Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community - View Single Post - CP Lockout Mafia - Game Over

Mazrim · 04-09-2014, 11:04 PM

Alright, here is my longwinded postmortem. TL;DR - Next game info at the bottom of the post.

This is the first time I’ve hosted a game, though I’ve been playing forum mafia in some capacity since 2007. I had just finished getting my ass handed to me as a mafia member in another game when I realized that Calgarypuck had never had anything that I could recall in terms of a forum game like this. In scumchat in the other game I had been talking with another mafioso about hockey and basketball and we started bringing up ideas of a sports related mafia game, and suddenly I knew I had a great idea for this forum to try out.

This game wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Krystal (aka Marlie Tang). She is an experienced player and moderator for Mafia games, and her playstyle and creativity in game design are well known to everyone who plays where she frequents. I largely stole this setup from her Super Mario RPG Mafia game (with her permission of course), and with her help we were able trim down and re-balance the game for a group who would largely be new players to Mafia. Most of the first post was taken from a number of old games I had played. Thanks to Krystal, Xythar and Pidgey for your excellent rules posts and role PM descriptions that I could steal from! My only regret here was removing the toxx clause paragraph which came back to bite me later in the game.

I was very nervous about starting the very first game as a closed role madness setup, which means that no one knows what roles are in the game initially, and every person gets some kind of ability. It was entirely possible that the entire point of Mafia would be missed among the large amount of abilities in the game, regardless of the strength of those abilities. Krystal’s prediction was correct however, and aside from a few minor bumps everything turned out about as well as I could have hoped in the game.

The easiest choice to make in the game was not to have multiple mafia factions. There was a very good chance of lots of crossfire between the mafia groups and it could end very badly. Plus I’ve never been a big fan of multiple mafia factions anyway. Instead, we added a Serial Killer, which led to the most difficult choice to make in the game: How powerful do we make the Serial Killer? There had been a trend on the forum where I play normally that Serial Killers were getting stronger and stronger abilities, and winning games more regularly.

We ended up striking a middle ground. I had to make sure the Serial Killer even had a chance in a 25 player game, so making him immune to nightkills and investigations was a no-brainer...but what abilities should I give him? We decided not limiting the number of nightkills he can perform was the best ability to have, and it also made sure the game would move quickly since there would likely be two deaths per night. I added in a fun misdirection ability (sending messages) and the limited ability to quiz dead players to make things interesting. They are both hard to balance for, but in the past they haven’t made a huge difference...I was shown to be completely wrong on both counts. Anyway, activeStick deserves credit for doing such a great job blending in with the rest of the group and lasting as long as he did!

Initially, there were a few questions being sent my way. Well, okay, there was a TON of questions. I shouldn’t have been surprised because of the larger amount of new players but I was. Quite a few of them were already explained in the first post, but many people weren’t willing to read that wall of text. Some of them were just misunderstanding the rules, and the others simply needed to read some of the newbie articles on the Mafia wiki. The feeling out process for most people took until the end of Day 2 to really know how the game ran and what to expect.

Unlike in the games I play elsewhere, a big difference here was that people read into the flavour way more than I expected. Whereas most people I know just skim or completely ignore the flavour text now, everything down to post restrictions were being analysed for any information. In hindsight, I probably provided too much information in some of the day’s flavour text. The hinting is supposed to be subtle, and not too leading.

The other big difference I noted was that the mob mentality is very strong in a new group of players. There was quick agreement on someone, and many people appeared to just blindly follow along, removing themselves from any later ability to justify their decisions. What can you say if you were one of 10 people who voted with no explanation? It could be used later if someone was wily enough to track it all into a scumclaim against you.

I made it a point to note that names and roles couldn’t be indicators of alignment, but largely that was ignored. The trends were still easy to figure out for many people, but there was plenty of people who blindly believed in a person being confirmed for something they couldn’t actually confirm themselves.

I really do believe that the Mafia got handed a bad hand this game. It wasn’t even that they were all new the game, but that they got singled out in a large group by random chance at worst and a slight difference from another face at best. A day 1 mafia lynch is rare. You could see they were starting to figure out what they were supposed to do, and HD and Aeneas held out pretty well considering how far behind they were off the bat. Kudos to Mafia as a whole for a good first game, regardless of the outcome.

There was a point early on where the game nearly collapsed, and it’s only because of activeStick being slow to check a thread that the game didn’t die then and there. He had the ability to talk to a dead player for one real time day, and fortunately for him, a mafia was lynched right away! He selected Drake, and I fully expected it to be a waste of time since I figured mafia wouldn’t be willing to help out the enemy. Turns out that Drake felt otherwise, and completely spilled the beans on who the rest of the mafia were! I decided to delete his post, and told activeStick why, and how the game would essentially be over at that point with an extremely long end game for him. Thankfully he agreed with me and was okay with not knowing what Drake said. Thanks for being a good sport about it.

Another interesting development in the game was octothorp’s unconventional way of using his day-vigilante ability. Usually the vig will keep their ability quiet until they’re ready to kill someone of their own choice, such as when they decide they found a scum leading a vote. I wouldn’t say I would let other people choose for me if I were in the same position, but I thought it was an interesting way to gain favour with the town.

Big props to Street Pharmacist and dsavillian for using their abilities to full effect. I really liked all the post restrictions, and the messages SP thought up really messed with people. On the flip side, I’m sad CaptainCrunch never sowed any confusion with his phantom vote.

In conclusion, I’m very happy with how the game went, and based on the comments I’ve received from people just watching and from those playing, it was well received too. There were those who could play the game well, and there were those who went along for the ride and probably learned a lot in the process. Hopefully everyone enjoyed it. Thanks for playing, and thanks for trying out my setup!

All night actions can be found here: http://pastebin.com/Ra5yiLSq
The Mafia’s secret thread can be found here: http://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/3GLmht9TNtfu
All the dead people talked about the game in this thread: http://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/hDrKwSpsA2Eg

The next game’s signups will start on Monday, April 14th at 1:00 PM Mountain Time. The new game will be different from this game to mix things up. It will be an open setup, meaning all the roles in the game will be known beforehand, and there will be limited power roles. It will be a purer version of mafia, about reading other player’s thoughts than their roles. Now that everyone knows how mafia works, it should be great!

Finally, I will post the Role PMs for everyone tomorrow.

04-09-2014, 11:04 PM	#1350
Mazrim CP Gamemaster Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: The Gary Exp:	Alright, here is my longwinded postmortem. TL;DR - Next game info at the bottom of the post. This is the first time I’ve hosted a game, though I’ve been playing forum mafia in some capacity since 2007. I had just finished getting my ass handed to me as a mafia member in another game when I realized that Calgarypuck had never had anything that I could recall in terms of a forum game like this. In scumchat in the other game I had been talking with another mafioso about hockey and basketball and we started bringing up ideas of a sports related mafia game, and suddenly I knew I had a great idea for this forum to try out. This game wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Krystal (aka Marlie Tang). She is an experienced player and moderator for Mafia games, and her playstyle and creativity in game design are well known to everyone who plays where she frequents. I largely stole this setup from her Super Mario RPG Mafia game (with her permission of course), and with her help we were able trim down and re-balance the game for a group who would largely be new players to Mafia. Most of the first post was taken from a number of old games I had played. Thanks to Krystal, Xythar and Pidgey for your excellent rules posts and role PM descriptions that I could steal from! My only regret here was removing the toxx clause paragraph which came back to bite me later in the game. I was very nervous about starting the very first game as a closed role madness setup, which means that no one knows what roles are in the game initially, and every person gets some kind of ability. It was entirely possible that the entire point of Mafia would be missed among the large amount of abilities in the game, regardless of the strength of those abilities. Krystal’s prediction was correct however, and aside from a few minor bumps everything turned out about as well as I could have hoped in the game. The easiest choice to make in the game was not to have multiple mafia factions. There was a very good chance of lots of crossfire between the mafia groups and it could end very badly. Plus I’ve never been a big fan of multiple mafia factions anyway. Instead, we added a Serial Killer, which led to the most difficult choice to make in the game: How powerful do we make the Serial Killer? There had been a trend on the forum where I play normally that Serial Killers were getting stronger and stronger abilities, and winning games more regularly. We ended up striking a middle ground. I had to make sure the Serial Killer even had a chance in a 25 player game, so making him immune to nightkills and investigations was a no-brainer...but what abilities should I give him? We decided not limiting the number of nightkills he can perform was the best ability to have, and it also made sure the game would move quickly since there would likely be two deaths per night. I added in a fun misdirection ability (sending messages) and the limited ability to quiz dead players to make things interesting. They are both hard to balance for, but in the past they haven’t made a huge difference...I was shown to be completely wrong on both counts. Anyway, activeStick deserves credit for doing such a great job blending in with the rest of the group and lasting as long as he did! Initially, there were a few questions being sent my way. Well, okay, there was a TON of questions. I shouldn’t have been surprised because of the larger amount of new players but I was. Quite a few of them were already explained in the first post, but many people weren’t willing to read that wall of text. Some of them were just misunderstanding the rules, and the others simply needed to read some of the newbie articles on the Mafia wiki. The feeling out process for most people took until the end of Day 2 to really know how the game ran and what to expect. Unlike in the games I play elsewhere, a big difference here was that people read into the flavour way more than I expected. Whereas most people I know just skim or completely ignore the flavour text now, everything down to post restrictions were being analysed for any information. In hindsight, I probably provided too much information in some of the day’s flavour text. The hinting is supposed to be subtle, and not too leading. The other big difference I noted was that the mob mentality is very strong in a new group of players. There was quick agreement on someone, and many people appeared to just blindly follow along, removing themselves from any later ability to justify their decisions. What can you say if you were one of 10 people who voted with no explanation? It could be used later if someone was wily enough to track it all into a scumclaim against you. I made it a point to note that names and roles couldn’t be indicators of alignment, but largely that was ignored. The trends were still easy to figure out for many people, but there was plenty of people who blindly believed in a person being confirmed for something they couldn’t actually confirm themselves. I really do believe that the Mafia got handed a bad hand this game. It wasn’t even that they were all new the game, but that they got singled out in a large group by random chance at worst and a slight difference from another face at best. A day 1 mafia lynch is rare. You could see they were starting to figure out what they were supposed to do, and HD and Aeneas held out pretty well considering how far behind they were off the bat. Kudos to Mafia as a whole for a good first game, regardless of the outcome. There was a point early on where the game nearly collapsed, and it’s only because of activeStick being slow to check a thread that the game didn’t die then and there. He had the ability to talk to a dead player for one real time day, and fortunately for him, a mafia was lynched right away! He selected Drake, and I fully expected it to be a waste of time since I figured mafia wouldn’t be willing to help out the enemy. Turns out that Drake felt otherwise, and completely spilled the beans on who the rest of the mafia were! I decided to delete his post, and told activeStick why, and how the game would essentially be over at that point with an extremely long end game for him. Thankfully he agreed with me and was okay with not knowing what Drake said. Thanks for being a good sport about it. Another interesting development in the game was octothorp’s unconventional way of using his day-vigilante ability. Usually the vig will keep their ability quiet until they’re ready to kill someone of their own choice, such as when they decide they found a scum leading a vote. I wouldn’t say I would let other people choose for me if I were in the same position, but I thought it was an interesting way to gain favour with the town. Big props to Street Pharmacist and dsavillian for using their abilities to full effect. I really liked all the post restrictions, and the messages SP thought up really messed with people. On the flip side, I’m sad CaptainCrunch never sowed any confusion with his phantom vote. In conclusion, I’m very happy with how the game went, and based on the comments I’ve received from people just watching and from those playing, it was well received too. There were those who could play the game well, and there were those who went along for the ride and probably learned a lot in the process. Hopefully everyone enjoyed it. Thanks for playing, and thanks for trying out my setup! All night actions can be found here: http://pastebin.com/Ra5yiLSq The Mafia’s secret thread can be found here: http://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/3GLmht9TNtfu All the dead people talked about the game in this thread: http://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/hDrKwSpsA2Eg The next game’s signups will start on Monday, April 14th at 1:00 PM Mountain Time. The new game will be different from this game to mix things up. It will be an open setup, meaning all the roles in the game will be known beforehand, and there will be limited power roles. It will be a purer version of mafia, about reading other player’s thoughts than their roles. Now that everyone knows how mafia works, it should be great! Finally, I will post the Role PMs for everyone tomorrow.