A game proposal

Back in the day, when I first started playing mafia online, things were run a little differently. In that simpler time, a moderator handed out roles and asked for SKIDS. The Godfather would respond with their hit – not just the name, but an entire scene describing how the kill should go down. The sheriff and doctor would say a few in character words. The serial killer would do the same as the mafia. The moderator would then post what the mafia wrote for the hit. Sometimes the mod would edit in a clue – but not even in every scene. Sometimes the mod might work in the actions of the sheriff or doctor. Same with the serial killer. And then sometimes the mod would not use the mafia scene at all, instead writing their own. Then the townies would have discussion time (both in and out of character), vote, and the mod would announce who was dead. Rinse, repeat – no scene for the lynch unless the mod felt like it.

This made the game a little different. Instead of clue-mining, it was more about figuring out if the mafia was trying to frame someone, or it was a double-blind sort of thing. The mafia would generally get into the spirit of things and bury in clues about themselves as well as townies. It seemed that an unintended consequence of these games, though, was that the mod would get sucked into sort of playing off all sides in order to keep the narrative flowing. So, for example, if they saw that the mafia was floundering, the mod might drop them a hint that the sheriff was dead. Or if the townies just weren’t coming together, the mod might let it slip that the doctor wasn’t who they thought it was. It unfortunately led to spoilers and people feeling a little manipulated, and like the game was too easy.

My friend David Bowles (who has played one or two mafia games on this board) and I decided to change up the way the game was run because there were a couple of things we thought could be done better. We had three sort of founding thoughts: one, that every character should have a great death scene, regardless of whether he was lynched, hit, or killed; two, that the game should be run without spoilers/direct interference from the mod/s; and three, that there should be a throwaway character to take the first round’s hits. We decided that the mods should go ahead and write all the death scenes so that we could stay on an orderly schedule rather than waiting days for the mafia to get around to writing the next death, and so that the argument of ‘who wrote this, the mafia or the mod’ would be taken out of the equation.

I think that we did a good job under the founding ideals, but we might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Mainly, the role play becomes minimal to the game. I think if everyone feels they have a part to play and are really acting out a role, they may feel more involved in the story – more like a murder mystery party where everyone dresses up. We have a lot of passion in these games – maybe this way, the passion would get poured into the character. So, while everyone is still in mafia mode, I wanted to run the idea of a game where the killers write their own scenes, with the mod at the helm but only steering the game (but only in character and in public, no /ooc tips or side emails) and writing the lynches past folks here.

Of course the obvious drawback to this idea is that not everyone enjoys or feels comfortable writing. So that might discourage people from signing up, and I don’t know that we would get enough to play this way. I think people would still want to play the version where the mods do all the writing, but this might be a neat change of pace. I know Roz had the idea of having a much more RP-oriented game, and this way could work really well for that.

So - thoughts?