RaMafia Special - The End

[STM1993]

If I may offer my view as a spectator after going through the comments and a chat on an irc?

I think the main thing is that this round over-emphasized the use of abilities. People will inevitably band together to share information, and its not like the GM can really enforce rules against private talking anyway and it does serve to make the game more engaging. In this case, because everything is unknown, players are pretty much forced to find checkers to gather intel instead of try and deduce identities based on vote behavior or otherwise. However, getting info in smaller groups without sharing is slow, so the idea of creating a bigger information network is attractive to make the game more or less settle down to classic mafia where you can guess based on player posts & behaviors.

But then due to an incident, instead of perhaps only revealing what the alignment of a role is and a snippet of the ability, every player's exact name & attached role are also revealed to public. Sure, the information isn't 100% accurate and there are inactive/uncooperative players who could be made into scapegoats, but it does take away a vast majority of the guessing game - only a handful of players have an alignment hiding ability afterall. And let's face it, some abilities are pretty absurd: Fake PMs from the gamemaster(which also inadvertently led to rulebreaking which also wasn't properly enforced)? Being able to repeatedly block the same person's abilities over and over again? And what's this 3rd zombie(wololo) faction that came out of nowhere?

In any case, the lessons I draw from this are pretty much aligned with some of Apoc's points:

1) Role alignment & (basic) ability should be available from the start.
The whole fun of mafia is figuring out who is what role, so I don't see a point forcing players to gather information about the alignment and ability of a role; if anything it caused the giant information network to form which allowed this level of trust and leakage to happen. However, I do understand that players may find enjoyment in figuring out a role's EXACT abilities - hence I suggest that simply giving a description saying that for example, the medic is a townie who can save others lives, but not mention whom, how many or how often would work. Or for two role checkers like spy & scientist, they would have the exact same description of "can check others but checks on them may be inaccurate" and only publicly differ in alignment. That kind of thing. And if there is a 3rd party faction, it should be known that it exists at the start of the game.

2) Rule Enforcement.
As Apoc pointed out, being able to enforce a rule with a non-game-ending punishment, like being unable to vote or use abilities or speak or just outright killed for a number of phases.

3) Trust in the GM.
Specific to that fake PM ability because I have to stress it - there shouldn't ever be an ability where you end up distrusting the GM's very words. It is understood that the GM can give you inaccurate information based on an ability YOU used, but not the other way around.

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Anyway, expect Ramond to post something in due time to wrap things up!