Hide or Die

[Raikage]

Well, now that mafia is really all about information, I thought of a new format to try out.

It's pretty radical and obviously needs a lot of sorting out, of course. Basically, I've thought of eliminating the lynch, and/or even night kills. Instead, the common way of killing off people will be this: provide all their essential details to the host. For example, it might be providing their alias, role name, role power, role command, and win condition. Once the host receives this, the person in question is automatically killed off.

Of course, to prevent the host from being spammed with guesses, you could include a drawback for it, such as the person who guesses wrong having some of their own information being revealed. It might also be possible to trick others with wrong information to benefit.

Roles would have to drastically reworked as well - complete inspector becomes a free kill, for example, and almost all roles would revolve around information. Nonetheless, I do think it's something worth discussing here before I try out this concept.

 

[dak]

shit idea

either people will play good and not tell anything = turbo slow game

or

people will play like shit and tell everything = game is shit

 

[Outlaw]

No, just no. This isn't mafia at all.

 

[Acklow]

The idea is somewhat horrible-but one thing I'd like to say, this is more or less a courtroom set up, really. Rather than having people killed, perhaps they are proven "not-guilty?".

 

[ck49]

so remind me what benifit there is to telling anyone your role? there needs to be a prize for giving your PM to the right person (a team mate).

 

[UncleSam]

so remind me what benifit there is to telling anyone your role? there needs to be a prize for giving your PM to the right person (a team mate).

Why does there need to be a "prize" for telling people your role?

Seriously, everyone here saying "this is a shit idea", for the most part, are only doing so because everyone is so used to information trading as a centerpiece of mafia. Besides, this format does not discourage information trading so much as spreading information about oneself.

Of course, I wouldn't call this idea "mafia" either, but I think it could be interesting, new, and refreshing if reworked somewhat.

For instance, you could force everyone to have a posting restriction related to their "password", role name, whatever you like (some aspect of how they die). Additionally, there could be a role that changes info for someone (like a bodyguard, but better), and of course teams would have to apply or no one would tell anyone else anything at all (again, info trading about others is quite viable in this format, and people who want to just claim and have someone tell them what to do are not really playing traditional mafia in any case so much as the evolved, Smogon mafia game we have come to be familiar with).

That being said, this format would have serious issues balancing, and would essentially come down to a series of turns in which people gather information, kind of like Clue. One possibility would be to include lynches and kills, but have the lynched party/killed person have something specific in their role revealed for all to see (this is essentially a public inspect of some aspect of another's role).

I honestly don't think this is that bad of an idea, and think that the people who have written this off are (for the most part) only doing so because it is so radical.

 

[ck49]

You probably do, or there is no intensive to tell anyone anything. that is, amusing its just the basic idea stated in the OP, your version seems a bit more in depth and less in need of it.

 

[Raikage]

Well, I suppose this can't be called a mafia, but no need to get into semantics. You can say 'tactical game' or whatever if mafia really grinds your gears.

I originally envisioned people swapping info with each other. For example, if your faction only gets role names, you'll need to swap info with other factions (say, one that gets only win condition) in order to make up a complete set to kill off a common enemy. Similarly, you could lie to protect your own team members etc. This is just a simplified example, but I don't see why info exchange can't be facilitated. You don't need to give out your own info for this game to work.