Mafiascum.net

lovers mafia but the mod picks who the scum are and we play 7 games in a row and each player is guaranteed to be scum at least once and you get 1 point for each game you win

I and a few other mods ran a lovers mafia variant during Marathon Weekend called "lovers mafia but the mod picks who the scum are" (that's 2 mafia lovers and 4 townies) where the mod personally chooses who the mafia are; in one that I ran, one player said in their /in post that they would like to be scum with another player, so I made those two players scum together. it adds a unique layer of mod WIFOM to the game and produces memorable results.

this is a variant on that where the winner(s) are decided by which player(s) win the most games. if one player manages to win all 7 of their games, for instance, that player will win alone, but if, say, a couple of people win 5 of the games, then they both win.

the moderator makes the choices for who to be mafia only after the previous game finishes and does so by whatever means they choose, as long as by the end every player has been scum at least once -- the game probably shouldn't be run in the open queue because this aspect of the game definitely qualifies as bastard modding. the moderator has a high level of influence over how each subgame goes, and can potentially do game-breaking things like not make a particular player scum until game 7 (thus just giving the town players a free guaranteed win).

let me go on record saying I love this. great way to get to know a player list obscenely well.
the obvious issue is, people who do not draw scum at all until the last game are instantly down a point...

looks fun, like 3 in 1

What a great title for a thread

The guarantee of at least once as scum is very problematic. Obviously, if someone gets to game 7 without having been scum, they are screwed and town gets a free win (meaning someone else gets screwed out of a point arbitrarily). Even before game 7, anyone who hasn't been scum yet is in danger of being auto-lynched for completely legitimate reasons. (Say day 6 I haven't been scum yet - well, surely the mod wouldn't let it go to game 7 and make that one an autowin, so I'm almost certainly dead game 6, either giving town a free win or, worse, decreasing my expected points game 6 and then autolosing game 7.)

Anyway, even without this it's definitely outside the realm of Normal. If you can get players for an extended theme game, though, ~shrug~

(Very tangentially related, but a few days ago I had an idea of running a UPick game, but instead of role names - or maybe in addition to - players sent D&D alignments.)

I feel like I'd be willing to try it

Honestly thinking about it in depth, the "mod picks who the mafia are" might be a good way of avoiding the issue of game#7. Since there's a pretty small player list, you can get the whole 'everyone is scum once' done in the first 3-6 games pretty easily.

It also creates a bizarre element of mod WIFOM. Which is definitely not Normal but is fun

In post 5, mith wrote:(Very tangentially related, but a few days ago I had an idea of running a UPick game, but instead of role names - or maybe in addition to - players sent D&D alignments.)

This would be so so fantastic.

A potential way to solve the issue of last-game-scum is to make the moderator aligned with the mafia in each game, where win if they win the most games (perhaps in addition to whatever player(s) won the most).

Obviously pushes it a bit more toward bastardry though. Although it isn't really bastard so much as explicitly mod-wifom; anyone who signed up would know precisely what they were signing up for.

This reminds me of the unexpected hanging paradox. You want the fact that a player is scum to be unexpected, but it has to happen at least once. It can't happen for the first time in game 7 because players would know it would happen by then. So by the same reasoning, it can't happen in game 6, or game 5, or game 4…

In post 9, callforjudgement wrote:This reminds me of the unexpected hanging paradox. You want the fact that a player is scum to be unexpected, but it has to happen at least once. It can't happen for the first time in game 7 because players would know it would happen by then. So by the same reasoning, it can't happen in game 6, or game 5, or game 4…

I actually almost linked to that in my opening post, but decided not to on the basis that it's not really 100% unexpected (the mod intentionally have game 7 be impossible to win for scum), just unlikely -- the possibility that something like that might happen and that players shouldn't plan around it not happening is a feature rather than a bug.