New Experimental Concepts for Mafia Games
 

I've been contemplating a thread like this for a while now, and I think this new subforum is a perfect place.

So I decided since I've just started work on a new experimental concept for a mafia, I want to see what new concepts other mafia players want to experience in future games. For the most part, I think we should discuss new formats we haven't tried before and see what the players think of them. I'd like this to be some kind of database for experienced hosts looking to create a new game to choose some exciting experimental concept to try.

For example, askaninjask and I are starting the basis for an experimental mafia which so far I've dubbed "Mansion Mafia." Basically, the players exist on one of three to five "floors" and can go up or down a flight of stairs to another floor at the end of the night or day. The floor one is on will affect abilities, targets, and perhaps roles as well (so far it's pretty vague). In a sense though, it's a new spin on mafia which may or may not be effective that I really wanted to try.

In addition to that, there are definitely a few other concepts I'd like to see tried by some of the experienced hosts in future games:

• larger than average village with three competing mafias and no neutrals
• normal sized or smaller than average village with no mafias and only a large number of neutrals
• rps-style mafia with three equal sized factions each with an advantage over another
• another "all neutral" game but actually balanced; kind of like a mafia-esque diplomacy where everyone would need to form alliances and such (would work better anonymously)

so yeah, tl;dr: what are some new types of games we could/should try in the future to help improve or balance mafia in general?

I had this idea of a mafia game with fixed length of, say, 10 days and 10 nights, and the winning team would be the one that acquired the most "points" and these "points" could be gained by lynching someone on the opposite side and various night actions.

/n00b's crapshoot

Hit Points Mafia:
Instead of just having their one life, each player has a set number of hit points. If a player's hit points go to zero, he or she dies. The lynch, and the mafia and wolf's kills, take away hit points equal to the number each player starts with. Certain roles can diminish the target's hit points, make the user or target gain hit points (having hit points over the initial set value may or may not be allowed), determine how many hit points the target has, transfer hit points from one player to another, or cost hit points to use.

Idea: a mafia game in which players can travel between two (or more) "dimensions". The "dimension" in which a player is in can affect how certain roles work, and if a player is even able to be targeted/lynched.

Here's my idea: Wager Mafia. Each player starts the game with an item, and all players have the ability to make a single wager with another player each night. The wagers can be about anything, from whether or not someone is going to turn up dead in the morning, to how many posts there will be in the thread by the end of the third day. Each wager would reuire a deadline upon which the host(s) will determine who won the wager. The winner of the wager gets all of the loser's items, and if the loser had no items, they die. All wagers are voluntary.

I had the idea for combining Risk and mafia into one game.

There's no village, just mafia factions. Each faction is a certain region/color it depends on how it could be executed.

If they're by region then each faction's member could have a choice to fortify themselves, and if they fortify enough nights (like 4 or something) their ability extends to more people (they can kill two a night) or becomes stronger (they gain a BPV) etc. The factions can attack different factions' land and defend themselves against attacks.

If it's by color.. the mafia could select what regions they want to take over and the mafia faction with the most players still alive and the largest regions of land left wins.

I think by region would be more successful though. This seems like it'd work best as a big mafia with a slew of different regions comprised of 5 players each or something but I don't know if hosts for big mafias would be interested in such an idea. SO it could fit as a small one either way.

That sounds rather like Diplomacy. However, if you added some MGS style into in (espionage, unknown names [that you have to find in order to kill], etc.), then it could be unique enough, I think.

An important thing to consider when throwing out a game possibility: How would the roles in your game adapt to the rule change? Consider the addition of items. That adds thieves, item protectors, people who cannot be stolen from, and all of those roles could be in your game.

@ Fangren: How would roles in your mafia adapt to that rule change? Would there be some sort of cheater role who always wins his bet? Would there be some really unlucky role who always loses his bet? Maybe there could be a role that cannot actually make wagers with anyone, or maybe there's a role that can make an unlimited number of wagers per night.

EDIT: This actually sounds a lot like our game (me and asim), which was already mentioned in the OP. How would Dimensional mafia be different from Mansion mafia?

How embarrassing for me, the tl;dr at the end was just so enticing.

That's a good point. In this kind of game, I think it would be that most of the abilities would be item based, and as such could be won or lost based on a bet...according with that, there could be, like, some sort of cursed item that causes the player who holds it to lose all their bets...there would still be roles that didn't need items to work, like the one that can't actually make a wager, or one that can make one but can't accept one, or one that's forced to accept every wager that's proposed...the cursed item one sounds interesting, since it would probably require additional flavor as to why the wager was lost, since ideally most of the wagers would involve public information...

this is actually a really interesting idea, and I know it's somewhat similar to Mansion Mafia, but I think this would be a good alternative, especially if Mansion turns out to be too limiting in terms of role use and the like.

quick responses to people's ideas:

As I might have mentioned before I thought of something similar (except with countries). Definitely want to see something like this happen.

Even if you implement the necessary crossfire protection (something that redirects kills to the village would be best), you still run into an endgame issue. Sooner or later, information on everyone's alliance will be public, and it'll be a Diplomacy-like situation. I like to avoid those.

Heh, this might be funny. Can't afford to give every neutral a kill though. Maybe they should need to cooperate to kill (eg 2-3 neutrals targeting the same person with an ability = dead target).

Can be fun if thought out well...but I'm kind of stuck thinking of a good way to do this. I don't really want to use my precious priority to play 25-man rock-paper-scissors.

Yeah, I personally had my share of Diplomacy-like mafia after Viva and all those games where there's 1-2 of each faction left at the end of the game and the only thing you can do to win is hope one of your opponents takes out the other in votes/kills.

Possible, but might be very luck dependent...always wanted to get more out of point-based CWCs though.

Needs to start with a very low amount of hit points to keep it simple. Say, 3. Might be a good idea to make kills only take away 2 hit points.

Needs something to encourage people to wager, or else they'll idle until a lot of people have fallen.

Here, posting some examples already done with your ideas.

Mafia with hit points

Mafia with no mafia

Unreal Tournament Mafia also covers the Mansion thing too.

What about a mafia with every user has a win condition that works against each other, i.e. there will be a Kevin for every chocolate boy fron Golden Sun mafia. There would be one item that two people need or maybe one villager that wants USER to live while another wants that USER to die. This would be for both the mafia and the villagers

A mafia in which all or some players are subbed out frequently. Restrictions should be placed on communicating with the previous player you are subbing in for. Players may be able to sub back into the same role.

Silent Mafia, where everyone can only communicate through anonymous announcements ;D

So this is basically MGS with items into the mix?

I think this was tried with a role in a mafia (Don't remember which). The role had to sub out every 3 days, and the player who subbed in/out couldn't talk with each other. This could be a cool idea, but there is a slight problem I see: If there are 25 players, and you need to sub everyone out 4 times during the game, that leads to 100 players. There are simply not enough players to do this.

This is very important. I'm gonna use MGS as an example because I obviously know the game but there are other games that did it right out there: one of our main mechanism was the CODEC and the frequencies. We could have added that on top of a normal mafia game, aiming for more communication, and it would have worked; but if it worked as it did, it's because we implemented it at the core of the game, half of the roles were new or took advantage of the frequencies, the uniting was made easier thanks to these frequencies. We took what was just a simple alternative method for communication and from that we elaborated the whole structure of the game, which lead to the 5 factions with their unique win conditions.

Also, when thinking about new mechanisms, you have to think above all else on the repercussions on the player's experience. It's cool to try new ideas as a host but for example subbing mafia would be pretty boring for the players - you have to carefully imagine that you're dropped into your game with no knowledge, and try to conceive what your thoughts would be.

askaninjask/serenity in 28 weeks later mafia as Frank West.

But yeah, I think a subbing out mafia would get annoying more than anything. There isn't as much incentive to win, anyway.

One mafia concept that warrants more exploration is just how large a mafia game can get and still work. Once the game is too large, the village leader would not be able to manage everyone's night actions at once, and mafia factions would have problems coordinating all their actions. The wolf, being just one player out of many, would be almost completely unable to win, and would have to be either made more powerful, or left out altogether. A truly gigantic mafia, one with around 100 players, would lead to new play styles and would let us test what happens in terms of team organization and information management as the size of a mafia game becomes very large.

I had this other brainwave: a standard mafia game in which the lynch votes are PM'd to the host(s) instead of posted in the forums.

Geniuses think alike: I had the same idea yesterday. Needs some discouraging for revealing the vote in the thread though, but I just might try this out later.

And then make everyone an announcer aswell :P

An idea I've been throwing around is having a pure neutral mafia, where people get to make their own factions. Great basic idea, but practically it seems to fail when I try to get it to work in my head :( any thoughts?

I think there have been abilities that did this in the past (Veedrock in WW3), but only for one day. I'm not entirely sure of the specifics of how these roles worked though :/

You could always say you're voting for one guy but actually vote for a different guy.