Locations in Mafia

[Fiasco]

I've been thinking a bit about the use of locations in Mafia. I think there's a lot of potential, especially in situations where it's OK to have an elaborate themed game. The idea has probably been used here and there, but there are a lot of different possible variants, and I'm making this thread to organize and share/request thoughts.

The most basic locations mechanic would be just a graph (in the discrete math sense), meaning a collection of points (vertices, locations, spaces, whatever), some pairs of which are connected. In flavor terms this could be anything from Diplomacy's map of Europe to a building floor plan to some idealized map of Middle Earth. (You can find lots of examples online that were designed for use in Diplomacy, but these may not be the best suited for Mafia, depending on your other rules; for one thing, they tend to have a lot of spaces.)

At all times, each player (maybe excepting some "God"-type roles) would be located at one of these points. Movement between adjacent points could happen once each day/night cycle, or more often.

Mafia with locations is only different if the locations affect either the lynch process or the players' night actions. For the lynch, you could rule that anyone could vote for anyone, but you could also rule that only players in the same space could vote for each other, or only players in adjacent spaces; or perhaps votes could only be cast on players in a certain location, or by players in a certain location. Maybe the simplest way to use locations is to play a normal game, except with votes only allowed on players at most one space away, on a circle, say. Movement could happen once every set period (like 48 hours). People might accuse each other of avoiding certain others, etc.

Player locations could be completely public, or they could be hidden but maybe detectable by some roles.

Some roles might be able to force other players to move to certain locations, or prevent them from moving. Maybe each location could only be occupied by one player at a time.

Some locations or connections between them could be usable by some roles (like naval ones) only.

Night actions might be usable on anyone, or they might be usable only on players in the same space, or in an adjacent space, or in a pre-specified space.

Locations could have public or hidden properties, like "all cop investigations return guilty here".

Some roles might be able to create, destroy, or change the properties of locations. A serial killer might be able to set booby traps.

Roles could be moved to certain locations ("the Underworld") after death. Locations could affect win conditions; maybe there's a group of separatists that wants to control all of some region and declare independence.

Does anyone have more ideas on this? Opinions on whether or not it's worth trying (more)? Perhaps suggestions on how it could be tried out safely/incrementally?

[Cogito Ergo Sum]

I'm not a fan of voting restrictions, personally.

I had given the idea some thought, albeit not much. My idea was more of a village with a house for every player and roles that would be capable of patrolling and watching certain streets. And Lordo(the Troll that lived under the bridge)-style SKs and stuff.

[cuban smoker]

I tried to design a game a little like this. I made a town that looked a little like a Clue board, and each player would give me a path they followed at night. You could set flags to interact with others when you crossed paths. I called it logic mafia. I still have the complete game rules & role description. Never tried to run it.

I like the idea of only being able to target people that are near you, which would add an interesting element of deduction as you try and narrow down suspects. That was the point of my game: if you found a dead person on a certain street, there are only so many people who could have killed them.

Only being allowed to lynch in your region could become annoying. If the graph had any size at all, it could be near impossible to get the town to agree to converge on one position. Processing move requests could get time-consuming.

I really like the potential of the idea, but there are many new issues to consider in terms of game balance. Moderating could require a lot more time and effort.

[Zindaras]

I'm actually planning a game like this (but different), where the town will change locations every day, meaning different rulesets and events. Cessy's idea looks pretty nifty too.

I don't like restricting targets and votes to locations.

[Fiasco]

Right, I could see how frequent movement and voting restrictions could become annoying. Players should probably be allowed to script their moves in advance ("if Fiasco moves to Armenia, I'm moving to Sweden; else I'm moving to Norway"). For location-restricted voting I meant my vote would still count if I voted you and then moved away from you, but I can still see how that would lead to distance problems. I like the idea of running away from a mob of angry townies, though.

Maybe a lynch should happen when you're surrounded by people voting for you (or two or three from each direction).

[Mr. Flay]

The Clue mini run by Orbiting had a "room" mechanic that didn't seem to disrupt the game too much. I've had a game rolling around my brain for a couple of years that would utilize the different areas of a ship to determine who could/could not act each night, but still not sure about the balance of it...

I think CS has some good points that you have to balance size/complexity versus playability. While I'd love to be able to roam an entire city playing Mafia (almost like a LARP in that respect), you'd never get enough players together unless you ran it in several threads... hmm.

[Fiasco]

Another way that location-restricted lynching could perhaps be made to work is to have a hit point mechanic, where you can only hit people from one space away (possibly depending on role). Would people camp at the edges?

[Glork]

Pooky used to run somewhat similar games in ScumChat, called "Mansion" games. It was generally some hybrid between Clue, Mafia, and his own creative inspiration. I believe that we've even run a regular Mafia game like this in ScumChat with something like... 5 rooms and maybe 7-8 players? Voting was unrestricted, but night actions could only be taken on people in the same room as you. Each night, a player could either stay where they were and act, act and then move, or move and then act.

The idea does appeal to me, and I could definitely see it working out. I'd be interested in helping develop such a game. My only restriction at this point is time, and the fact that I've got a few other mafia endeavors (such as Weather Mafia) that I am working on.

[Elephant Hell]

I had an idea once for a game centred around a hotel - each night every player could choose a room (I think the grid for a normal game would be around 3*4 or 3*3 rooms, with some upper limit on the number of players who could be in any particular room) and night actions could only be performed on players in that room or players who didn't submit a room choice. Some roles changed depending on whether they targeted players in that room or players without a room. The Mafia would be able to kill any of the players in any of the rooms they had. Once someone had been killed in the room nobody would be able to use that room again due to it being a crime scene (and thus off-limits).

[EmpTyger]

Flay beat me to invoking Clue Mafia. The mechanic is interesting, but there are a lot of balance issues. Read my postgame commentary for specifics.

[Fiasco]

All those examples (CES, CS, Zindaras, Clue, EH) are interesting, but different from what I had in mind; what I had in mind is each player actually having a location on the map by day and "walking around" (at whatever speed).

Rough, arbitrary, and probably pretty stupid example for a twelve-player open-setup: take a map with land and water spaces (like the standard Diplomacy map), make four random players mafia, have a period of pre-game discussion, allow each player to choose 1) what unit type they want to be and 2) their starting location. Possible unit types: 1) infantry, 2) artillery, 3) fleet. Everyone starts with 5 hp. Every 48 hours, players choose (by PM) whether/whom to attack and where to move. First all attacks are executed, then all moves. An attack costs the defender 1 hp. Infantry can only attack adjacent units, artillery can attack only units more than 1 and less than 4 spaces away. Fleets can attack adjacent units so long as they're in a coastal or sea space. Infantry and artillery can be located on land only. Fleets can be located at sea or in coastal spaces. No two players can be in the same space. Sort out stuff like convoys and somehow prevent game-breaking strategies like shooting from an island (if that's game-breaking). If you're at 0 hp, you die and your alignment gets revealed. Town wins when mafia is dead, mafia wins when town is dead. No nights. During the entire game, have discussion on who's town and who's scum in thread, of course.

Or: forget about water spaces and just make everyone "infantry".

[Mr Stoofer]

Right, I could see how frequent movement and voting restrictions could become annoying..

√

[Fiasco]

...but the question whether there exists an annoying version of Location Mafia isn't as interesting as the question whether there exists a non-annoying version of Location Mafia.

[Zindaras]

I just remembered an old game I played in. Realistic Mafia. Basically, it was as Realistic as possible. Lots of Vanilla townies, but that was off-set by the fact that you could actually just randomly do stuff.

Locations never played an important part in the game, but they could've, if the players would've used them. I'm pretty sure of that.

You were able to go to each other's houses and stuff. I remember a Mafiate locking himself in the basement of another player to incriminate him.