As you might know, I enjoy designing five-player games because I think we need a more varied selection than vengeful for small games. I've also run and played in a few of them.
However, now I'm not sure whether five-player games actually provide a good player experience.
They all seem to end in one of two things:
1. General apathy. After a flurry of activity in early game, people somehow stop caring about the game and there is little activity. Wagons assemble only slowly and pretty randomly since there are few posts to work on.
2. Quickhammers. Days end quickly because LyLo votes or hammers are brought early in the day.
I'm fearing that this isn't a matter of setup design or the player list. It looks like five players are simply too few to sustain scumhunting or activity in general.
The problem is that there's always a certain percentage of players that aren't active until others are active. You need enough spam-posting/active players to keep a game going. In a 5p game, it's unlikely you'll reach that threshold.
Well no the problem is that 5p setups are inherently bad regardless of activity. Mostly because you have to choose between one scum, which is arguably not mafia, and two which is unbalanced obviously.
In post 6, Ythan wrote:Well no the problem is that 5p setups are inherently bad regardless of activity. Mostly because you have to choose between one scum, which is arguably not mafia, and two which is unbalanced obviously.
I disagree wholeheartedly. There are multiple setups that allow for a mislynch with five players, which imo is all you need to have a real mafia game.
@thesupertriomusical on Instagram, come see it if you’re in LA area, I wrote it!
The problem with 5 player game is that if 1-2 players are inactive. The game is just dead in the water.
You need a player base that are going to be active posting, that are going to try to figure stuff out.
Take that game we just had, you were relatively inactive. The scum team was completely inactive.
It was just two players talking to each other trying to scumhunt with very little to actually work with because the scum didn't want to interact.
"You are the Joker of mafia players" - Oversoul
"last time I was scum with Firebringer
his first post in the scum PT was "yes I rolled scum!"
I decided to post "haha just don't post that in the main thread", but to get up to date on the main thread first.
His first post in the main thread was "yes I rolled scum!" -popsofctown
In post 6, Ythan wrote:Well no the problem is that 5p setups are inherently bad regardless of activity. Mostly because you have to choose between one scum, which is arguably not mafia, and two which is unbalanced obviously.
I disagree wholeheartedly. There are multiple setups that allow for a mislynch with five players, which imo is all you need to have a real mafia game.
I mean if you've ever played one that worked and you can share what it was
In post 6, Ythan wrote:Well no the problem is that 5p setups are inherently bad regardless of activity. Mostly because you have to choose between one scum, which is arguably not mafia, and two which is unbalanced obviously.
I disagree wholeheartedly. There are multiple setups that allow for a mislynch with five players, which imo is all you need to have a real mafia game.
I mean if you've ever played one that worked and you can share what it was
WNAF and Vengeful are both really fun face to face, both of which I wouldn't say are super unbalanced?
@thesupertriomusical on Instagram, come see it if you’re in LA area, I wrote it!
Also Resistance has this shitty thing where Town can get super fucking lucky if they succeed the first two missions without having scum on it and there isn't much scum could do.
I wish there was a good method in allowing the Mafia to choose who could be the first leader. Maybe allow for leader to be elected by votes day 1.
@thesupertriomusical on Instagram, come see it if you’re in LA area, I wrote it!
In post 16, Ythan wrote:Oh man vengefuls. We eventually stopped playing those for some reason. Not as fun to play a hundred of those as you'd think.
we stopped playing vengefuls because we've mostly stopped playing mafia IRL at this point, not an issue with vengefuls and more an issue with an exceptionally stale meta arising from having the same dozen people play in dozens / hundreds of games together