The Mafia Discussion Thread

[R.W.]

After having no new games for a month, 3 games ended today. That means 3 games are going to start this week. I'm not sure where everybody else stands on the waiting list, but I'd like to see if there's any support for a one and only one new game per week, regardless of how many are running rule.

With this in mind, whilst I'm putting sign-ups out now, the game I'm running won't start until next Monday.

[Noah]

A sing-up sounds wonderful RW.

I do love a good musical.

[R.W.]

[C-MIL]

I disagree with a replacement bonus. Having won Pokemon Mafia solo after replacing GoGo, I doubt I could've done it from the start myself. If anything, I'd advocate a bonus point for the person that got replaced.

[NobBe Nobbs]

If anything, I'd advocate a bonus point for the person that got replaced.

...oh come on, you're just being contrary. You want to give the person that got replaced - more often than not because they didn't pay attention to the game or didn't post - more points because somebody picked up the slack? Rubbish.

[EWB's Best Poster.]

Think you may be selling yourself short there Cmil. If you won solo, you won solo. You deserve the bonus.

Im also crying fraud on RW never stating his game was ready. Oh yeah, I went there.

[C-MIL]

I'd sooner do that than reward somebody MORE for doing only part of the work.

As it stands, people that get replaced get negative points, presumably because their inactive negatively impacts the flow of the game. If a player can sub-in and talk their way out of a "lurker lynch", then I don't think the original inactive's inactivity could've been all that damning to the overall game.

I'm not advocating any change to the current stats or whatever, but I would definitely be more in favor of people that played initially and got jammed up for whatever reason than I would bonusing somebody who only played half the game. Even in that case, they should still be penalized overall with a negative score. I'm not at all in favor of rewarding inactives.

[-A-]

I rule Id like to see in place is a point bonus for someone that steps in as a replacement and carries to the end.

Its not easy for a guy to step up and have to read sometimes 40 pages, AND then have to prove himself.

Depends. In USA Mafia C-MIL just sent me a message saying 'congratulations, you've just joined the game and won. Who do you want to win with you?' So I did nothing and deserve no points in the Overall Play League at all.

Definitely don't think we need to have bonus points for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you're not a better player if you come in as a replacement. Since the list is supposed to be a way of working out who's good, we can't really use it as a carrot to make people do things we want them to.

[Guest Mr. Potato Head]

Discussion question:

Since the last board upgrade, game-runners have taken to including themselves in mafia group convos. On the one hand, it's nice to see what's going on behind the scenes, on the other, it could be taken advantage of to see how certain players play as scum.

What do people think about this?

[Plubby]

Well at the beginning, you can't not.

As a game-runner AND player. I prefer to keep all the PM's in one place to help me keep track of roles current and past...in Sousa's last mafia, I started a new thread seperate to Sousa for strategy - mostly to check to see whether or not it was him leaking the info, but the mafia can just do that.

[-A-]

You already have to give quite a lot of that information to your team-mates, so I suppose the impact isn't too big. Should be at the discretion of the players involved though. You can still use PMs.

[Pesci]

To be fair the mafia's right is to talk outside the thread anywhere they want, so if they use the PM the runner's sent them exclusively it's their own decision. It's a lot easier to do that than create a new conversation, though. I don't really mind. I don't think anyone can gain a stronghold on your play through being mafia with you, since a lot of players play the same.

[oldskool]

Nothing's stopping any mafia member from using any other method of communication the runner can't see, so I don't mind it. Granted, it hadn't occurred to me that game runners were scouting me during their games. Usually I'm too frazzled running my game to pay much attention to what the mafia's discussing, I just used it in Hugo to look back & see what discussion there was once the game was over as pertains to post-game writeup explanations (and MVP had they won)

[C-MIL]

I did it for the first time with my last game and I'll probably never do it again. I use the PM function for too much other stuff.

Also, I'll never participate in a group convo if I somehow find myself stumbling into a Nick Adams game either...

[Pizza]

I don't get MPH's point here. Your scumpartners have just as much opportunity to scout you as the game mod does. I'd have no problem posting the details of a mafia convo after a game is over for everyone to see, the gamerunner seeing it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

[C-MIL]

Should never play the game the same way anyway, town or scum.

With number of people we have here that play, tells become really obvious really quickly.

[oldskool]

Worst case scenario: i want to play but know no canons. now i see what people went through when I got up & ran a Hugo game that like, three people had any idea what it was & one of them was me.

[naiwf]

Worst case scenario: i want to play but know no canons. now i see what people went through when I got up & ran a Hugo game that like, three people had any idea what it was & one of them was me.

I still don't see why that's a factor. All canon knowledge does is make it easier to sucker people who stop playing the game and rely on metagaming.

[Josh]

Theme factors into whether I decide to play or not, but only in two ways:

- I already know and love the theme, so I join regardless of whether I think it will actually be a good game.

- I only know enough about the theme to know I hate it, so I stay out regardless of how good or bad the game might look. For example, Ruki's Anime things.

Not having any knowledge of the theme won't keep me out of the game on it's own. If I think that mod will run a good game, I'll sign up anyway.

[Sousa]

Ruki's anime thing pisses me off because he's otherwise allocated his geek points pretty well.