Live Action Mafia

A game of sneakiness and paranoia
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 Post subject: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 1:07 pm 
As the week winds down, a maniacal laughter can be heard in the distance! And then not so much of the distance.

The mafia have overpowered the town. MWAHAHA-what.

Congrats to the winners:

Mafia:
jakob
sashacf
michikyo
sammyluo
Ellena
ksedlar
isaacg

Non-Mafia (but still winners):
oreo
arkadiyf

Good game to all!

Wrap up will be this weekend, and please please feel free to leave your thoughts on this experimental game of mafia.


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 1:32 pm 
Please please leave your feedback on this game.

Some background about my modding experience: Though this is my first time modding live action mafia, I'm not exactly a noob at modding forum mafia. I've run a couple of games on websites where the days were up to 120 hours long, and the nights were always 48 hours. Transitioning from that to a 24 hour turnover with no nights was a bad idea for a game this hectic. But I love bad ideas, and I think this game turned out okay despite it all.

If I ever mod a game again, I'll make sure to keep it saner. I think I'll keep the daily dramas if I can think of at least 10 before game starts, but otherwise the setup is far too difficult to keep track of. Never again will I run a bastard mod mafia though. I've never run one of those before (though they've been some of my favorite games I've played in), and I didn't realize how hard it is to lie to people when my first instinct is to answer honestly.

This game was very heavily based off of two games that I loved in the past. Kieros's Revenge of Extreme Trainwreck Mafia, and Schazer's Murderfia. Seriously, they were the most fun I've ever had playing mafia, and they were both bastard mod games. In the former we even lynched the mod and the game went batshit beserk and never stopped. *reminiscing*

Anyways, it turns out live action mafia is way harder to do in a bastardly way. It was fun while it lasted though, despite eating both my life and dgrazian's life, along with probably a lot of the players lives.

Man, dgrazian is an amazing comod. He kept things under control and he was really good at day turnover. He also had lots of crazy role ideas and mechanic ideas. I was surprised to find that between the two of us, he was typically the one to go for the really out-there ideas and to work them into the game in a way that fit. Three cheers for him!

If anyone has any comments or tweaks or concerns or criticisms or thoughts or anything, feel free to post them below. I value your feedback greatly. Sorry for the wall of text, I just have a lot of feels about this game and wanted to share them.


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 7:00 pm 
Whew, yeah! That was an adventure to GM, and I imagine it was an adventure to play as well (we did tell you it would probably break!)

Thank you to Pravina for being a lifesaver - throughout the whole game!

As far as feedback goes, I know of a few things that were problematic:

1. Investigation functions were sufficiently unconstrained that they were next to useless. Apologies for this. We should have publicized at the beginning of the game the set of possible types of investigations (e.g. normal, insane, random.)
2. Random items (like cookies) were probably a net negative, due to the possibility of being poisoned. Even if they weren't a net negative, they felt that way.
3. Rules were often poorly defined and left open to interpretation. Different GM's could issue different rulings. This is probably inevitable in this type of game.
4. The mafia found the choose-your-own-ability power to be frustrating to work with. Interestingly, my impression is that the townies that were able to choose their own ability really enjoyed doing so. Perhaps this was because those townies only had to choose their role once at the beginning of the game, whereas the mafia were expected to come up with a new ability each day.
5. The overall lack of constraints was frustrating. This lack of constraints was, of course, the central premise of the game. The likely conclusion is that this game was an interesting idea that would be best not to repeat, at least not without dozens of hours of preparation.

If there were other issues that you noticed, please post! If there were elements of the game that you particularly enjoyed, please mention those as well! Compliments make GM's feel warm and fuzzy.

Thanks to everybody for playing!


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 7:06 pm 
Special shout-outs to jakob and sasha for some magnificent mafia masterminding!

Also to oreo for some truly impressive serial killing (and for keeping a diary of her plans and deeds!)


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 9:57 pm 
GMs, you were great. I can imagine how much work it must've taken to keep this wild of a game in check... I thought you dealt with the various mafia accidental reveals, the necessary nerfings, etc. in as reasonable a way as was possible for the situations involved. Kudos to you both.

I echo the praise of Jakob/Sasha/oreo's tactful play. I also enjoyed arkadiyf's plan and liked the ideas behind Alex's (forestalled) plan. My own rogue plan seemed like a good idea at the time (at least as well thought-out as the fall one D: ), but it didn't end up doing much.

On the townie side, I felt several townies (e.g. lilychen, lgunder, aliciacm) worked really hard in doing what they could to figure out the whirl of confusion that the game quickly descended into. Town deserves a lot of credit for staying commendably (relatively) cohesive for quite a while. Mafia was probably just too OP.

In terms of specific mechanics/roles feedback (as well as tangential ideas they brought to mind):
-I really enjoyed my original (non-nerfed) role as long as it lasted, but I recognize that there's no way something like that could go through in a normal game. In this case once mafia found me (which given Jakob's alignment was bound to happen really soon in any case if Jakob didn't poison me first) keeping it was unthinkable and would have been gamebreaking, and in a normal game it would make it virtually impossible for town to win. Perhaps some form of investigation-flipping third party role, possibly combined with arkadiyf's lynch list role, would be a fun thing to have though.

-Lol aliciacm so OP

-Suicide powers are probably not good to have available in non-emergency situations. Especially if they involve conscription.

-The dynamic of using actual food items / verbal keywords to do things in game (lgunder, lilychen?, Jakob, shensley, aok, aradhana?) seems like an interesting idea that could be kept in some form, though probably not stably in any form that requires stealth.

-Some variant of my cover role ("Crazy superhero") also seems, in retrospect, like a reasonable role to put in a real game: Have a source of (generally) reliable investigations that can't be replicated, which leads to town having to take some investigators at their word or leave the vig-revenge business to the untrustable investigators. This also gives caught mafia/rogues (ahem, me) a slightly higher chance / better excuse for survival. More room for tricky play, seems fun :P

-Not sure how Trek's role worked (did game end if he got lynched?) but if he was more active it seems like he could've won pretty easily (a large fraction of people do get lynched in this game), especially since no one knew jester existed. If people did know jesters existed, and their deaths ended game, it would be a LOT harder for town to win such a game :/

-Though elections were stymied quite quickly, the position of class clown brings up a possible way to implement my suggestion at the end of last fall of having a "Mechanic" role that creates items from materials. Perhaps the elected person can get one unit of materials each day and distribute it to one person of their choice, who can then collect a few of these materials and make an item from it corresponding to their role. Put in something about role reveal or a mafia-enhancement factor, and we might get an interesting, not too OP elected position?

----
-Completely unrelated, but a way to partially nerf (reliable) investigations without having unreliable ones that cause all investigations to cease, which I suggested after the fall game: a (multi-copy) town role called Schrödinger's cat, which is immune to bangs but dies when investigated for anything. This would add some complex dynamics involving whether to investigate someone, etc., and would give mafia plenty of excuse fodder...
----

Overall, I really enjoyed playing in this game and watching it afterwards. Being mafia-aligned was quite stressful, but I suppose it's a burden someone has to bear ;) Thanks for organizing this whole thing and making it happen!


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 11:59 pm 
seems like Schrodinger's cat should have some chance of dying when investigated, but not a 100% chance.


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 12:31 am 
Thanks for the write up Sammy!

Trek being lynched would not have ended the game (except for him :-))


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 1:36 am 
mads wrote:
seems like Schrodinger's cat should have some chance of dying when investigated, but not a 100% chance.

Oops you're right... I don't know physics :/


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 Post subject: Re: Game Over: Mafia Win
PostPosted: Wed Mar 04, 2015 1:50 am 
Thanks GMs! I thought that game was very well-run. I suppose I'll think about feedback on the game structure for the wrap-up.


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