I stand by my initial statement. We don't have any relevant experience. Take the too many kill sources complaint for instance. It is absolutely true for a game of mafia, but is it true for your suggested game? Let's look at why it's bad in mafia: It makes non killing town roles feel impotent because their direct impact on the game is significantly reduced. It significantly increases the variance making it functionally more luck based. Now lets look at how those apply to your version: I suspect you already have a non functional day phase. no majority faction will either lead to day being a complete blood bath or lynches wont happen at all. In either case lots of killing roles has a reduced impact on how it effects their ability to be meaningful during the day phase. Increased variance still makes it luck based, but now a faction being randomly eliminated early actually makes the game more functional. I would posit that the increased killing roles in your game actually help it. Now, my confidence of that is fairly low given that I have no experience. But I think it highlights how just getting us to through general advice meant for mafia your way could negatively impact your game.
In post 42, Powder Punk Girl wrote:But you are saying giving them that information would ruin scum's chances, where am I saying that they get that information? Also I have never been apart of a game where town knew who they were to keep alive either.
they're effectively a scum faction in that they're a minority who have to stay alive and/or keep other people in their faction alive. just because you slap a "town" label on them doesn't make them a town.
i have no skin in the game and i'll add the the chorus of people saying that, as is, this isn't a mafia game. that's not a judgement and i'm not being an asshole, it's a cold hard fact.
i think it could be a perfectly acceptable forum game (see our "mish mash" section). but calling it mafia would be inaccurate.
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
In post 46, Kamigami wrote:This post will very likely show up as a google hit for some player who wants to research the flavor. You're probably underestimating the extent to which it's spoiled by being here, especially since it's unworkable as an open due to all the uniquely named roles.
I think this can become reasonable if you accept the primary criticism: there should be only one Town. Once you have that, if you want to preserve flavor, you're going to have to rethink how the different factions (by which I mean zerg-terran-protoss) interact. A possibility mentioned above is something like having faction-specific roles. If you do that, you should expect Day 1 to start with a mass faction claim unless you give players some reason not to.
In general, I don't think it's a good idea to maintain the notion that the three factions are irreconcilably different, especially given that they have a common enemy. I didn't really follow it, but I believe Hitogorashi's signs and void had players with three different "signs" that you might draw ideas from.
I'd expect the mass faction claim to happen as it sits now anyway.
Holder of the Longest Continuous Weekly Mafiascum Post Record. 1 July 2012 - 16 Feb 2023
*It may be held by someone else if you discount the major downtime in 2012 and 2014, I'm not doing the research.
In post 42, Powder Punk Girl wrote:But you are saying giving them that information would ruin scum's chances, where am I saying that they get that information? Also I have never been apart of a game where town knew who they were to keep alive either.
they're effectively a scum faction in that they're a minority who have to stay alive and/or keep other people in their faction alive. just because you slap a "town" label on them doesn't make them a town.
i have no skin in the game and i'll add the the chorus of people saying that, as is, this isn't a mafia game. that's not a judgement and i'm not being an asshole, it's a cold hard fact.
i think it could be a perfectly acceptable forum game (see our "mish mash" section). but calling it mafia would be inaccurate.
Well to be fair I have already pointed out that it doesn't need to be called "mafia" the gameplay would encompass all the same elements such as, day/night phases, voting, night actions and the like. It would in fact be a variant on the game of mafia.
In post 54, AngryPidgeon wrote:The most obvious problem with this game is that its so symmetrical people will figure out what roleclaims are fake or not pretty readily.
Well the roles are not set in stone, and it would be easy to rename everything and make the game no reveal as to not give away too much information as well.
Now that I think about it. that would be a HUGE solution for any and all problems revolving around people knowing they are in a different faction than they are. Everyone would have to play as one faction. regardless of whether or not they were. There being three scum and three factions they could each pretend to be one. Therefore evening out the squads as to not draw too much attention. Or maybe I make each scum a member of each race and all the town of each race work as one and the three scum from each race work as a scum team. I technically have three faction divided into two teams.
In post 61, Powder Punk Girl wrote:Or maybe I make each scum a member of each race and all the town of each race work as one and the three scum from each race work as a scum team. I technically have three faction divided into two teams.
Because if I did this and keep the "abilities don't activate until each faction's mason is dead" I wouldn't have to break them off and it would still feel like there are three teams. I could even have the faction win con include ALL Protoss/Terran/Zerg, so if one of the faction specific scum was alive with nothing but faction specific town they would all win. You guys think that sounds better or worse?
In post 61, Powder Punk Girl wrote:Now that I think about it. that would be a HUGE solution for any and all problems revolving around people knowing they are in a different faction than they are. Everyone would have to play as one faction. regardless of whether or not they were. There being three scum and three factions they could each pretend to be one. Therefore evening out the squads as to not draw too much attention. Or maybe I make each scum a member of each race and all the town of each race work as one and the three scum from each race work as a scum team. I technically have three faction divided into two teams.
The analogy I'm going to use is that if you tell a white lie, then have to keep telling more lies to cover up for the original lie, it becomes a giant mess.
So... if the "different town factions" mechanic is causing you to have to keep coming up with more and more "fixes" in the setup to make it work, it's going to create a bigger mess than it's worth.
Check out Gay Mafia, a game I co-modded and designed.
We had people with "orientations": gay, straight, or bisexual. Certain roles in the game could affect certain other roles based on their alignments, but all town were still just town and all scum were still just scum. I think that's a much more elegant solution to the different races you want to include in this game.
To be fair things said in this thread have helped me figure out the direction I want to take it, and for the most part there has been VERY little advice actually given it has mostly been "this won't work, give up"
In post 61, Powder Punk Girl wrote:Now that I think about it. that would be a HUGE solution for any and all problems revolving around people knowing they are in a different faction than they are. Everyone would have to play as one faction. regardless of whether or not they were. There being three scum and three factions they could each pretend to be one. Therefore evening out the squads as to not draw too much attention. Or maybe I make each scum a member of each race and all the town of each race work as one and the three scum from each race work as a scum team. I technically have three faction divided into two teams.
The analogy I'm going to use is that if you tell a white lie, then have to keep telling more lies to cover up for the original lie, it becomes a giant mess.
So... if the "different town factions" mechanic is causing you to have to keep coming up with more and more "fixes" in the setup to make it work, it's going to create a bigger mess than it's worth.
If the only way to make something work is to fix little things one at a time, then that's what you have to do. It's better than giving up every time you hit a little bump in the road. Also I would say if I can find a way to make this work with out any glaring flaws it will have been WELL worth it.
"this won't work, give up" is all the advice you'll ever need though
Holder of the Longest Continuous Weekly Mafiascum Post Record. 1 July 2012 - 16 Feb 2023
*It may be held by someone else if you discount the major downtime in 2012 and 2014, I'm not doing the research.
