The impact of good guy/bad guy flavor

[popsofctown]

There is lots of changes in flavor across games, and so many themes and even plots. But the informed minority is ALWAYS the bad guys. Why is that so consistent? I feel like it's a traditional design choice worth questioning. It's definitely realistic, usually IRL an informed minority that can silence people it doesn't like is probably evil, sure. But fall damage is realistic yet I don't want it re-added to halo because it's not a good design choice.

A design benefit to having the bad guys have evil flavor is that people might get into the flavor roleplaying feeling of being evil, and then start to behave like one who is guilty. On the surface that seems right. It's probably right in general it's just something I find interesting to play devil's advocate on. On the other hand roleplaying a criminal naturally inclines one to secrecy. A virtuously flavored individual would not be naturally inclines towards concealment, and would be fighting the urge to be proud of everything that they are!

Logically adjacent to this, perhaps, ego, condescension, and confidence in questionable forms are often used as a scum tell, and a pretty decent one. A virtuously flavored informed minority would be more prone to such arrogance about their extra information when it's balled up alongside a moral high ground.

Has anyone ever run a mafia game where the mafia were the good guys?

[Gamma Emerald]

I've been in one similar to this idea. One of the scum factions was portrayed as the good guys in the flavor, but still counted as bad guys based on the source material(it was a theme-type game).

[Vi]

This has been done several times, actually. However, the sorts of behaviors you're looking at require heavy flavor immersion, and that's infrequent.

[Vi]

Also there's the whole manipulating and undermining thing that the informed minority does, which kind of predisposes them to be bad actors regardless of flavor.

and we don't need more Townies acting like that

[popsofctown]

That's a pretty good point there

[SpyreX]

What was it called back in the day... antifa? It had a name I swear

[MagnaofIllusion]

Not exceedingly unusual -

Andrius's LOTR Mini Theme - http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=16232

Mafia was Glorfindel, Legolas and Boromir. Town was the various members of Sauron's team and other historic Lord of the Rings bad guys.

My Brotherhood of the Wolf Mini Theme - http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=16125

Not quite as true to the OP but the Mafia were two of the three main heroes of the movie and a love interest for one of them. Town included heroic figures from the movie and outright villains.

I'm sure I could find others ...

[kuribo]

Binding of Isaac, scum were the game's players, town was the game's enemies. By coincidence, I was my own avatar.

[MichelSableheart]

Or you could look to the classics:
Harry Potter Mafia
Space Monkey Mafia

It's not so much the roleplaying that's relevant here, but the way the town players got blindsided. Noone expected mafia to be the good guys in flavour.

[Zorblag]

Futurama Mafia had Fry and Leela as 2/3 of the scum team. Mom was the last 1/3, so that be less of an example for these games.

It was also the only game Troll has seen where a single player has lost the game for two sides in two incarnations.

-Zorblag R`Lyeh

[callforjudgement]

I remember reviewing a game with Banjo-Kazooie flavour, in which Banjo and Kazooie were the scumteam and the townies were generic enemies from the game. (You pretty much have to do Banjo-Kazooie that way as it doesn't really have enough characters aligned with the heroes to form a typical town, unless you want to fill the town with variously coloured Jinjos.)

[Vi]

But B-K has all kinds of off-the-wall non-hostile NPCs though. Brentilda, Dingpot, Mumbo and Humba, random Skivvies, Loggo, Cheato, entire families of Jinjos, Canary Mary, Jolly Roger, Bottles and his family, Jingaling, and I'm not even close to done.

[popsofctown]

Apparently the mod wanted the townies directly aligned with each other and not just nonhostile. You'd have to restrict the list to characters that don't interact with banjo and kazooie on a strict compensation-> services rendered basis. I think you can't get there with only the original, but can get there using the sequel, even restricting yourself to characters that love you off the bat or seem willing to help you repeatedly and indefinitely after an initial amount of good treatment.

[Vi]

Dude, you gave the Skivvies fresh pants. That's even 'pants' in the British sense. By doing the equivalent of popping them into your mouth and slobbering over them. If that doesn't get you five solid loyalists I don't know what does.

But in the first game only?
*Brentilda
*Tooty
*Bottles
*Adm. Blubber
*Clanker
*Tiptup (and choir)
*Cheato (in the first game; in the second game it's more for-services-rendered)
*Boggy (and kids)
*a small army of Twinklies
*Gobi (just kidding Gobi is the SK)
*Loggo
*Snorkel
*Nabnut
*Gnawty
*Dingpot
*The Jinjos (collect all five colors!)
*various animated pickups

You've got enough, especially if I missed someone.

[Ranmaru]

Dingpot can be a traitor too. (To Gruntilda)

[drealmerz7]

I saw this thread when I first started coming to MS, a good while after I'd already created a game that I just finished running the 2nd iteration of, and I've been wanting to comment on this thread since, but didn't want to give away that aspect of my game that I was intending on modding here.

I just finished modding it, and so now I can tell about it!

One of its main themes was to not have decidedly badguys or good guys at all. Even the Demon Worshiper role had the option to be a neutral survivor instead of being forced to be a serial killer type and kill everyone. The game was about balance, the sides to balance within nature and humanity, etc. There's a lot there.

The main thing I did was make the werewolf characters very good upstanding members of the community who really did care about the future of the village and their fellows, and were doing what they thought was best for the village by caring out their place in nature as being a population control, danger eliminator, sort of thing. Their perspective on what was right and good simply was the other side to what the villagers were trying to achieve, who were also good people. The idea was also to really instill the idea of the characters and therefor the players working together and really caring about each other. I also wanted it to be highly encouraged to consider no lynch as an option, because I like to mess with that with players as part of ME, and that worked too, though they didn't intentionally no lynch, they did consider trying to go for happily ever after.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=73801 - ISO me for a bunch of flavor, pretty much all of which revolves around or supports those ideas ^ [MATURE CONTENT]

[Raskolnikov]

Futurama Mafia had Fry and Leela as 2/3 of the scum team. Mom was the last 1/3, so that be less of an example for these games.

It was also the only game Troll has seen where a single player has lost the game for two sides in two incarnations.

-Zorblag R`Lyeh

LOL did the SK really get to replace in after dying? I guess that makes sense since that wincon was final by then but I think I'd never see that nowadays
That sounds so fun.

[Gamma Emerald]

Special mention to Zaphkael's World.createNew game for doing the "mafia are the good guys" approach. The mafia were a resistance movement to a big simulation world that was collecting user information without user consent, kinda like a sinister Oasis from Ready Player One.

[vonflare]

maybe something where the whole town is an evil organization, and the 'scum' are infiltrators trying to bring down said evil organization? mechanicswize its the same, only difference is flavor.

[Randomnamechange]

Special mention to Zaphkael's World.createNew game for doing the "mafia are the good guys" approach. The mafia were a resistance movement to a big simulation world that was collecting user information without user consent, kinda like a sinister Oasis from Ready Player One.

came here to post this. EverHOPE was fantastic.

[kuribo]

In Gay Mafia 3, the town was Donald Trump's supporters and the mafia was an alliance of gay icons (and Jesus)

[Espeonage]

Are trying to say Jesus isn't a gay icon?

[mhsmith0]

Fwiw

http://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/thr ... oopa-Troop
Was an easy example of flipping good guy bad guy flavor

[drealmerz7]

hah that is the only game I ever observed on MU

my bud yogsloth!

that was almost me, actually! ppl wanted to send him or me, he was the better choice :þ

[Awoo]

One of the newbie games hosted by creature.

The townies are insane cultists trying to kill the secret agents then commit suicide to cause a world ending event.

The mafia are secret agents that don't kill themselves.

It ended in a mafia win, where the flavour was that the endgamed townies committed suicide, but then the ritual was ruined when the secret agent-mafia wouldn't.