RaMafia Special - The End

[CosmicSarasa]

I told ya, I wasn't a Mafia

[Apocalipsis]

I "won" and I'm not as satisfied as I should be.

It's the uncertainty that keeps the game interesting for me. I try to get to know the roles of each player as fast as I can because of that uncertainty, and it's usually fun. But when that uncertainty is completely gone, the only thing that remains is a combination of actions which should result in a win (if it's possible). At that point, I think it's better for the game to end.

This is not something specific against mfc or A-Man actions (they were the ones who started doing the PM thingy in the last two games), because they are playing by the rules, and I even remember doing the same in the past. This is more of a "Why don't we stop doing that for a change and see how the games goes?".

I'm sure some roles were overpowered/underpowered as individuals (compare Amadis and MangaD), but I'm not sure if factions were overpowered or not, because it's a complex thing to analyze. I surely wouldn't call this game broken just like that, since I'm sure that Ramond took some time to balance things out in the big picture.

That being said, I remember Ramond saying this was an experiment, so I'll add my two cents:

• Reveal the roles and his abilities from the start. It's way too chaotic if you don't.
  
• Enforce the specific rules by not-so-severe punishments. As of now, the severity of the punishment for breaking the rules makes you avoid punishing players at all. Also, no more three-strikes warning. For infractors: why don't you make them unable to talk or vote for a certain amount of days? Other option is just killing them (depending on how breaking a rule affects the flow of the game). I know their deaths would affect their factions severely, but not as much as an instant-defeat (and endgame).
  
• The rule about ghosts being unable to talk didn't affect the activity of this game, like it used to do in other games. Then again, the bad thing about it is that mafias usually end up killing the active players first... so I'm not sure it should stay in a normal game with not as many players as this one.
  
• Don't let players send fake PMs from the host. It's just too overpowered and game-breaking.
  
• I say we have a rule against talking privately. I know that won't stop everyone from doing it, but at least it would stop us from explicitly asking for that in the thread ("send me PMs", "he told me privately", etc).
  

[mfc]

I say we have a rule against talking privately. I know that won't stop everyone from doing it, but at least it would stop us from explicitly asking for that in the thread ("send me PMs", "he told me privately", etc).

But how, I don't understand how this would function, If people don't want to send pms, they simply don't. And without talking outside of thread, mafia will know anything town knows and nobody can surprise mafia like this. I don't know whether you played vanilla mafia games with such rule before but I cannot see town winning without private talks.

---

And you know, Afaik only Jernemies and Ariel pm'ed their roles and Ariel: We suspected he was mafia until the end of the game. Jernemies: Fake abilities and we thought he was townie whole game.

Amadis 100% townie(only you and ariel suspecting him) And fake passive. So, That pm part didn't help us breaking uncertainities that much.

I was only able to get powerlist from MangaD in private thanks to EF telling me he was Governor. But apart from that, It didn't change that much in the game.

---

Ah also there is MangaD, told A-Man that he was the GodFather

---

And uncertainity was never gone until Darl revealed everything, Amadis and Jernemies and Ariel. Also Pf. Jernemies blocked Aman last night from copying powers of tornado. So, game could end with even mafia's victory, since we were trusting anything amadis told us and jernemies on the safehouse.

[A-Man]

I'm sure some roles were overpowered/underpowered as individuals (compare Amadis and MangaD)

I'm sure abilities of mafia and civilians are not meant to be balanced.

Reveal the roles and his abilities from the start.

The fact that abilities weren't revealed from the start made things more exciting. Though maybe if abilities are revealed but alignments aren't, it may work out well.

Enforce the specific rules by not-so-severe punishments. ... as an instant-defeat (and endgame).

I agree with this part.

I say we have a rule against talking privately.

Nah, that's a good part in the game. The mafia would have the great edge also when every single plan civilians come up with is devised in this thread.

[T.O.R.N.A.D.O]

Is it only me or someone else is waiting for Ramond to post his review and end the game?

[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.

---

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

[Apocalipsis]

But how, I don't understand how this would function, If people don't want to send pms, they simply don't. And without talking outside of thread, mafia will know anything town knows and nobody can surprise mafia like this. I don't know whether you played vanilla mafia games with such rule before but I cannot see town winning without private talks.

That's why when you first approached me privately, I told you that I didn't want to give information away, because you could have a mole in your network. And you had one, and all the information people confided you ended up with the Mafias, even before you made it public. Town won only because Amadis slipped.

You never played a vainilla game where citizens only played in the thread? o.o
I played 10 games at least, and I only remember 3 that include massive role-revealing (including the last two games).

And you know, Afaik only Jernemies and Ariel pm'ed their roles and Ariel: We suspected he was mafia until the end of the game. Jernemies: Fake abilities and we thought he was townie whole game.

Amadis 100% townie(only you and ariel suspecting him) And fake passive. So, That pm part didn't help us breaking uncertainities that much.

I was only able to get powerlist from MangaD in private thanks to EF telling me he was Governor. But apart from that, It didn't change that much in the game.

---

Ah also there is MangaD, told A-Man that he was the GodFather:D

---

And uncertainity was never gone until Darl revealed everything, Amadis and Jernemies and Ariel. Also Pf. Jernemies blocked Aman last night from copying powers of tornado. So, game could end with even mafia's victory, since we were trusting anything amadis told us and jernemies on the safehouse.

There was no uncertainty about which role each player had. There was still some uncertainty regarding abilities and alignments, because those were not revealed from the start... something I didn't like.

And I don't think that Town had the game won. Actually, after the Paramedic's death, Mafia had the upper hand. They could start killing the Town's most valuable players one by one, starting with [Rhino and then] A-Man, or Ariel (if he were to be still alive, since you wanted to lynch him). Ariel was key here, because even though his death would make Amadis suspicious, he was the only citizen capable of checking abilities. Without him, after Klodasmone's death, you would have started to lynch people who didn't have "100%" in your table, and that wouldn't have included Jernemies (maybe not even Amadis), the remaining mafias. Consecutive lynching of citizens and steady Mafia kills usually don't end well for the Town.

I'm sure abilities of mafia and civilians are not meant to be balanced.

I never said otherwise.

The fact that abilities weren't revealed from the start made things more exciting. Though maybe if abilities are revealed but alignments aren't, it may work out well.

It didn't make things more exciting to me. Everything felt too random, as everyone could claim to have any fake abilities they wanted and we would have required a checker (Ariel, specifically) to prove them wrong (or right).

The mafia would have the great edge also when every single plan civilians come up with is devised in this thread.

That's the whole point of the game, in my opinion. And that's how the game is usually played at webpages exclusively dedicated to this game:
http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?titl...te_Message

Heck, some places even have hidden threads for Mafias to speak, so everyone can see how they planned the whole thing once the game ends.

Edit:
In case anyone is wondering what that 3rd faction is, check the "Cult" described in this page:
http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Cult

Let me quote something from that article: "Cults have been criticized for being very hard to balance". So yeah, it was an overkill in this game with so many abilities. But it was smart to diminish Monk's power by making his active ability available only on odd nights.

[Ramond]

Finally somebody who understands that Mafia was actually going to win if the Amadis-Darl controversy hadn't happened this way.

Don't expect the proper review post anytime soon, it's going to take a while to fit everything in. But there will be a proper end to this. I will however now take the time to talk about a few of your points.

In the meantime you guys could comment on your experiences on the game. As Apoc already mentioned, this was a type of experiment on how to expand the world of Mafia to something more exciting for everybody, not just non-Citizens. Of course, balance is always an issue if there's no template to work with, but imo it wasn't as badly balanced as some of you make it out to be. Yes, it seems like some roles were too strong or too underpowered this game <-- big emphasis on this. Things can turn out very differently if the players approach it differently, and that is usually a good sign.

Fake PMs
Most people complained about the fake PM ability. At first, the ability was designed in a way that each anonymous message would have a preceding "You have received an anonymous message:", and that there would be a town-aligned anonymous PMer role as well. This however didn't seem very useful without any other ability to actually relay proper information to the right people, so I dropped it and made the Mafia counterpart more powerful.
I don't see why the fake PM ability should be overpowered; that power loses pretty much all value once people start figuring out there's fake PMs going around.
In this game for instance, once mfc figured out he wasn't actually Insomniac, that power would render itself useless under normal circumstances. However, since all the roles were made public (particularly to Mafia), Mafia could still use ability to fake ability results, like giving the Mentalist another fake night target or giving an ability checker a fake ability.

Rule Enforcement
I was never really planning to really end the game if somebody broke a rule, but I figured that people were less likely to actually break the rules if the 'punishment' sounded severe enough. The rule that I fear most to be broken is the ghost talk one. There's no 'punishment' for a dead player in killing him or not letting him talk or vote, obviously. I do admit though I haven't thought much about the rule enforcements after the start of the game.

Private Discussions
The game would be immensely different without private conversations. I think this adds in some more depth though, especially if Mafia manages to sneak inside a trusted network as a mole. I also think that forbidding this in rules won't stop it.

3rd Party
Initially I wanted Mafia to be unconvertable, but I figured Monk would then know that his conversion target is Mafia. I didn't want to kill him in that case either, since there's an initial 5/16 chance of targeting a Mafia. In retrospect that would have been a better idea; Monk needs Mafia to kill enough town, so he wouldn't actually reveal his Mafia findings too quickly.
The 3rd Party could be revealed through alignment checks (except the Monk himself), but too late I realized that the only actual alignment checking ability was the Mentalist. Most checking roles only checked for the role name, while most roles were already known pretty early on.

Not revealing list of abilities
I figured it'd be easier to lie about your role if people couldn't just check up whether such an ability exists. This is, of course, only benefitting Mafia side. This would have also rendered the fake PM ability obsolete, which was supposed to be a trump the Mafia could play. But this can be changed if people feel too uneasy with it.
In my opinion, it also added a few short surprising plot twists (see Hellblazer being revealed as Mentalist and mfc actually believing he wasn't). This of course wouldn't have worked if people had known such abilities existed. But maybe that's too much already and only fun to watch as a spectator.

Relying on abilities
This is the main plot point. In a normal Mafia game, how would you find Mafia if you are not the Sheriff? Simple, you look at daily accusations and votes and compare them later to the roles of the deceased. Mafia tends not to vote each other if they are not obviously lynched.
Therefore, with the publication of all roles and who was probably Mafia, only one single bandwagon would form each day. Checkproof Mafia would simply join in (no way to save fellow Mafia) and there is no information gain for the town on checkproof Mafia. Benefits Mafia of course. Compare Sheriff->Godfather in original game.

Some other random facts I want to answer

The Cop cannot block the same person twice in a row. This role is definitely not overpowered as long as they don't know which townie can do what. Of course, it became very powerful once all roles and abilities were out.

All roles being revealed benefitted only Mafia. That way they could accurately plan how to use their abilities; who to block; who to kill and even who to send fake PMs to with which info. In my opinion, counting out the 3rd party, this situation would be won by Mafia 95% of the time, since Leader role would inevitably fall on Amadis or Jernemies at some point because of 100% 'trust'.

There was no Mafia member that was 100% check-proof. Vigilante is not checkproof. Coroner appears as Town-side only if he dies (alignment or ability check would make him look Mafia). Cop appears as Town-side only if checked by Mentalist. Godfather checks are inconclusive, but that by itself is suspicious anyway. And if Scientist was checked by Spy, the Spy would get "Spy" result and notice something's fishy.

Coroner's passive is twofold; appearing as Town and being able to still talk after death, to try to lead the townies away from Mafia while apparently Town-side.

Joker is not immune to lynch. He loses his voting ability if he's lynched (which is basically as bad as dying), but he stays alive. In case Mafia knows his abilities, they need to consider whether those are enough of a threat to actually still kill him.

Nave went just a little too overboard with his fake Insomniac PM idea, if he had stayed a little more under the radar I guess he could have deceived a lot of people.

mfc get off your horse already, your actions would have led town to inevitable defeat if Amadis hadn't double-crossed Darl.

klodas PMed me saying that his 'inactivity' (or not-posting) was actually part of his plan. While I didn't quite like it or believed him, there was nothing I could really do. prince_freeza kind of left LFE after he received his role.

In future, if there's enough genuine interest in trying to balance out this style of game, updates would happen much faster because of no more story videos. That was a special one-time thing (but it sadly didn't go as planned all the way because the game ended prematurely), but there will be a proper ending video.

My (confusing) spreadsheet of game events (Click to View)

[Darl]

I just want to say that I found kind of fun being all Game of Throne-y like, being friendly with the people I actually wanted dead. On the other hand, waiting for odd days was such a pain.

[Apocalipsis]

Nice spreadsheet. Why did Amadis check A-Man the first night, if he was the Mafia's target? Makes no sense.

Ramond edited this post 02-24-2016 02:34 PM because:

There were communication issues at first.