I was thinking to myself about what we could do (without req) to make this game more interesting... we have tournaments of all sorts, clan games, and the forums to keep us busy, so what else can we do to get our "New Version" cravings satisfied?

Well... not that this is how the thought started, but this is the best way I can think of to describe what I have in mind: Mafia. a game many people play in groups of 8 or more.

This is how it works: 1/3 or less members of the game KNOW eachother and are working in a secret allience against everyone else. nobody else knows who they are, infact, if an accusation comes up, the accuser might very well be mafia trying to get the rest of the group to destroy itself. intrigued yet?

I started thinking about ways to alow for sneaky behavior... everybody likes honorable behavior only it seems... besides a select few. well, what if I have a craving for sneaky-ness??? how do I go about that without ruining my hitherto unblemished record? well, in the game "mafia" its all about lying.

I suggest a WoL version of the game "mafia" be invented.
in a 10 player game, there'd be probably only 2 or 3 mafia.
in a 40 player game, maybe 10... maybe only 8. the powers of secrecy are pretty hard to beat.

now, there are detectives in the real game mafia, some way to find out who the mafia is. THAT is the part I just don't know how to do officially and need help with. ONE person is going to know who mafia is. he will take each persons name and randomly pick out of a hat or something. then he'll tell that person he's mafia, and who all the other mafia people are.

The point of the game is for the mafia to kill all the non-mafia, or the non-mafia to kill all the mafia. see? if the mafia's secret gets out somehow, then they don't win. otherwise, alliences can form and non-mafia people will have to chose based on gut instinct or guessing who the mafia is.

a tool for helping the non-mafia people win (in the real game) is a watchman. the town watchman can ask the game mediator if one person he picks is mafia, and will be told the truth, but then he has to convince the townspeople...and they might think HE's mafia!


gah, the specifics of the game I don't want to get into... but as far as OUR WoL game is conserned, I have thought of a few ways (besides actual diplomacy between players) for the non-mafia to have ways of finding out who they are up against, and thus having a chance at winning.


here's a link for the description of the party game I have been refering to all this time... I just found out that its also called "werewolf" in some places... I guess that works too:

boardgames.about.com/od/werewolf/

click on "rules".

So... people aren't going to attack others UNLESS they think they are on opposing teams. A lot of buildup will be going on until people start to get suspisious... so there must be a way to start conflict, because the mafia itself will be found out right away if they go accusing everyone of being mafia, and if they start attacking people...well then everybody else will know. however, if somebody starts attacking... he COULD claim he was attacked... non-mafia types might protect themselves with scouts from other lands who can vouch for them not having made the first strike, yet who's to say the scouts aren't mafia??? see... its sneaky and I like it

now, about balancing. we want to make this so that EITHER side could win. and anybody who is mafia would have to have honor in this one area: NEVER to tell a non-mafia who is mafia.

about the town watchman. the way we could make this like REAL mafia, SORTOF... would be so that whoever is in charge of telling the mafia who they are, ONE townsman can ask every ten turns if a certain person is mafia. the incharge person (who will not be playing) will have to answer correctly. now... just because he know that person can be trusted or not, doesn't mean that person can trust him when he comes up to him and says "hey, I'm townwatchman, and I just asked about you and KNOW you arent mafia... so lets watch eachothers backs..." because he might be LYING!! infact, chances are he is, since this would be a great way for mafia to gain trust and theres a bunch more of them than the watch man.

another way to do it would be:

limit the powers of the mafia.

let each mafia player only know that He/She is mafia to start. then let each mafia player know 1 other mafia player every ten turns. or every 5 turns in a 40 player game. whatever.

another limiter for mafia (and I don't think this one should aply unless the mafia is fairly large, like only a little less than half) is if the above rule aplies for learning mafia, and 1 player is added to the mafia list, but is expected to work AGAINST mafia. so, the mafia might try to figure out who they all are before the "double agent" does. this will inspire distrust among the mafia! also, toward halfway through the game, there may be 2 or 3 lists going around, one by the double agent, and others by mafia, they trying to sort out amongst themselves who they are and who is the double agent while at the same time trying to confuse anybody else!!! MWUA HA HA Ha ha ha!!

I must also note that these games could only be unranked. to try to play this way in a ranked game would be insane... too many conflicting motives... clan mates watching out for eachother?? maybe...maybe not. maybe you'd want to watch out for your clan mate, but what if he's mafia? what if you are? what about your rank? shouldn't you be attacking somebody by now, to avoid being last?? but maybe that would be to the advantage of the mafia... if they are still working for eachother and not there own gains... hmmm...

No, it would obviously not work.

Last Edited : Sunday, 19 December 2004 - 15:02

hey i like it i play the game differently but i like that lets see if someone finds something wrong with hte idea now

If you don't drop this line of thinking, I'm gonna have to whack ya.

Actually ^ector I think it could work but it would have to be ranked. After all if your mafia, or not, rank is important. The higher your rank in the game, the higher you are in the chain of command.

This way players can't just sit back and wait to find out who is mafia and who isn't. After all the highest ranking mafia member would be able to command the lower ranking mafia members, provided that those members are known. The non-mafia members would be under the command of the highest ranked player that is not mafia.

Provided they choose to work as a team. There is nothing saying that one mafia member can't decide to eliminate a higher ranking member, or that a non-mafia member has to follow the orders of their supperior. If a mafia member wanted to eleminate a higher ranking member he would have to still obey the orders, until he was ready to make his move. Disobeying the higher ranking mafia member could result in your elemination, unless you are ready to eleminate him.

After all this would be a game of treachery. The only rule is that non-mafia must try and eleminate the mafia once they know who they are. While the mafia might be trying to use the non-mafia to remove the other non-mafia.

I would say that every 10 turns one non-mafia member can request to find out if another player is mafia or not. While every 7-8 turns one mafia member can request information about another player. This would be based off of two things, the first player to make a request from each group during that period gets their question answered. The person who recieved an answer would then have to wait 3 times, after their request is answered, before they could expect another answer.

I understand the fears of people sitting back and waiting to discover who the mafia is, but the point is kinda that they'll never really know... not unless somebody fudges up. or they might be tricked into believing somebody fudged up...


but. My reasoning for non-ranking stands, even if we need to figure out a few more reasons for people to risk fighting. because if you introduce rank, you will take out completely the aspect of the idea of mafia. Mafia will work for there own ends or not. and the fact that the mafia EXIST and may/may not ever be uncovered will give non-mafia players the idea to betray eachother for points, blaming it on "that they were in the mafia" something nobody will be able to prove wrong till the end, and nobody will be able to do anything about it at that point. Plus, calling that person "dishonorable" would be laughable... this whole game is based on betrayal.

No, if you insert rank, I'm absolutely positive mass chaos will ensue, and you might as well call the game "backstaborama" where anything goes, gangbanging is considered the norm.

no thank you... I'll go with non-rank only please.

unless you can argue from some point that I'm WRONG about my speculations... that human nature will NOT prevail and that somehow, in a game where betrayal is expected, people will not exploit that.

you see, the idea was for there to be two teams. mafia and not. the goal would be for a mafia person, to kill all non-mafia. for a non-mafia, the goal would be to kill all mafia.

if you insert rank, like I said, people will just start killing eachother like in a regular game, except they'll have the excuse to backstab as much as they want.

well what we need to do is have req create a 40 player clan game so we can do something like this but the mafia should only be a 8 player group....

this happens already alot of times, you see a group of your friends in a game and you just gang up on those who arent your friends. sometimes your friends fight amongst temeselve though... like in real life. A mafia game could be played if a group agreed to play it that way and then all of them joined a game and played it.

maybe req just needs to add a couple "no honor" named games where "what happens here stays here" and you can GngBng to your Hearts content.

Maybe add a cool suicide unit that blows up... lke dwarves in myth did? Call them terrorists or something. Can my dwarf have a car bomb?

It's....different
While it will help stretch your politics skills....I can't see Req going to much trouble to make this, official or not.

It needs some way to be simple on Req - not because he's a really really nice man who you should always be nice to (although that's a good idea too, if only to get your bugs fixed and the new version out ), but purely because the less effort he has to put in, and the more demand there is for the feature, the more chance it has of making it.

On the simplest level, you could just make a basic game that system messages the mafia players at the start to tell them they're mafia (and so are their respective buddies) and use an LMS-like end condition - excpet this time, associate each player with some kind of boolean var to represent them being mafia or not. Game end being when all one one kind remain only

As for ranks...sorry Gengy, any orders you give me are going to be ignored unless you can prove your plan is better than any thought of mine

yeah thats why i said a clan game, those are unranked, but we would need req to create a 40 player one!

it wouldn't need to be a clan game people, it would be a regular (non-ranked) game... each person who entered would have to know that he was getting in on a "mafia" game... maybe we could call it something else cool... like "Dark Allienece" or "Dark Forces" I don't know... something like that.

Anyway, Why would Req have to do anything to make this game work? I said in the begining this was an idea for something we could do together with some organization with what Req has given us... no need for him to do anything more. we can already do this game!

Like I said, there are about 3 ways I can think of to do this, and would apreciate any ideas from others. Once we decide on some concrete rules, we can start this thing! it will be organized in a thread like a tournament... mog said he could help with any web based things (like rules and list of players... maybe "clues" for individuals if he can do that and we decide to incorperate that in the rules...)Once we have enough people, somebody randomly picks players to be mafia, and they get messaged... but only after everybody joins the game and its turn 1.

the biggest issue at hand here is how to start combat... I've already described why its counter productive to make the thing ranked... but have yet to find a way to make combat happen faster. mafia will at least know SOME people who they can attack, but if they attack right away, the others will know who mafia is... unless mafia organizes only 1 vs. 1 battles and pretends to be on the defencive to the rest... but that would be easy to wait out... there needs to be SOMETHING more. It'll hit me eventually, but if the inspiration gets one of you guys first, please post.

maybe I didn't make something clear at the start and this is why you people think we need req to automate messages (CTD, thanks, your post I think helped show me what isn't being understood)

There is a game moderator. somebody who is completely nuetral who isn't playing, but is in charge of the game. He/She messages the mafia before the game starts and tells each of them who the mafia all are. And may have other roles, if we can agree on other rules to promote conflict.

Last Edited : Monday, 20 December 2004 - 00:51

hmmm... just thought of another way... maybe EACH player (of the townspeople) could get a little info every 10-20 turns, but never enough so that the townspeople would be able to KNOW for SURE who all the mafia are. the mafia, in this senerio, would need to know who they all were from the start.

so, X (non-mafia) on turn 10 gets a message from the moderatior that Y is not mafia. he talks to Y, and tells Y, "hey, I just learned you weren't mafia... so why don't we team up, you tell me your message so we can know more together." however, Y doesnt know that X is not mafia yet. y's message was that Z was not mafia... Y might not tell X who Z is, because then mafia might find out what Y knows(Y doesn't know that X isn't mafia) if mafia knows what Y knows, they can use that in there schemes...

I don't think it would work too well if each player gets more than 3 peices of information. I think this might be something I could eventually figure out with math... its gonna be a different number for 10 player games than 40.

I think I may have just hit on something to promote fighting after all...

no no... i guess i wasnt clear.......

what i suggested is req create a 40 player unranked game and we all know those are the clan games

because a 40 player unranked game doesnt exist

and your idea wouldnt work in a 10 player or 12 player games.

I think a better game idea would be something like "Wild West" or "Roaring Twenties". That way we can all identify to characters like:

"billy the kid",
"jesse james",
"geronimo",
"the dawton gang",
"the younger brothers",
"wyatt earp and doc holiday",
"dutch shultz",
"bugsy sea gull"
"pretty boy floyd",
"roy earl",
"baby face nelson",
"machine gun kelly",
"john dillinger",
"humphrey bogart",
"james cagney",
"edward g. robinson",
"bonnie and clyde",
"ma barker",
"george raft" and last but not least "john garfield"


TR

Can I be Belle Starr? She was a somewhat famous female outlaw in the Old West. I won't bore anyone with the family ties to her lol.

uhhhh, TR, read the whole thread. your post has NOTHING to do with what this thread is about. this isn't a TIME theme thing... "mafia" is used as a refrence to the party mind game called mafia... not as a refrence to the time when the mafia was around (1920s I think?).

this is about teams... one team is secret and known only to itself... has nothing to do with a theme.We may very well call it "Dark Allience" instead of "mafia" when we actually play it... it depends on whats popular

@raptor... yeah, I guess I see where you are comming from, I suppose we DO need req to make us an unranked 40 player game... dern. thought we could do this without him.. Reeeeeeeeeq!!! we neeeeeed youuuu!!

I did read the whole thread and I'm sorry but I think my post is relevant because of these two statements that follow:

"I started thinking about ways to alow for sneaky behavior..."

"maybe we could call it something else cool..."
_______________________________________________

So I suggested alternate game title ideas. Maybe "Gangster Wars" or "Mob Wars" would be better also. I'm not thinking "time theme". "Wild West" to most people has the connotation of "anything goes" and the same for the "Roaring Twenties" and yes the choice of the "criminal element" is less stereotyped.
I just added some characters that might possibly be used in such a game.

TR

ok, but what you said was "I think a better game idea would be something like "Wild West" or "Roaring Twenties"."

since you used the words "game idea" instead of something like "name for the proposed idea of this thread", I thought you had different ideas about what this thread was about...Now do you understand why I didn't realize you were talking about the same thing as I was?

any how... I don't care what its called... but we'll still be using medival units, so I would guess it would make sense to try to take something from that era. But like I said... whatever is most popular. I'd like to moderate the game, rather than play it... so I don't care what goofy thing its called.

Last Edited : Monday, 20 December 2004 - 14:21