It’s been a bit since I’ve seen a Mafia game on this forum. I have entered a period of relative calm in my real life and am beginning to feel the itch to create a game. But instead of standard Mafia, I’d like to run something a bit different.
For anyone who played in the ridiculously epic Malazan game on Idle Thoughts’ much-missed board, what I’m suggesting is something very much like that.
For anyone who did not: the game would be very similar to conventional Mafia in structure - there would be alternating Day/Night Cycles, and during the Day cycle all players would vote to eliminate a single player from the game. Each player would have one or more powers able to affect the game, and they would generally be familiar: protective powers, investigative powers, killing powers, and so on.
The main difference from conventional Mafia is that with a few exceptions, you - the player - choose your own faction. Off-board communication is not just allowed, but essentially necessary, and players may form, break, betray, or extend alliances as they wish in an effort to be among the last players standing. It is a game as much about diplomacy and negotiation as about ferreting out secrets - but there’s plenty of ferreting out secrets, as well.
I have the bulk of the set-up drawn up but I don’t want to actually try running the game without a set of 20-30 players, so I figured I’d drop this here and see if I can gauge interest. Thoughts?
As the head moderator and original conceiver of the game that became Malazan, I endorse this full out. If you get enough interest and need one more, I can even become convinced to play again. (I should be able to find the time.)
It still amazes me that even with four moderators we were still overwhelmed with everything. And then there was the moment where I realized I goofed on balancing the vote chargers and how if a vote charger played it correctly they could single-handedly win the game with no one being able to stop them. Fortunately, each got killed off before either one realized this fact.
And watching you puzzle out the game and the moment when you finally figured out how the King in Chains worked was a thing of beauty.
That was good times. And Rysto’s color was great. The game wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without the Malazan theme.
It’s been so long, though, that I don’t remember who the other two moderators were. But they were all great and kept the game from falling apart even when things got their craziest (partially because peekercpa was in it).
Sure, life has calmed down a bit for me also. How important is knowing the backstory/colour, as the only thing I know about Malazan is what I googled just now.
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I first played Mafia in your game last summer and have become addicted to it, playing almost non-stop in various games here and elsewhere during the last year.
storyteller, I owe you much gratitude for introducing me to this compelling game. Count me in for anything you put together!
Since I started playing Mafia in one of your games last summer (same as Biotop’s), I’ve become addicted and have played nearly constantly since, either here or on Giraffe. So I’m in.
What would be even more diabolic (coming at this as a veteran Diplomacy player) would be the equivalent of grey or even black press (anonymous or even forged communications)…
The theme will not be the same, and - like with the first game - knowing the color will be completely irrelevant.
There will be very few restrictions on offboard communications. I am entirely behind the idea of forged or anonymous communications, if you can find a way to swing them.
If we can get a decent quorum of interested people, I’ll post the ruleset in its entirety for you all to nitpick.
And hi, Hoopy! Your game was still the most fun I’ve had playing one of these games on any forum, ever, and I’ve long wanted to watch something like that from the sidelines.
It’s certainly fun to watch. It’ll be interesting how you handle off-board communication. When we did Malazan, there were considerably less options for that stuff available. I would recommend that you highly discourage PMs as an option, just because it’s very inconvenient for tracking by admins. (Especially when peeker alone was cc’ing the main admin account with something like 50 PM’s a day.)
The people who created message board groups were a godsend because those didn’t directly fill up an account and were threaded so you could follow individual conversations rather than the straight up queue paradigm PMs bring.
Heck, you could probably set up a Slack group these days and allow people to create private channels.
