Author Topic: My Brother's In The Mafia! or, Kairon's Lil Bro Pretends To Be A Game Designer  (Read 4062 times)

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Offline MoronSonOfBoron

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http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/forums/index.php?topic=30584.msg585568#msg585568
Quote from: Kairon
Dude, you should get MoronSonOfBoron in here. He's run like, 6 AA mafia games on his Ace Attorney fan forums and he's experimented with so many ways to explore the theme in the context of a mafia game... yeah.
Quote from: Maxi
Maybe your bro could talk about it some.
Is this where I talk about it some? Let's pretend it is.

First off, Kairon mentioned a points system for voting: that round was an absolute mess. Some good ideas, but an absolute mess. I guess my hindsight is poisoned by my perception that it affected the game designs for the year to come, resulting in bloated and overly complex games.

Here's the scoop: in this particular game, the top three(!) people with lynch votes would be put on trial; being voted out did not mean certain death. What ultimately determined your fate was a bunch of dice rolls. There was the Prosecution score (-3 to +3), and the individuals' Defense scores. Defense is determined entirely by the evidence items submitted the preceding phase; evidence items were randomly doled out, and each one could either be consumed for a temporary power or consumed for adding to the Defense score. Submitted evidence was randomly distributed among the three "defendants", and anyone beating the Prosecution score would get off scot-free without their identity being revealed.

Of course, there were a number of other features that were stuffed into this game: three factions, hidden powers triggered by specific conditions (one went off and it ended up wiping out an entire faction, oops), not to mention the ten or so roles that were included.

TLDR: it was a clusterduck

For more or less complete documentation, here's a link: http://www.freewebs.com/crmafiapage3/risefromtheashesstats.htm

In retrospect, (more retrospect, run for the hills!) this particular game was unbalanced, but it introduced a lot of new ideas to my group of players.

Hidden powers were put in place for... well, just 'cause. They were intended to be fun, outrageous, and jaw-dropping, with big bold letters and custom Photoshop banners and lots of people dying left and right. Worked a little too well, if you ask me: Joe Darke ended up vengeance-killing Damon Gant, wiping out Gant's faction in one turn.

And it's a good thing, too! Damon Gant's hidden power had him essentially turning into a cancerous domino with eight legs: he could copy the power set of another living role and use them concurrent to his own powers. A friend of mine pointed out the possibility of Angel Starr being copied by this power in turn making some poor player into "Gant's Lover"...

Evidence items were distributed only to non-roled players, or as we call them, "Vanilla". This was meant to establish a more "democratic" system where roled players were not the primary source of investigative ability. A lot of players in my group weren't the best of critical thinkers and often felt overwhelmed by the game mechanics, so this was a chance to let them gain some confidence by having a little power.

There were no controls on the quantity of evidence in play, and in the end the glut of evidence items proved vital to the Town's victory. The Mafia "Godmother" role of Angel Starr had the ability to completely block herself from being placed on trial, and freely sacrifice her lovers to nighttime hits. To counteract this, the Town loaded up on Thinker statues to block her from ever taking these actions. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SAVES THE DAY!

Angel Starr is an abusive variant of the "lovers" role in that she has two randomly-selected lovers she can freely use and abuse for above-stated purposes. One of them ended up being Ema Skye. Damn pedos.

I had a lot of fun making all the little banners, though! The players with those roles got to keep them for signature usage and such.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2010, 06:48:46 PM by MoronSonOfBoron »
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Offline Stratos

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How do your more complicated games turn out? Do you ever feel you go overboard with those things? I seem to drift more towards the exotic in my Mafia plans but I fear it will alienate a large portion of the community and cause an un-fun game to be born.
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Offline MoronSonOfBoron

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That actually did become a concern last year. I described Round V in the original post, but that took place in mid-2008. The latter half of that year (and 2009) was spent reeling from the impact of Round VI (which was not authored or run by me): it hosted 65 players, had more hidden powers, items with three different functions, item rarity, accuracy modifiers, wildcards, mass kills, mass resurrections... It got to the point where players became inactive not by choice but by sheer inability to comprehend or handle all the variables at play.The game ended up lasting several weeks.

To give you an idea of the kind of guy who was in charge of Round VI, when he was drafting the item banner images, they were 600 wide by 400 tall. I told him there was no reason to make banner images that took up a quarter of my widescreen display, and made an alternate banner image that was about 200x200 that contained all necessary information for item descriptions. He went with his 600x400 design.

Thankfully, no other game in the group has approached that level of complexity. There's been a movement for game masters in our group to focus more on a single unique aspect for their games, be that the wildcard aspect, specific victory conditions, the method of role distribution, or whatever else they can come up with. There have been some good ideas that have passed through our gates: one game gave everyone publicly revealed roles with secret powers activated by very specific actions or conditions, creating a high-tension atmosphere; another created a multifaction clusterfreak by pairing everyone off; there was a game that employed a mentor/shadow system to help the rookie players contribute to the game; and finally, there have also been mini-games consisting of logic puzzles and riddles.

Now, of course, with such strange and varied mechanics being thrown around there have been a number of instances where Game Masters have had to adjust on the fly, and players have been less than pleased. There was talk for a while about creating a design review board, but that idea wasn't met with very open arms.

Even with the frustrations that arise, the fact we've stuck around with each other speaks more about the community spirit. We accept that no Game Master is the same, that we're dealing with very new ideas at every turn, and it's difficult or impossible to be a perfect Game Master or run a perfect game (outside of running a very simple setup that could be operated by a chatroom bot... which we have employed in the past).
« Last Edit: February 17, 2010, 04:04:23 PM by MoronSonOfBoron »
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Offline Stratos

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Are there different ways you have paired people off in the past? I'm interested in creating a mafia game where everyone has a partner and that each one is bound to the other so death affects both of them.
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Offline NWR_insanolord

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In the one mafia game here that was actually two mafia games being played simultaneously, one of the roles involved having a counterpart in the other game that you knew who they were, which ended up making whoever the other one was and I effectively partners. It was pretty interesting.
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Offline Stratos

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Hmm...which one was the Dual Mafia game? I always had an idea of making a game that had dueling GMs but I'm afraid it would get too complicated.
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Offline BeautifulShy

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Insanolord is talking about Crisis Mafia. For some reason Day 2 isn't posted in the HOF.
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Offline MoronSonOfBoron

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I can't recall any particularly sweeping pairing mechanics outside of normal faction and role balancing. I'll have to dig around in the old archives for the specifics.
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Offline Stratos

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For a bit of context I would love to eventually host a "The World Ends With You" mafia and thought it would be nice to have people 'paired up' similar to how every one of the people in the game were paired. Townie 'players' would be teamed with each other and mafia 'reapers' would be teamed as well.

It could easily just be tied to life and death where if one dies the other passes as well but it would be interesting to explore more like joint roles and unique 'psych' powers that had specific requirements.

Say, what forum is it where you run mafia games, MoronSonOfBoron? Might I go check them out? I'm also a fledgling fan of Ace Attorney games so I might fit in well there.
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