Here’s the thread for anyone who wants to watch along with the Shakespeare Mafia game and kibbitz. The signup thread:
Act I:
I wish I had the time to participate in this - I (mostly) fondly remember the games I played in here back when the dinosaurs roamed. I will have to content myself with trying to follow along.
Same. I found I had too much going on after a while to play much, and that was back when we still had regular games.
But now with a toddler and an infant there is considerably less time.
Never understood the whole “Vote All” thing.
To me it’s anti-town because it muddles vote history and means you don’t have to justify your votes so it adds noise without any additional information.
Multi-voting I feel is slightly pro-town over single-voting, because it provides more information. It does make vote-tracking more difficult, especially when there are a lot of votes and unvotes, which benefits scum due to the ease of adding noise, but overall, the more information that gets out there the better off town is.
Does “vote all” include the voter? If so, is it common for the voter to promptly unvote him/herself?
I don’t think “voting all” includes the person declaring such. The person who votes that way must declare themselves included.
I don’t really get the point of it, other than creating noise, as stated above. I played in a game with a town role of “crop duster”, who if targeted at Night was compelled to smudge players when entering into the conversation at the start of the Day. (IIRC, they were lynched Day 3 and revealed as Town.)
“Smudge” having the meaning of “making people look scummy”? That’s really subjective. Who judges if a post is smudgy enough?
I’m not a big fan of post restrictions in general, and especially not of subjective ones.
I don’t recall much of anything from that game other than the Reveal; other players used that word to describe that one player’s actions.
Since someone brought up random voting, my thoughts on that:
To me it’s a situational thing. The theory behind it is that town will honestly random vote and scum might intentionally NOT random vote because they have more information, might have someone in particular they want to target, and/or don’t want to vote for someone in particular. Additionally, if you change your vote, it forces more justification as to why you are changing, as in do you find the person not scummy anymore? Do you find someone else more scummy? And in a multi-vote game, leaving your vote on the random is an indication that you likely still find them scummy.
The drawback I see is that it also allows people to be lazy. And scum like being able to lazily vote.
I could possibly see it becoming an issue for scum if multiple people end up randomly voting the same character, including one or more scum, and that character happens to be a powerful scum role and then scum have to make a choice to leave the bandwagon and justify it, or stay on it for town cred and lose a powerful ally.
Regardless, to anyone who suggests the random route, if I were town (or even scum, for that matter) I would instantly track the votes, and ask the people suggesting it at the end of the day if they were tracking votes. Because to suggest it and then not track votes is anti-town and might be pro-scum, because it at that point it seems you suggested something purely for noise sake.
Roleblockers do not work well for both sides. Roleblockers work great for scum, but have limited use as town because you’re generally more likely to block an ally than an enemy.
At least “paranoid doctors” (i.e. protective and roleblocking both) have the advantage that the player you block can’t die. Those work well for both sides.
But a straight-up town blocker is anti-town if they use their power willy-nilly. The only information they really can get for town is if there is not kill and scum have to designate a killer and a kill doesn’t happen, they MIGHT have been the one to stop it. But in a closed game it’s going to take many days for even that to be made clear.
One option for a Town-aligned roleblocker is to target claimed vanillas. If they’re telling the truth, no harm done. If they’re lying, then maybe you do a lot of good.
Would this work?
Schizo – Flips a coin to determine town/scum alignment each day
Not really, because a player isn’t meaningfully Scum unless they know who the other Scum are, and of course it wouldn’t work to have a Town player who knows that.
It’s also bad for the same reason that recruitment mechanics are bad, because they punish good play. It’d suck to do a good job Scum-hunting, and then suddenly find yourself one of them.
Reminds me a bit of my “Kill 'Em All False Flip” Mafia game I ran on this board a bunch of years ago. It was called “Inblorious Gasterds”. (Which is a reference to both the Tarantino movie and the Batman Mafia game that was run on Idle Thought’s Mafia board–which was also the first Mafia game I ever played in.)
It was bastard mafia, but with a specific set of rules. There was nothing arbitrary and the game could have been won by everybody. Or only one person. It all depended on how the players played it when it came down to the last three players. There was no town. There was no scum. Everyone was a serial killer…but instead of actually submitting a target to kill at night, they submitted a name that would be collected with all the other names and it would act as a secret vote where the top target or two would be killed each night. During the day, the top vote getter would be killed by the players. If more than one person had the same number of votes at top, each would be killed. Each player had a preassigned reveal which matched stereotypical town/scum roles. Before announcing each death, I PM’ed the dead players letting them know what’s up because obviously the flip was going to surprise them. If the final three players (which since I controlled how many were killed in a cycle, I guaranteed that the final Day would have three players) all circle voted, they would all die, and everyone would win. If anyone got two votes, the player who didn’t get voted on that final day would solo win.
Of course, the players didn’t know any of this, other than they were playing a bastard game. But I played everything straight, even up to the point where the first 6 deaths were all players with Vanilla Town as their flip. (People wondered if it was an all vanilla game at that point.) I even had some spoiled observers wonder why I didn’t fudge the flips, and I said the only cheating that I was doing as mod was that I was lying about the death reveals. Everything else was completely on the up-and-up.
Some spoiled observer that had died the final night accidentally let slip at the final day the whole thing by posting to the game thread instead of the spoiler boards, which it must be said were on an entire different server from the SDMB. I reached out to the mod to delete it, and it was deleted eventually, but it was seen by the last three players. They literally could have gamed the entire thing to have everyone win, but one guy got too clever and didn’t believe what he saw in the spoiled post and figured he could vote one of the other players who already had a vote on them, while he himself had a vote on him.
So the person who didn’t have a vote on them got a solitary win when Day ended.
And as far as the partial scum/partial town, thing. There’s always this:
I think there’s something that nobody has asked me in-thread, that someone really ought to.
But I’ll stay quiet until and unless someone asks.
The last game I ran was openly all-vanilla, but the two Scum were a Godfather and an Investigator, anyway, mostly just for color (the intro and death reveals included some chatter between the Scum roles). The Scum Investigator never bothered to use her power on the Godfather (they knew that it couldn’t possibly affect the game state), but if she had, I would have told her that he was Town. If the game had been larger, the Scum team would also have had a third member, a Roleblocker.
I’m not sure how much more blatantly explicit Chronos could have made it that “you turn into a ghost and can continue to talk” is Banquo’s “power” rather than just part of the game for everybody. Of course the ability to talk without actually having anything to talk about is not that useful.
I think it’s a fairly useful power, actually.
Imagine a confirmed town that can’t be killed but can analyze the game and give their full thoughts.
The only drawback is not being able to vote. But everything you say can be taken to have a pro-town motivation.
Then again, I played a vig in a game once where I info-dumped all my suspicions on Day 1. There were 10 players I found suspicous and 4 of them turned out scum (out of 6 total) and one of them was third party. I tried to vig my highest suspicion but ended up blocked by the scum roleblocker. Scum then killed me Night 2. Town didn’t even bother reviewing my info dump until almost the end of the game where we barely eked out a win. Scum were really scummy in that game.
Still, confirmed town that can keep talking and can’t be removed from the game is extremely powerful if they’re a good player and Town actually pays attention.
Ohhhhh thank you for saying this. I’ve never followed a Mafia game before and I was really confused. I mean, I’m probably still confused but this cleared a lot of things up for me (plus makes sense of the character being Banquo, lol).
Shouldn’t they all be shutting the hell up at nighttime?