CP Lockout Mafia - Game Over - Players Win!

[dissentowner]

Originally Posted by stazzy33

-----Dead Post-----

Now we just sit around... waiting for the hammer to fall...

Ahhh Christ, it's stazzy's ghost!

[Mazrim]

Vote Count:
With 5 alive, it takes 3 votes to lynch. It takes 2 votes to deadline lynch.

Hasn't Voted (0):

Voted:
activeStick (4): Wood, undercoverbrother, dissentowner, agulati
agulati (1): activeStick


The reasoning seemed sound. They had to form a sound strategy to find the enemy. Would it pay off? Would they make another needless sacrifice?

They rounded on activeStick. He wasn't willing to go down quietly.

"This is a terrible idea. You're doing exactly what the assassin would want you to do! If you kill me, who is going to help you find him?" activeStick said.

"I'm not sure I buy any of that. Good try though, Kopitar." said Wood as he dragged activeStick off to the side. "Even if I'm wrong, I'm still confident we will win."

As they approached the wall, it opened up, and a number of men in suits and black masks walked out to take activeStick. The person at the front of the group looked him over and chuckled softly.

"An interesting disguise, but you didn't fool us. Congratulations on making it this far. We never expected it, to be honest." The man gave activeStick a smile, but it didn't look warm. He reached around behind activeStick's neck and pulled. At first there was nothing happening but screams of pain, but suddenly with a bloody rip came off a mask.

Many of the players didn't recognize the face. He was an old man, with a piercing gaze and a look of a lifetime of hard experiences to him.

"I'm disappointed." said activeStick, "I would have thought you stupid players would have known the commissioner of the greatest league in the world! What a waste of time this ended up being. This was to be the start of something wonderful, comrades. It was the start of the end of your world. You Americans think too highly of yourself, and you needed to work together with us for hockey to survive. We knew that would never happen though, so I was here to make sure you were forced to listen."

"Shutup, Medvedev. Your time is up." said the man in the mask. With that, another man in a mask was behind activeStick in an instant with a knife. He went straight for the throat, and shortly after that, he was dead.


activeStick: Alexander Medvedev, KHL / Serial Killer / Lynched Day 8

The remaining players stood in stunned silence. This was it, wasn't it? They've uncovered their foes, and survived to tell others about it...if they could get out. The men with the masks seemed to sense their thoughts.

"You have lived, and you players can now shape the league as you wish. Our job here is done." They turned to leave.

"Wait!" said undercoverbrother, "Whose side are you on anyway?" he asked.

"We take no sides. We only wanted resolution. Good luck out there." He gave them another cold smile as he turned.

As they walked out, the wall didn't close. The lights didn't turn off. The players looked at each other, nodded, and walked through the opening. The nightmare was over.


Wood: Roberto Luongo, Players / Mason / Victorious


undercoverbrother: Tim Thomas, Players / Mason / Victorious


dissentowner: Shane Doan, Players / Coroner / Victorious


agulati: Alex Pietrangelo, Players / Roleblocker / Victorious


Congratulations to the Players! They have defeated all opposition to their cause and their group has been successful.

Anyone may now use this thread to discuss the game. I will be posting a postmortem with my thoughts on the game in a bit, along with details of the next game which will have signups starting after a few days break. Thanks for playing!

[dissentowner]

Yeah, we did it boys!!! Woohoo! Well played all and congrats to everyone on the players side!!!

[Wood]

Good game activeStick, it's really impressive how well you blended in and came so close to winning it on your own

[agulati]

Yes!!!!! We are victorious!!

Thanks a lot Mazrim. Had tonnes of fun. Can't wait for the next one.

[Wood]

Thanks a lot Mazrim. It was a blast. But I think this game has left me with severe trust issues haha

[Street Pharmacist]

I think my contributions were the most contributorial


Edit: And thanks isn't enough. Awesome Mazrim. So much fun

[kermitology]

I wasn't even playing and I loved this..

[agulati]

Originally Posted by Wood

Thanks a lot Mazrim. It was a blast. But I think this game has left me with severe trust issues haha

I completely agree Wood. I am glad you and UCB were players. There was a nagging doubt in my mind, that we might be getting played by a couple of assassins. Good that I stuck with my gut.

[Mazrim]

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.

[jayswin]

I'll just post my wrap up thoughts on the ending from the secret thread.

Wow, awesome game!

Activestick - He played an incredible game, imo. We can say he's doing it all wrong at the end. But the reality is, he just got to a point where the remaining posters just knew too much about everyone but Activestick, and he could no longer lay low, but still post enough to not look suspicious.

Considering he was the only one on his team in a game with over 20 players, he gets a standing ovation from me. Played well, it came down to a numbers game at the end, and he lost.

Wood - Also played extremely well. His only weakness was his public second guessing himself, because his analysis was very accurate all game long, he just shied away from being the true leader until it was completely necessary. Then he rose to the top and figured the whole game out and ended it. Excellent game from him.

[Wood]

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by kermitology

I wasn't even playing and I loved this..

Yeah. I read all 1300+ posts of this today, and have come to the conclusion I definitely need to sign up for the next round. Huge props to Mazrim.

[Wood]

Originally Posted by flameswin

I'll just post my wrap up thoughts on the ending from the secret thread.

Wow, awesome game!

Activestick - He played an incredible game, imo. We can say he's doing it all wrong at the end. But the reality is, he just got to a point where the remaining posters just knew too much about everyone but Activestick, and he could no longer lay low, but still post enough to not look suspicious.

Considering he was the only one on his team in a game with over 20 players, he gets a standing ovation from me. Played well, it came down to a numbers game at the end, and he lost.

Wood - Also played extremely well. His only weakness was his public second guessing himself, because his analysis was very accurate all game long, he just shied away from being the true leader until it was completely necessary. Then he rose to the top and figured the whole game out and ended it. Excellent game from him.

Yeah I kept saying that to myself every time I publicly doubted myself, I was way too nice. I even said I'm sorry for being an ####### to activeStick earlier today even though at that point it was obvious he was the serial killer lol

[jayswin]

I also found it funny reading the mafia secret thread and seeing that my early death basically boiled down to Regulator75 saying me and him have had run ins in the past, so let's off him, lol.

[strombad]

Excellent work Mazrim!

I had an absolute blast even just watching the events over the last couple days.

[Blaster86]

I am still surprised I made it as long as I did. I was pretty sure I'd be target numero uno being the only non-Flames fan.

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by Blaster86

I am still surprised I made it as long as I did. I was pretty sure I'd be target numero uno being the only non-Flames fan.

You would have been dead early if I didn't come out and say we were together and then proceed to get killed and proven a player shortly after, imo.

In fact, I think you had already racked up a few votes against you before that turnaround.

[stazzy33]

Thanks Mazrim that was a ton of fun! I am a little sad I was the last player offed, but at least we still win as a group!

It was definitely interesting not knowing the division of players and mafioso... Made things that much more difficult in my opinion!

[formulate]

Very entertaining, even as a random observer!
If my timezone didn't constitute a sleep schedule opposite to everyone else, I would have loved to get in on the next round. Is an observer thread possible for bets/predictions without the current players being able to see?