves to Mafia: “We have the Doctor, Detective, and Watcher switches (held by Alpha, Beta, and Outrider, respectively). We will flip our switches every cycle, so if you have the matching switches, don’t touch them until out corresponding role is dead”. And poof, suddenly Town has no power roles.
I’d probably get rid of the switches entirely. Too much overhead in mod terms vs not a huge pay off in terms of extra player enjoyment.
This is a good point. The ability of players to gain information via the switches or strategize around them was severely limited by the lack of public knowledge of their state or how many remained. (Also, the early discussion of how they worked had me banging my head on my desk. In part because their method of operation seemed clear enough to me and in part because knowing more wouldn’t have allowed any more strategy around them.)
So Cookies, I understand it was your role to play however you wish, but why were you so against giving us any information after being caught red handed?
I figured it was something like that, but the win conditions as stated don’t support such an interpretation.
If you are going to repeat, I’m happy to proofread the ruleset before-hand.
We would welcome the extra set of eyes
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.
Yeah, though I am pretty happy with by scumdar giving most of it was off the cuff.
And I’d love to have help. I want to take a little break to cool off, but I’ll send you what I have when I’m up and running. To give you/everyone a preview, one idea I’ve been considering is that to have a closed game in which every player knows one other role that is in the game.
I spent quite a few posts on the wolf board agonizing whether killing you would make me look interminably scummy, because your case WAS goddamn ridiculous. 
Watching that last Day, though–I’ve never once believed a frustrated townie meltdown of that size, and I’m glad to know that continues to be justified.
We were taking the opposite tack from you–we were deliberately looking for mafia as much as town power roles. Man, I was waaay off target in all my blocks, though.
I know I’m never going to play in a game this size again–it just moved WAY too fast for me, and that’s no one’s fault but my own–when I last played mafia I was sysadmin-ing a series of small companies, and now I’m a senior cloud engineer at Comcast and let’s say that this was not a nights and weekends kind of game when I really did deploy hundreds of servers over the course of it. =P
Mostly, wolf-side felt an awful lot like we had a preponderance of people whose lives got away from their ability to spend a lot of time on the game, and we suffered a lot for that.
Me too.
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.