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[Tylui]

As the title suggests I've been kicking around the idea of trying to get my friends to play Mafia. We play it while camping, but that's once a year and not quite the same as online anyway.

Here is a rough draft of a doc to explain the differences; tell me what you think. Also, this was written for a group of my RL buddies, and kinda reads as such at times.

Mafiabook


What is Mafiabook?

   Mafiabook is simply a game of Mafia adapted to being played over a social media platform as opposed to around a campfire or on a forum. It is very much the same as a game of mafia while still being a bit different.


How do I play?

   I found an easy-to-understand explanation of rules on the Mafia Wiki. Copy-pasta:

“In its simplest form, Mafia consists of two sides: the Mafia, and the Town. The Mafia's goal is to kill the innocents, while the Town's goal is to kill the Mafia.

At the beginning of the game, the Moderator will secretly send everyone their role. The Mafia will know each other, while (in the basic game) everyone else will only know their own role.

The game has two phases, the first of which is Day. During Day, the Town must choose someone to Lynch; they are trying to eliminate the Mafia, but the Mafia can lead them astray by casting suspicion elsewhere. Generally, players will vote for someone they think is Mafia (the Mafia will vote so that they seem to be doing this as well, and might even vote for each other to confuse the Town); when a player gets a majority of the votes, they are lynched. Their role is revealed by the Moderator, and it becomes Night.

During the Night, the thread is locked and no one can talk publicly. The Mafia, however, can speak to each other privately to plot strategy and decide who to murder before the next Day begins. In this way, they can silence members of the Town who are threats to them. At the end of the Night, the murder is carried out and another Day begins. In effect, the Town gets to kill someone, and then the Mafia gets to kill someone.
The game alternates between Day and Night until either the Mafia are eliminated, or the Mafia have killed everyone else (or nothing can prevent the same).”


How is Mafiabook different?

   It’s only different in a couple of ways, and only in ways that I feel will speed things along, or in ways that will adapt Mafia to this type of media. I made a small change to the day round involving a voting period. Also, I don’t like taking an entire phase up for the night round. To do away with this I’ve made it more automatic, but the Night Phase essentially still exists.

Day Phase Changes

   When the Day begins, the GM will post the Day. A discussional period will happen until 6PM PST. At that time players may start voting, and may change their vote any number of times. These votes must be stated in clear language such as: “My vote is Bluh” or “I change my vote from Bluh to Bluh2” or “Bluh sucks; I’ll vote for him”. Voting will stop at midnight PST; any votes placed after that time will NOT be taken into consideration. Normal discussion is absolutely still allowed during the voting phase.
   
   The GM will then wake up at some ungodly hour to a baby yelling at him and at some point in the next caffeine fueled couple of hours he will do everything for night and then begin the next Day Phase.

Night Phase Changes

   Any player with a role that has a Night Action needs to send me two targets. The first target being their first choice, and the second target being the back-up, in the event that their first choice gets Lynched during that day.

   For example: Bryan is the mafia against Elijah, Jacob and Kameron. Jacob happens to be a Sherriff and wants to know about Elijah, and chooses Kameron as the back-up. Bryan, as Mafia, wants Elijah dead and Jacob’s being all quiet and know-it-all-y so he’s probably a Sherriff so he’s a good back-up. Bryan picks his Night Targets accordingly and still convinces the town to vote off Elijah! So Elijah dies by lynching. Then later that Night: Jacob finds out that Kameron is town, and Bryan ends up killing Jacob. And I’m pretty sure that game ends in a tie or something. Hooray!


Explanation of Roles

   At the beginning of every game, the GM sends out a message to each player individually with their role. The two most basic of these are simply Town and Mafia. However, there are special roles.

Town: You are a townsperson. You have no Day Actions or Night Actions.
Mafia: You are of the Mafia! You have one Night Kill every Night.
Doctor: Aligned with the town. Night Action: Your target will be protected from any Night Kill that next Night.
Sheriff: Aligned with the town. Day Action: Discover immediately if your target is town or mafia.
Vigilante: Aligned with the town. One-Shot Day Action: Immediately kills your target, and reveals you as vigilante. After you send the message to the GM he’ll post something like this: “Dannille pulled out two nickel plated ‘45’s. BANG! BANG! BANG! went the guns. ‘ACK!’ yelled Jacob, as he fell face-first into a puddle of his own blood.” Can only be used once per game.
Strongman: One-Shot action that negates any protection on the mafia’s target. Even if protected by the doctor, the Night Kill target dies regardless! Can only be used once per game.

Other Terms

Day Action: Action taken during the day. The GM is sent a message with the target, and action is taken immediately.
Night Action: the GM is sent a message with the First Target and a Back-Up Target during the day. The following Night, the action happens to the First Target. If the First Target was lynched during that day, the Back-Up Target gets the action instead.
Night Kill: a Night Action that kills the target.
One-Shot: an Action that can only be used once the entire game.


Other Rules

Always include the GM in a PM conversation you have with someone. For example, if you want to whisper to Ryan, send the message to Ryan and the GM both.
Don’t quote or forward anything the GM says in a Private Message.

[Dariush]

Actually, I was asking the OP. Why would he come to a forum with a formed community, regularly organized highly complex games and a good platform for them and tell them to move to the unholy shitfuckness that is Shitbook and play the most stripped-down version imaginable?

[zombie urist]

He's not asking us to play, he's playing with his friends.

I've also tried this approach and these were the main problems (that I remember):
1. Threads get really hard to read.
2. No quotes.
3. Deleting posts is really easy.
4. Hard to do vote counts.
5. Lurking. This is probably just because all my friends were pretty busy.

[Tylui]

Actually, I was asking the OP. Why would he come to a forum with a formed community, regularly organized highly complex games and a good platform for them and tell them to move to the unholy shitfuckness that is Shitbook and play the most stripped-down version imaginable?

Well thanks for not raging much appreciated. It was for the discussion of it. Because I wanted some feedback on an idea and I figured "why not post it on bay12, they're usually pretty cool and smart people to give advice in an area that I might need it, and seeing as how I started playing Mafia because of them, someone should have something good to say!". I can see I grossly mistrusted today's generation of bay12 user.

He's not asking us to play, he's playing with his friends.

I've also tried this approach and these were the main problems (that I remember):
1. Threads get really hard to read.
2. No quotes.
3. Deleting posts is really easy.
4. Hard to do vote counts.
5. Lurking. This is probably just because all my friends were pretty busy.

Thank you.

Yes these are all ways that it differs from a forum setting.
1. What made up a "thread" for you? I made sure to have a "Game 1 Day 1" post and made sure everyone only commented on that. Recently a friend ran it and came up with a separate "votes-only" thread. Which I don't like, as it makes chronology funny. If players made sure to vote in both, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. (Sorry for rambling, I'm just thinking the ideas out It's nice to have a friendly sounding board, thank you zombie urist. )

2. My friends haven't really gotten into the game very much. They're used to playing it in a camp-fire real life type setting, so they aren't very into re-reading or countering super word-specific quotes. My friends have short attention spans. I tried to speed the game up to address that, and even at what I would consider a blinding pace(a day and a night every 24 hours) there is not a whole lot of conversation unless someone very overtly reveals something. Again they started Mafia as hour-long games around a fire so they're used to arguing face-to-face.

3. Haven't had anyone try to yet... But if they did I'm sure they'd catch shit for it and it would become part of the game. Someone would realize they're deleting posts

4. True. It was a tad easier with the separate vote thread but it was funky.

5. Yep. Busy or lazy or short attention spans.