Live Action Mafia

A game of sneakiness and paranoia
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 Post subject: Basic Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Jan 17, 2012 11:53 pm 
Here are my basic tips. I think these are commonly agreed upon, but feel free to post with other opinions.

- Post on the forum. Face to face conversation is great, but it's good to involve players from all over campus. Forum conversations make it hard for Mafia to tell different people different things or deny they said something.
- Vote every day.
- Know the rules well.
- Explain why you're voting for someone. Voting for someone out of nowhere looks suspicious.
- Be familiar with the rules.
- Post suspicious stuff you see. "I didn't want to look suspicious myself by posting suspicions" is the path to an easy Mafia win.
- Start discussions early. It's bad when everyone's rushing to decide for whom to vote for at 11:50PM.
- If you're a special role and about to be lynched, announce it, leaving enough time for players to change their votes if they are convinced.
- If you're holding an item and likely to be lynched, hand it off to someone you trust. Otherwise, you're risking the item to be redistributed randomly, possible into Mafia hands.

-If you're Investigator, investigate every day. Consider announcing your results using a trusted player as a proxy to relay the results without revealing your role.
-If you're Mad Scientist, collect body parts every day you can. Also, don't tell anyone you're Mad Scientist unless you have a really good reason.
-If you're Politician, there are two ways to go. Either survive until the end to suddenly force through lynching a Mafia in the endgame, or use it early and get people to lynch you on a boring day so that we have a trusted (but powerless) townie.
-If you're Ironheart, bait a Mafia into trying to kill you, then reveal.
-Electing a Mayor is a good idea overall. You can always impeach them towards the end of the game.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jan 18, 2012 9:27 am 
Some points Alex made that are so important they are worth repeating and expanding on:

0a. If you're reading this, read Alex's post above again! He's giving some really useful advice.

0b. The town (and the mafia) win together and lose together. Even if you die, you win if your team wins. You should always place victory above your own survival. For example, you should almost always prioritize the lives of special roles over your own (if you are a normal townsperson.)

1. If you are Investigator or Mad Scientist, use your role every day!. The investigator should almost always use a proxy in revealing his/her information.

2. Be familiar with rules and mechanics and especially rules pertaining to any special role you may have. There have been minor changes to the rules, some of which were made at packet handout. Read the rules.

3. Keep track of items. Transferring items can be very important, but players should always be accountable for which items they have and who they have given them too. The town might well have won the last game, if they kept better track of who had the Fake ID's.

4. Start discussion early. This should be intuitively clear, since better-informed decision can be made with more time, but the consequences of failing to do this are not so obvious. Consider the following scenario:

At 11:45 p.m., a lynch mob forms to lynch X. X happens to be a special role, say the Ironheart. The only way X has any chance of surviving (and even this probably won't save him) is to scream on the forum that he is Ironheart (and that assumes that he is aware of what is going on.) A revealed Ironheart is obviously much less powerful. However, if the lynch-mob process begins several hours earlier, the Ironheart can be a little more subtle. He could, say, reveal himself to one other player and get that player to lobby in his favor. Hopefully, he can survive without any mafia having learned his identity. (Btw this situation basically occurred in the game last IAP. Ironheart was lynched in a last-minute lynch mob, despite his frantic efforts around 11:57 to persuade the town he was Ironheart.)

5. Be active and involved in the game. This prevents the mafia from controlling the game (see the game from this fall.)



A few new points of my own:

1. The following properties are really good for the medkit to have:
a. being in the hands of a special role (Mad Scientist would be the best of all!)
b. having it's location not known by the Mafia (note the absence of this property at game start. Xavier, this might be a good thing to fix.)

2. Same with the Microphone/receiver pair

3. Talk outside the forum! Get an idea of who you (somewhat) trust. Discuss strategy with other people. In addition to being really important to the town from a strategic perspective, this is the spirit of the game.

4. Don't be too paranoid! The mafia are (almost certainly) going to be killing somebody everyday, so even if you don't die someone else will, perhaps a special role character! (see 0b at the top of this post.) Also, the game's more fun when people aren't excessively paranoid.

4b. The above paragraph becomes less true near the end of the day, if the mafia are running out of time to make a kill and can potentially be denied a kill for the day or forced to take excessive risks.

5. With that said, if you're going to get killed try to do so in a way that brings down a mafia (your life for a mafia's is a sweet victory.) Send private messages to a couple people when you are meeting with somebody. Try to trap possible mafia into killing you when others know you are with that person. Be clever.

6. Keep up with the forum discussion. Be aware of what is going on publicly outside the forum.

7. Use private messages! You may not want to say something publicly, but often it is a good idea to tell one or two people (suspicions you have, where you're going to dinner, etc.)

8. Keep game momentum going. The mafia may well try to kill active players early. If you are a townsperson and there is a void in leadership, take some initiative. Don't leave the mafia to control the game! (See the game from this fall.)

9. Read Alex's post again :)

10. Please make comments, disagreements, concurrences, etc.


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