I can’t remember if it was that game or not, but yes there was a game where you really took me to the woodshed and got me lynched like a pro. I was soooooooooooo frustrated with that :mad:
Good times, indeed!
You can count on me to play. I only go back 18 months in this silly game, though.
Thanks for the invite. Haven’t played since around 2013, but was recently thinking about how much fun it was.
Yeah. I’m in.
Most definitely /in.
Evening all[sup]1[/sup]
Now let’s see whether I can still remember how this goes.
Folks,I know that you’d like to off the rat who backstabbed you and got you lynhed in the last game, but …
Don’t Hold Grudges
Remember that no role, or even alignment, automatically carries over from one game to the next. So let’s face it, this time the probability at the start is that you’re both Town. Backstabbing your Townie teammate makes evil Mafiates laugh. What it doesn’t do is help your team win.
Of course if either or both of you are Mafiates, you can carry grudges to your heart’s content.
I’ll rouse myself from torpor and see if I can handle a game again.
[sup]1[/sup]Or whatever time of day it is where you live.
Thanks for the invite, Idle.
I may or may not be massively changing my life over the next couple of months, so I’m going to defer signing up until later in the month. But I will watch developments with interest!
vote mhaye
For the sake of tradition.
I’m likely in, the only thing would be that, jesus, those old games were such glorious time sinks, one of the reasons I had to back out was I was struggling to find the time to keep up with them. Hell, I think one game I got lynched simply because I was so busy at the time and could only check in on certain days and it was decided that was a scum tell.
I can’t even say how much fun that game was to watch with full knowledge. That it came down all the way to the wire is probably at least as much to do with some ballsy play as it did with any balancing I did; honestly, it was likely was a little too favored toward scum. I had had some ideas over the years since about some mechanics and such, maybe I’d be done to hosting or co-hosting a game again in the future.
That said, I think my favorite game I ever played in had to be the “Gastard” Batman game; what utter, glorious chaos that was. I’m still surprised that I was able to step in and fill in for someone who just flat out claimed to be scum and I managed to weasel my way through several more days and even convince the town to lynch someone they were pretty convinced wasn’t scum over confirmed scum and take out the detective. Hell, IIRC, I think Storyteller (who was the detective) even figured out what I was doing and couldn’t convince the town to lynch me. I even reread that game at some point later and couldn’t figure out how that happened.
alright, alright, I’m in.
Same caveats on time as almost everyone else.
Sheesh, I haven’t been here in so long I still list Final Fantasy XI in my interests line, and they just closed it down for good.
Ah, grand ol’ Mafia, those were the Days.
I don’t really have time for it anymore. (Although, looking at how much I’ve posted lately, I’m getting dangerously close to averaging more than a post per day.)
But I do so love playing and running games. I can’t promise to run a game or even play, but I’ll peruse my old notes and cogitate my brain and see what scum floats up. (I’m out of country for most of December and early January, with some free time but irregular internet access.)
If I can get a Conspiracy (I think some of my more experimental concepts wouldn’t be great for a reunion game) setup balanced to my satisfaction, I could run it if I had the help of a dedicated co-mod. Someone who could more quickly answer questions. I also have a vote-count python script, but it needs a human to scrape the thread for votes.
I would consider it a great favor if whoever ends up running the game maybe takes some notes on their balancing thoughts to share once everything gets spoiled. My game was pretty simple and I still found balancing to be pretty opaque and difficult.
Thinking about it, and my recently found love of GMing RPG games, I think I would prefer to be a host than a player. So whoever does end up running it, I’d love to act as a cohost/helper.
ETA: And if that let’s it be a Conspiracy, all the better!
I don’t have it anymore since it was so long ago, but when I ran mine, I used some numbers I think NAF1138 had provided with just a few tweaks. Pulling roughly from memory, if each vanilla townie is worth one point then, for example, a doctor is worth 3 and a detective is worth 5, and vanilla scum are worth and a Godfather is worth 6. Most variations on a power role can be judged relative to those. Also, another rule of thumb if I remember correctly is you want your scum to be roughly the square root of the number of players.
That all said, when I went at it, I played around with the numbers and got them close, but I also had a lot of feel in it. What are your goals when designing the game? Are you trying to make it as even as possible? Sometimes having the odds stacked against you can make for a lot of fun (like my aforementioned example of the Batman game). Other times, a well balanced game can get wildly unbalanced fast with a little bit of luck or stellar/awful play. Just using the game I moderated, the town got really unlucky with the detective being taken out early mostly by luck, but then there was the whole “Monkgate” debacle that ultimately squandered a lead the scum had built up. I ultimately left feeling like it was a bit unbalanced toward scum, but what if the detective had gotten to live longer and gotten a little bit of good luck with his investigations?
I just think as long as you’re consistent with your goal and you put forth an honest effort, the inherent randomness involved in the game will cover any minor issues.
I wish FlyingCowofDoom’s wiki hadn’t vanished, because it had a good page on JSexton points – that was how I learned to balance my first few games.
There are a lot of variables in balancing a game, though, and not just in roles:
Whether or not Town can strategize at Night
Whether or not Scum can strategize during the Day
Whether or not there’s a Night Zero, and whether or not Night Actions can take place therein…
And then you have to look at the interaction of Powers (e.g., if Town has a self-killing Remorseful Vig and Scum have a Redirector, what happens if Scum figure out who the Remorseful Vig is? How else can Scum use a Redirector? What happens if you have a paranoid Doc who blocks the Cop, or if there’s a Paranoid Gun Owner who kills the Doc?)
YES I MIGHT STILL BE BITTER ABOUT A GAME I PLAYED IN WHY DO YOU ASK?
A quick scan of my notes shows I have Conspiracy sketches (role counts and secret powers) out to #10. We’ve only played to #6 (which was over four years ago 
). I’ll work on one of the less lethal ones, to give everyone as much time alive as possible. Unless you guys’d prefer a bloodier setup?
It’s always opaque and difficult. I never appreciated the point-based systems. You simply have to do the hard work of considering as many possible ways the game could play as you can.
I generally go through each role and think about: What’s their obvious tactics? What’s the best unobvious way to play them? How could they play safely? Or risky? If things go well, who can stop them? Or help them if things go poorly?
From there, I try to make sure there’s path to winning or losing that’s as long as possible. Require multiple steps before the point of an ensured win or loss is reached. But the game has to keep progressing toward the end, no matter what.
My Conspiracy games, with the four counter-balancing factions helps a lot. If one side is doing well, it’s in the interest of the others to focus against the leading side. And to ignore the side about to lose.
This is so true. Having developed and run and watched a ton of these I learned a few things that seem to be true of all games.
- a little bit of random luck is more fun than a game where all luck is controlled out.
You don’t want to go luck crazy, but a bit of it adds an element of excitement that gives a spark.
- a game that is too well balanced is boring
The thing is, balance dies with the first lynching. The most well balanced game I made was also the worst because the only considerations were balance and things got lopsided quickly. Keep an eye on not stacking the deck too much but make other things a priority.
3) things being unknown is more fun than them being known, but too much emphasis on puzzles gets exhausting for everyone
I think this played out in a lot of games. It’s great to have some unknown stuff, but if you have to figure out too much the game gets mentally exhausting and people start to focus too much on the puzzle and not enough o the actual game. It gets bad fast.
- it’s fun to have to make choices, but simple is better.
I’m a beliver that all choices should have positive and negative consequences in a game. Not everyone agrees, but I think we can all agree that the best games were the ones where players have to make only a small handful of choices rather than constantly having to make big decisions. The point of the game is to hunt scum, don’t get too far from that.
Malazan was the most ambitious game I was involved in, but at the end of the day it wasn’t mafia anymore. It was awesome, but it became a different game. If that’s not your goal watch out for that.
Keep those in mind and you should be ok.
As a noobie, I’m taking notes.
It’s been a long, long time since last I joined any of these games.
/I’m in
Completely unofficial roster.
- Idle Thoughts
- Mahaloth
- NAF1138
- Suburban Plankton
- Colby11
- Boozahol Squid, P.I.
- Guiri En Espana
- storyteller0910
- Hoopy Frood
- Johnny Bravo
- Hawkeyeop
- Nanook of the North Shore
- AngeloftheNorth
- Prof. Pepperwinkle
- snfaulkner
- Daphne Black
- paulwhoisaghost
- bufftabby
- Sunny Daze
- sinjin
- Dante G
- jsgoddess
- brewha
- Chronos
- Hockey Monkey
- ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies
- septimus
- Biotop
- Enderw24
- Khameleon
- MHaye
- BlasterMaster
- Zeriel
- Pleonast
- SisterCoyote
- DiggitCamara
/in !!!