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[RoseHeart]

Well the skrulls are randomly assigned. Anyone, except in your example Nick Fury which I like, would potentially be one.

So its important that any combo of mafia would be fair.

Domino is a character important in the deadpool mythos and subtly one of the most powerful Marvel characters. She is... well she's lucky.

[Mephansteras]

Note that visible power roles can make it very easy for town to deduce who the scum are. I have seen quite a few games end in town victories once they were able to figure out what role everyone has.

It goes like this: Town calls for a claim of who did what each night. Everyone claims. Whoever is obviously lying is scum and therefore lynched. Repeat until town wins.

Unless you've got some very good scum and/or some carefully crafted roles that allow for some good fake-claims, scum has very little chance of winning. Add into this roles that effect night-kills or give information to town (like the Nick Fury idea) and it can get even worse.

Also note that Venom is a particularly tricky role if known, especially from the outset, as it is an easy lynch/kill target.


Overall...while I know why you want to do this from a flavor perspective, it's really tricky to balance.

I'd suggest, instead, that you have normal hidden power roles and have the visible roles be minor powers. Say...Captain America gets a one-shot bodyguard ability. Stuff like that. Keeps the flavor up a bit since you have the 'no one knows who's a Skrull' without making the game a simple puzzle to solve for town while scum tries desperately to mislead people into losing.

[RoseHeart]

A) Maybe the skrulls have additional abilities.


B) If, say it was to be visible as proposed, what roles might make it less a solvable puzzle?


C) It could be every role has 2 abilities, with most overlapping with one or more others. Such as bodyguard, and vigilante.


maybe going back to the skrulls ability to copy powers is where the "faking" can stem from. Similar to super skrull ect.

[Mephansteras]

Well, the part that makes it puzzle-like is that many roles have actions that are the most logical thing to do. A Cop role, for instance, should pretty much always be investigating and reporting their results back to town.  A bodyguard role should always be guarding the Cop. And so on. If anyone deviates from this, they have to have a super compelling reason to do so or they're going to be lynched. They may be lynched anyway.

You could, possibly, set things up so that the powers have reasons to do things other than the most obvious action, but that would take a lot of thought. It might even be a static set-up, essentially, where a very specific set of roles for Town and Scum are actually balanced. And even then you have to worry about what happens as roles get removed. If the only thing stopping the scum from killing the Cop is a Bodyguard, and the bodyguard dies, then either the Cop is 100% dead or probably lynched the next day for not getting killed by the Scum.

Part of the major challenge of a Mafia game is that the Scum have more information than the town. With power roles, the fact that the scum all know who each other is and what powers they have as a team is part of their advantage. If everyone knows all of the powers in the game and who has them, the town has a lot more information to work with.

Town is supposed to be working at a disadvantage and trying to get clues fast enough to eliminate the scum before too many town die. The numbers are what gives them that chance in most games. If the only question left to ask is 'who is scum' while still giving town every possible tool to get more hints it's going to be hard to balance.

You could make scum super overpowered, like abilities that let them bypass blocks or get extra kills or whatnot, but that becomes really hard to balance. It also takes some of the fun out of the game, since the only thing worse than having no power is having a power that is actually completely useless.

[RoseHeart]

Hmm. Do you have any links to games that did have visible roles(with a preference to ones that went better than others of the type)?

[TolyK]

You could try looking here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=144075.0

I don't have time to parse, but if there was a visible setup that worked it'll likely be there.

[Leafsnail]

I was thinking about a Dangan Ronpa mafia setup. And by that I mean not something that uses any characters or lore from the series, rather just the basic rules of the Killing Game. So people who've played the games won't be at an advantage, and people who haven't played the games aren't at risk of being spoiled.

The basic rules are as follows: to win the game, you must kill another player and get away with it. After a murder occurs (during the night phase) there's a trial (day phase) where all players must vote on who they think the culprit is. If they get it right, the culprit dies and the game continues. If they get it wrong, everyone except the culprit dies and the culprit is the sole winner. The game also ends if there are two or fewer players left alive - in that case those survivors win.

The idea is that everyone has that same win condition, and it's up to you when and if you become scum to try and win the game. I think the best way to implement this is with a bidding system. Every player would have the following ability, regardless of role:

- Murder: Send me a victim and a list of other suspects. If your murder attempt is successful the victim will die, and a trial will begin. At the start of the trial I will post that list of suspects with your name mixed into it. You cannot perform any other action on a night you use this.

Only one player can succeed in killing each night. If multiple players submit a Murder action the player with the shortest list of suspects will be successful, and all other attempts will fail. So essentially a shorter list will make you more likely to succeed in your attempt, but also makes it harder to survive the trial afterwards because there will be fewer other possibilities.

Players would also have an "Ultimate talent" that would grant them some extra abilities. These could help you investigative murders or kill other players. In the case of an ability other than "Murder" being used to kill someone the thread will be told what the ability was and how it works. Players would also be given a "strength" rating between 1 and 20 that would be used to break ties in bidding and for other checks.

[doll]

There's definitely some solid core gameplay lurking in there, but the main problem I'm seeing is that 100% of information asymmetry is down to role powers.

The idea is that everyone has that same win condition, and it's up to you when and if you become scum to try and win the game.

How are you supposed to hunt between a group of players (suspects) when each of them was literally trying to do the same thing and has no actual preference in who they would kill (i.e. each of them would be just as happy with the situation, given their wincon, if they happened to be the one who made the kill - to the point where we can imagine that each player could have chose the same list and the mod picked the winning submission)? It strikes me that the core game loop is concerned about figuring out who is lying about their power role (probably everyone) and how (probably a lot), and then divining the killer from there; if this is the case, then hunting is based purely on parsing mechanical information and a light bit of cold reading on claims.
For that scenario to work, we would need to be able to presume that the roles in play are relevant in every (or almost every) case of murder plausible yet do not leave the case solved beyond reasonable doubt.

Compounding this concern, expendable role powers quickly become a game of chicken since every other player is by definition your enemy (excepting two-man draws) and so any usage of your resources is likely to be against your ultimate interests.

[notquitethere]

The challenge is each day, which of the suspects is most likely to have A. Killed that victim and B. Chosen those suspects.

For that we need actual motives, reasons why someone would kill one person over another. That can come from role interactions and would probably require role powers were known.

[Leafsnail]

The best approach I can think of is to give people "secondary objectives" that unlock powerful abilities if you complete them. By having some of them require co-operation with other players you could have discussion and information exchange going on.

[doll]

By having some of them require co-operation with other players you could have discussion and information exchange going on.

Which would be entirely unrelated to hunting scum , since there's no way to distinguish between other players vis a vis their guilt beyond mechanical advantage since there's not information asymmetry with regards to the murder and this does nothing to change that.

[Leafsnail]

There's the same information asymmetry that is present in every mafia game - the culprit knows they can win by lynching any other suspect while the town does not know which suspect they need to lynch in order to avoid losing.

I do get what you're saying about it being arbitrary who dies and who gets put on suspect lists though, there should certainly be some kind of system that makes certain victims more desirable for certain players to introduce more of a WIFOM game there.

[Mephansteras]

There's the same information asymmetry that is present in every mafia game - the culprit knows they can win by lynching any other suspect while the town does not know which suspect they need to lynch in order to avoid losing.

I do get what you're saying about it being arbitrary who dies and who gets put on suspect lists though, there should certainly be some kind of system that makes certain victims more desirable for certain players to introduce more of a WIFOM game there.

There is also the issue that, while it is true that you have sort of a one-man scum team each day, it's not the same scum team from day to day. Which makes it useless to go back through and look at how someone played on previous days.

Which is not to say that it won't work, just that it does have some significant differences to a normal game.

[MoonyTheHuman]

I've been throwing around the concept of a bastardized mafia game where the only way to win is for the players to add rules and win conditions themselves. I'm thinking that the vote to add a rule should be 3/4 or unanimous. Looking for some feedback.
Unanimous requirements would force people to come up with fair (or seemingly fair, but hilariously broken) rules that everyone will be ok with adding in. To make this sane(r) i'd allow for neutral votes.
3/4 would work similarly, but has the disadvantage that vilteam could potentially win very rapidly by adding a "vilteam wins"  rule.

It would probably otherwise follow standard mafia rules for roles (wolves kill, seer sees, villagers idle out) but with nonexistent game rules (until they're added)
The rulelawyering would be strong with this one.

[FallacyofUrist]

Nomic Mafia.

I'd play.