need help on balacing a Variant of Mafia

[Gypyx]

ok so, i'm designing a game of mafia for a group of friends taking place on another game, and i would've liked some feedback as the first 2-3 games I ran weren't balanced at all

the game is diplomacy, if anyone doesn't know it but still want to take a look in the rules, you may find the thread about it here

but basically what changes from real mafia is :

Town has an execute and Scum has a nightkill, but those don't kill, only hinder the person from playing at their full potential on the map, the only way to remove someone from the game is to destroy him on the map, therefore it's way harder to kill someone

my group is pretty bad at town (no offense lol) so i'd also like to townside it more in order to counter that, they also really want the game to be role madness / similar to that

and finally everyone can create as many PT's as they want with as many peoples as they want

any tips for how to balance that kind of game? thanks in advance

[Akarin]

I don't understand how the town-scum thing can work with the everyone-for-themselves-ness of Diplomacy.

Like if the Town players have an alliance and control a majority of supply centers is the game over? Because that sounds too easy. Do they have to actually remove all the Scum powers from the board? Because that sounds like it would take a long time and be kind of no fun in some situations anyway.

Even knowing how Diplomacy works it's not clear how this game is supposed to work, which makes it pretty impossible to talk about balance. Is this more a Diplomacy game with some Mafia element (what it kind of sounds like) or a Mafia game with a Diplomacy element? Cause it kind of sounds like you're trying to balance a Diplomacy variant instead, if Town can't actually eliminate someone from the game.

Be aware that people tend to overestimate how townsided stuff is, so you probably want to townside

even more

than you think you do.

[Gypyx]

Basically i'd say it's mafia, but in diplomacy

Town's goal is to kill all the threats to them, and scum has to do the same, classic mafia wincons, we try to avoid solo wins
(And yeah when a game looks like a side has unavoidable victory we often call the game on that lol)

And town can eliminate peoples from the board just fine, like idk what you're talking about

And ok, i'll try to townside it, thanks

[Akarin]

In terms of balance, the goal being to destroy the threat is less significant than the means by which the threat is destroyed (i.e. voting) IMO.

But you didn't explain anything so I'll just drop it.

But if you want people to help you on balance you're going to need to actually describe the specifics.

[callforjudgement]

So I'm assuming that this follows all the normal rules of Diplomacy, except with changed win conditions:
- Two of the players are on a team and know each other's identities, they win if either of them wins. (This is the informed minority, = scum.)
- Everyone else wins if both scum lose, but they don't know who they're trying to eliminate. (This is the uninformed majority, = town.)

The correct way to break this is for the playerlist as a whole to agree, in public discussions, on who's most likely scum, then have everyone together steamroll them to eliminate them, with any player backstabbing / going against the agreed elimination target / doing anything that they didn't promise in advance to do automatically being targeted to death for the rest of the game (in order to prevent one scum saving the other). This is something that will be completely alien to a typical Diplomacy player because it removes basically the entirety of that game's gameplay and strategy, and effectively collapses the entire game into 5:2 nightless (which is probably townsided if played by experienced Mafia players, but will be scumsided with an inexperienced playerlist).

If the game is played more like Diplomacy, then scum will most likely utterly steamroll. Having someone that you know has no incentive to betray you is a huge, huge advantage when it comes to playing Diplomacy, easily overcoming the disadvantage of other players attempting to band up against you (especially if you put in a little distancing, making people think you're backstabbing each other; this is something that happens even in regular Diplomacy, between players who simply happen to have a temporary alliance).

In other words, the balance of the game depends mainly on how much players ignore the unique mechanics. That's normally a bad place for a game to be in, so I think there may be fundamental issues here which are mostly unfixable; once the players gain the right attitude to get optimal town win rates (i.e. "we should collectively, as a list of players, agree on every action for every unit before doing anything, and eliminate anyone who goes against that"), the game will cease to be any fun.

(If you're planning to play the game anyway, focusing more on the Diplomacy aspect than the Mafia aspect and not caring about playing optimally / intentionally playing suboptimally to not break the game, I recommend adding some sort of gameplay twist to allow eliminated players to give advantages/disadvantages to players who still remain. Something like "when a player is eliminated, immediately before the next disband phase, they can choose two unoccupied supply centres and cause them to revert to neutral ownership". Because townies get eliminated much more often than scum do, this will make the game more townsided by putting more power into town's hands.)

[Gypyx]

Oh yeah i made this thread

Well thanks for the advice, we're not playing "seriously" so it's still close to diplomacy, but interactions from the dead is a nice idea, even though we have limited moderation tools

It's on a 15 players map btw, does 5 scum 9 town 1 neutral seem like a good ratio?

[callforjudgement]

Not at all, that's a horribly scumsided ratio. In a game without power roles, and without factional abilities beyond communication (i.e. that is symmetrical between town and scum), typically at most a quarter of the playerlist should be scum. So you want either 3 or 4 scum in your 15-player game. (You probably don't want neutrals either; they will find a game like this very hard to win because they have no agency to do anything.)

[Gypyx]

there are power role though, how does that change balance?

[callforjudgement]

Power roles normally end up compensating for a scum nightkill (i.e. nightless vanilla and nightkill versus town power are balanced at similar numbers). I'm not experienced on balance for games with no nightkill and town power roles, because they're very rarely run.

[Gypyx]

ah, well we've had some fun in the previous runs of this kind of setup so...

i'll just forget about balance i think xd