What if everyone played one game

[Ankamius]

I'm going to put this here and walk away

I already mentioned Everyone Has One Bullet as a reasonable setup to base this on.

If you wanted something more like normal Mafia, I had the following idea:

First, you break all the players into 16-player pods. Each pod has its own thread, in order to make things easier to read. You are allowed to read any pod's thread and to talk (in the game threads) about players in any pod; however, any post you make must be in the thread for your own pod (or in scum/mason PTs, etc.), and you can only vote for players in your own pod. Each pod is guaranteed to have between 3 and 5 scum (this is information the town can use to narrow down who can possibly be scum), and each pod has its own days and nights (scum in a pod can only kill players in that pod overNight). Once two pods get down to 8 or fewer players, they are merged with each other into a larger pod, that has its own thread (the original two threads are locked, but linked to in the new thread's OP and remain publicly visible). This continues until only one pod is left and there are no town/scum in the pod in question.

Scum have knowledge of other scum in their pod, and in one other pod (this is mutual, so you have scumteams that cross two pods). Masons can likewise be masons with other players cross-pod, and will be given new mason partners (in other unrelated pods) whenever the pods merge.

As far as I can tell, this idea scales to

any

number of players, and keeps the amount of reading you'd need reasonable. It would probably require ½-1 moderators per pod.

Wouldn't the setup already be a scum win if scum get majority in a single pod?

[Ankamius]

There's a problem that if a pod ends up eliminating all its scum, or insufficiently many members of its scum, people will know how many scum are in the pod and adapt accordingly (e.g. lynch from a pod who's winning until there are no scum left). I think scum need more than a majority to get an automatic win (there have to be 8 scum left in the pod for them to survive a pod merge, although that is of course possible; something like a 7:6 majority isn't enough). Based on that, the setup needs some work, although I think the general idea could still be viable.

You'd probably have to have a shuffle mechanic where you put pods in a bigger 'group' (like 6 pods?) and occasionally shuffle them up in a way that gives a wide range of possible scum (1-5 maybe), so that it's harder to tell who is scum from the shuffles and so the pods stay somewhat balanced at least.

It would fix the problem of scum going extinct in pods causing scum in other pods to have an uphill battle merging into those pods and it prevents town having literally zero chance when two pods merge together and there's like... 10 scum in it (at least until there's enough scum that it's near required for each pod to be in lylo)