Organized Real Time Mafia on IRC (yeah!)

Another important update!

The rules and roles have been finished! The game is designed for ~18 players but can be reconfigured for different sizes if that's needed. Nonetheless, don't linger when the sign-ups start!

By signing up, you agree to ALL of the following rules. If you do not, I will sub you out or godkill you, and possibly invoke further punishment in the form of bans from forum mafia on Circus Maximus. So read it all carefully.

When the rules and the role PMs conflict, the role PMs take priority. For example, one rule says no deadtalking, but if your role PM says you are allowed to deadtalk, you are allowed to do so.
1. Common sense. You are assumed to play to win, and to let this game take priority over any friendships you have. I reserve full judgement over what common sense means.
2. No deadtalking. When you're dead, your voice will be removed, and you are not allowed to converse about the game with anyone who is playing. Whether you think what you said while dead mattered or not is irrelevant.
3. No copypasting any conversations with the host. You may copypaste your role PM, and you may obviously fake one.
4. No changing your nick when you're still playing. Otherwise keeping track becomes too annoying for the hosts.
5. Stay active while you're still playing. You will be subbed out and penalized later if you don't.

I may add more later.

Here's how the process will work.

Sign-Ups

At the designated time and date, the general discussion channel will be taken off invite, and the name will be revealed. The channel will have a user limit that allows 18 people to join it, excluding the hosts. These 18 will be given voice (+v). After this, the channel will open up for everyone willing to watch. If you did not make the cut, I recommend sticking around, as subs will be needed! If I need a sub, I will come to you, not vice versa.

After this, the roles will be randomized, and then the role PMs will be distributed over IRC query. Then the hosts will announce the game is ready, and we will start with Day 1. The exact roles, factions and priorities will not be revealed, but there will be material for the non-villagers to false claim.

Game Flow

At day, everyone has one (1) vote to cast. The person with the most votes against them is lynched. If two people have an equal amount of votes, neither dies. The day ends when majority (more than half of all the possible votes are on one person) is reached, or when the host ends the day for time reasons (this will be announced a few minutes beforehand)

Everyone votes in a separate channel, as to not clog up discussion and votes. Occasionally, the hosts will post a vote count for everyone's convenience. This vote count will assume everyone's vote counts as 1.

At night, villagers with a power role PM Mekkah (not CrabNebula) ON IRC with their night action. Non-villagers have separate instructions.

Communication is allowed everywhere in any way, in both day and night, except in the voting channel, which has to be kept clean for votes.

When someone dies, their role and alliance is announced, and their voice is removed.

The game ends when all factions but one have been eliminated.







Update!
I've pretty much decided on a time. Until further notice, the first game will start at 5:00 PM my time. This is equivalent to 3:00 PM UTC, making it morning for USA, and around midnight for Aussies. The date is Sunday, October 4th.

There are no pre sign-ups. I will announce a channel name at exactly this time, and the first x amount of people (depending on interest, it will be 15 or 20...I'm starting small) will be in.

CrabNebula has generously offered to help me hosting this time.

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One day I had the idea of organizing some time to play #fluodome mafia with a lot of people at once. Others had this idea too. It's too bad that #fluodome mafia is pretty boring, and if you join it with 30 people you just end up with 20 villagers and possibly a lagging bot. Shiv talked about improving the bot someday with lots of different modes, but let's face reality, he's not going to do it until he has an extreme span of wide time again. So I thought of this.

One or two people think up a somewhat basic, though also slightly unpredictable game, and host it on IRC at a certain time. For example, Mekkah and jumpluff announce they will host Disney Mafia at 20:00 UTC on September 28th. Everyone interested in joining gets their ass on IRC at that time, a channel is made, and people join it. Then jumpluff and Mekkah proceed to PM everyone with roles and such, and the game plays out just like forum mafia, except in real time.

There's two options for the size: a set size of like 20 or 30, or make a game concept with some roles and then optional roles that are only in if you have enough players for it. A size limit is easier, especially if you play this for testing, plus it's easily enforcable through putting the channel on +l. It also makes life a lot easier when it comes to inactivity. Some people might have to drop out at some point, and it's easier to find subsitutes if not everyone who was interested joined.

Interest? Ideas?

1. Mekkah
2. Accent
3. blue_light
4. GTS
5. Amelia
6. jumpluff
7. Tangerine
8. Shade
9. Outlaw
10. Jimbo
11. askaninjask
12. Jedil
13. RB Golbat
14. moi
15. LonelyNess
16. asim
17. Flamestrike
18. porygon3
19. Umbreon Dan
20. twash
21. Toothache
22. Pidgeot79
23. Pyromanic
24. HD
25. eric the espeon
26. Mr. 378
27. Sikh Assassin
28. ExplorerAce
29. Altair
30. Dale
31. ReyScarFace
32. Mattimeo
33. Yoshi King
34. Earthworm
35. Dubulous
36. cookie
37. moot
38. MagicMaster87
39. GoldenKnight14
40. gmax
41. billymills
42. Amelia
43. KnightoftheWind
44. Thorns
45. blue_light
46. Agape
47. Sidd
48. CrabNoobula

If we did this, it's possible we could use old mafias and replay them.

Yeah, that's a good combination of ideas. However, we'd need like 40-50 players for that, and we'd also have to either incorporate anonymous play (not impossible, but adds an extra layer of difficulty) or neglect the "true feel" of the game. We're better off starting with something more basic though.

Wait... so are game creators submitting old games, and playing them in one sitting? I mean its an interesting idea but the entire point of Forum Mafia is so that you can talk to people and interrogate them. If you are doing it all at one sitting I'm not sure how you are gonna get claims, get false claims, etc. etc. I think this needs to be explained a bit.

And I'm guessing we are going to use old games from small games or Large mafias and permission from those creators? Or are we using entirely new games?

i think this would be fun and i approve of using old mafias (we could just start with the older ones like super mafia and mafia mafia that didnt use aliases) but how do hosts plan to organize ~50 irc pms at once

I think this idea would be fantastic. The only drag might be how long it takes. As stoo said, how are the hosts going to handle 50 pms simultaneously? Besides that, how are the mafia going to make fake claims, given that the game will be moving at a relatively fast pace? I suppose the host could pre-prepare them, but that would be an awful lot of work I'm pretty certain most people would not want to do.

You're raising valid concerns, but there's solutions for all.

First, we're not limited to two hosts. We can have like four (12-13 PMs per host) or five (10 PMs per host). Of course, this should start with like a 30 player game, which means even if you do it with two hosts it's 15 each, which is reasonable. You can also throw in generic villagers, which are also a partial solution to the next problem: falseclaims.

There's several ways to help falseclaims and they all originate from forum mafia. We can ban role PM pasting during Night 0. We can have long days and nights during which you can interrogate, talk, etc.

I don't know about everyone else, but this is REALLY exciting if it works. Imagine sitting in a channel with thirty players, and you can create chats and channels with each of them as a villager or mafia to gain info.

Possibly cutting down on flavour significantly would help people make fake PMs? One problem with replaying old games is that every role is known so falseclaiming will be hard without having a conflict.. Also village leaders will have a LOT of PMs to deal with at once, especially if there is a shortish time limit on days and nights. Still, it would be great fun, though could need a bit of tweaking to work well. Maybe have some mafias run at different times to help people in other timezones? Depends on activity I suppose..

Possibly cutting down on flavour significantly would help people make fake PMs?

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I have always been in favor of short role PMs.

One problem with replaying old games is that every role is known so falseclaiming will be hard without having a conflict..

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Yeah, replaying old games is pure nostalgia. This is why I'm saying the idea should be tested with a fresh game instead, then later it can be used for this.

Maybe have some mafias run at different times to help people in other timezones? Depends on activity I suppose..

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Yeah, like Smogon Tour I guess.

One thing you could do is instead of taking just the old mafia. You can take the amount of roles in it and reduce it. That way it allows holes in the village for the mafia to fill with their false claims, you could also add new additional roles into the old mafia to spruce it up. Mafia numbers can then be reduced to balance out the reduced number of villagers.

Something to take into account when making the game is that with easier false claiming, village leaders (if there are any) being very busy talking to at least 10 people at once and finding it hard to sort out who they trust, and the fact that many villagers will not claim quickly to an unproven leader, added to the lack of anonymity to protect you if you trueclaim to a mafia.. well its probably going to be very easy for the mafia to mole in most games, or a least not be cast under too much suspicion. In many of the more recent games the combined mafia has been almost as powerful, or even significantly more powerful than the village. This on IRC could be too much, but it can be tested and fine tuned.

Edit: I like blue_light's idea, maybe the mafia could even be told some of the village roles that had been removed?

That'll do as a test run, of course. What I think is optimal is fluo mafia + some more common roles from past forum games, such as:
- yes/no asker
- announcer
- watcher
- tracker
- redirector
- resurrector

sounds good, #fluodome mafia is getting tired. I'd be interested in both hosting and playing

I like the idea, but I think that in the same way that when talking about forum mafia we have to admit the fact that it's very different than classic mafia, here we have to forget about some things that are specific to the forums.

For example, I think roles should be handed out to players on IRC too, and consist of only a few words. I also think that all roles should be known by all the players beforehand: the mafia players will have to take risks when falseclaiming, but that's the point (of course, if someone claims inspector when there is only one in the game and the actual inspector dies, it will raise suspicions).

The other thing that bothers me is the time that's necessary to play a mafia game with 30 players. IMO, a normal day should last at the very least 5 minutes, and a night, 2 - so, if we count 1 death per day and 1.2 deaths per night (the average for a game with one village and one mafia), the game could easily last 1 hour. If we want to reduce the time that a game takes, we would have to allow two deaths per night, for example.

In any case, I'm interested, of course :)

i think to allow for time we shouldnt have more than 30 or 40 players, i mean we need at least 20 minutes for each day/night cycle, quite possibly more, which could be between 2 and 3 hours in a larger game. considering time zones and commitments, that could be a problem. i suppose though, as the game nears its end, days and nights will become progressively shorter

edit: accent is a lame

If this is played with role PMs at all I'd suggest banning pasting them altogether, simply because you're probably going to be busy for almost the whole time and you won't have time to make a flawless / convincing fake.

Good idea!

We probably shouldn't be using much if any flavor at all in these PMs. Is there any reason why we can't just have stuff like "you are the watcher, send host a PM that says "watching USER" and you'll know in the morning who USER targetted."

I'm also against having all of the roles known at the beginning of the day. If someone wants to claim role checker and they are lucky enough to get it right a couple of times (or get it wrong but go undetected), I don't think they should get outted just because the REAL role checker got killed... that kind of defeats the point of a false claim.

I don't get what LonelyNess is saying 100% but I'm pretty sure he's referring to roles being revealed after death. You always make a risk as a mafia to claim something, and if your false claim manages to die when you're moling it's something you have to deal with?

Ideally the game should probably no matter what the theme be just

You are Devdan. You are a Mayor.

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involving role pms. you'd have to make the correlation between the role and name have some sense but as simple as possible would be the best. or you could maybe add like one line of flavour

There is no way you can make each day/night cycle 20-30 minutes, there really isn't enough time for that. I could see at best 10 minutes. I also agree on the flavor thing. The only thing a person really needs to know is their alliance and their ability, otherwise if you were to c/p role pms from old mafias I am almost positive many of them would be cut off.

moi said:

I don't get what LonelyNess is saying 100% but I'm pretty sure he's referring to roles being revealed after death. You always make a risk as a mafia to claim something, and if your false claim manages to die when you're moling it's something you have to deal with?

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What I'm saying is that if at the beginning of the game there is an announcement that there is exactly ONE inspector allied with the village, and that one inspector dies randomly, then if a mafia claimed to be an inspector he is fucked. At least if we don't know -exactly- how many people are allied with the village, and -exactly- how many of each role there are, there's a bit more wiggle room in terms of what you can claim and how you can actually play. If there's no wiggle room, then we might as well just be playing #fluodome mafia.

As I said, if there is one inspector in the game and you, as a mafia, claim to be the inspector, well you deserve to lose anyway.

But that doesn't mean we have to do what I said of course, and yeah we could announce all the role plus some unused ones, or not specify the proportion of villagers/mafia.

This sounds very nice. I'd like to get involved if I find the time.

to be honest i'd much rather not have any roles being given at the start at all but that's just me

i love this idea and am totally for it. agreeing with blue light here, but maybe not even 10 minutes. maybe 10 minutes at maximum and 5 if you really want to be strenuous about it.

I agree, the roles shouldn't be announced at the beginning. I also agree with not using flavor text and just saying "you are the something, every night you can do whatever" should be fine.

If we are trying to do a regular mafia game but in real time then it should probably use a setup similar to what we have used in most games here (obviously there are exceptions, I don't expect a viva on irc or anything). I would probably not allow copy pasting, although it is not hard to type out "you are X" on the spot even, if you can type fast enough.

Also I'm interested obviously.