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Author Topic: NQT's Mafia Design Thread  (Read 993 times)

notquitethere

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NQT's Mafia Design Thread
« on: April 24, 2023, 04:43:57 am »


NQT's Game Formats

Here's a list of mafia or mafia-adjacent games that I have run based on setups I've designed myself. I've been reflecting on how to do the next CYOM, so I thought I'd recap what I've tried before.

Elements

This was a format for five players where each player had two allies and two enemies (in a circle) and they win when their enemies are dead and they're still alive. A bit swingy maybe but a lot of great possibility for back-stabbing drama.

Elements 1

Two more games of this were run by other people.

Procedurally Generated Mafia

Proc-Gen Mafia uses a random role generator, with some very wacky possibilities. Not always very well balanced but always nice and chaotic. Typically I'd make a batch of roles and then weed out ones which would just instantly end the game (like "Twice per day you can kill every player").

Proc Gen 1 - Mafia Win
Proc Gen 2 - Town Win
Proc Gen 3 - Town Win
Proc Gen 4 - Mafia Win

Angry Ghosts

Angry Ghosts is a game where the dead can keep posting, there are no role-flips and only the dead have night powers (but no vote). I had forgotten about this setup, which was never actually run.

Puzzle Temple Panic

Puzzle Temple Panic was a cross between mafia and a turn based adventure game with objects, puzzles, an action economy and everything. It was very ambitious but also quite  hard to run. To my shame, the actual ending stalled out due to waiting too long on a player for an action and me getting busy with other things, but by that point the scum team had basically won. It was probably a little too difficult, but I loved the blended genre ideas here.

Choose-Your-Own-Mafia

CYOM is my signature game. The core conceit is that players pick their roles themselves (often through a point-buy system) and then they can gain new roles to adapt to the game state as they survive successive days. As a format, it's very much a mixed success. There have been some phenomenal highs and some dreadful lows.

Choose-Your-Own-Mafia - Town Win
Point-Buy system. Probably too town-sided. Some players were very good at making role creation choices, others not so much. There were cult conversion powers on the table, which haven't appeared since.

Choose-Your-Own-Masquerade - Town Win
Same point buy system, but with adjusted costs and more powers. This time it was a Masquerade, so players could only target masks and no one knew (prior to claims or mask inspects) whose mask was whose. It was also Deep South, so there was no night phase, everything happened during the day, which makes things nice and dramatic. People had fun with it but it was also felt to be quite town-sided (though the mafia did have more tools at their disposal that they didn't always take advantage of).

Choose-Your-Own-Mafias - Scum Team B Win
This was like the Masquerade game but instead had two scum teams, as well as NPC masks (so someone could kill a mask but it turns out its not a real player). I upped the character creation point value so players started out twice as powerful. There were also third parties. The game went on to 13 days because one of the scum teams managed to cheese the point system in some inflationary way.

Choose-Your-Own-Mafia 4 - Town Win
This game used a D&D style race + class +levels system which was quite elegant. Scum gave up on D1, this was a complete disaster. Town full claimed and came up with a plan to squeeze out the scum and confirm everyone, and so scum threw in the towel. Miserable. Learned an important lesson about doubly ensuring the game can't be won by full claiming D1.
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notquitethere

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Re: NQT's Mafia Design Thread
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2023, 11:04:45 am »

I've been working on a card game variant of Choose Your Own Mafia. It ditches the masquerade and nightless parts (though maybe Masquerade should be kept), and gives a sort of deck building aspect to it. Players make their roles up with cards.

Choose-Your-Own-Collectable-Card-Mafia

This is a Choose-Your-Own-Mafia game, and like every earlier version of the game, it has a different ruleset. In this game you will spend Experience Points (xp) to get Booster Packs. Each Booster Pack contains a number of role cards, from which you will construct your role. During the day, you may also trade cards with other players.

Spoiler: Booster Pack (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Cards (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Trading (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Alignments (click to show/hide)




The whole design is that players still get to make their roles, but they're limited at any given time by the number of powers they can take, and what powers are available to take. This should limit really cheesy game-breaking strategies, but still give players some flexibility.

The common action cards are mostly trash (by design), so players will want to get uncommon or rare action cards. Uncommon and rare targeting gives them more power, flaws of all kinds give them more flexibility and power. All of the reflexive (previously called 'auto') cards are useful, so but there are only so many slots, which limits the power. I might add 3rd parties in, or have multiple scum teams, I'm not sure yet.

Some questions:

- Should there be more cards in the packs or is 7 a sweet spot? Here's a selection of random draws for reference:

Spoiler: Random Draws (click to show/hide)

- Is Job Lot too good? From the testing above, I think it might actually need to cost as much or more xp than the other booster packs.

- Are there any cards that should be outright removed? The list is based a lot on my revised list after CYOM3. It massively reduces active power stealing that was common in the previous CYOMs.

- Are there any cards that should be included?

- What rules are currently unclear?
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TolyK

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Re: NQT's Mafia Design Thread
« Reply #2 on: April 28, 2023, 05:01:35 pm »

Haven't dug too deep, cuz yeah, but consider what might be reasonable limitations to allow an in-person version of CYOCCM to be playable. With a mod/GM, of course.
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Jim Groovester

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Re: NQT's Mafia Design Thread
« Reply #3 on: April 29, 2023, 12:47:50 am »

I spot checked if the rarities made sense and it seems to check out. Maybe situationally I would want a common card over an uncommon or rare but by and large the higher in rarity the card is the more desirable they are.

If there are flaws in the setup I think they only get wrung out after playing it a few times.

- Is Job Lot too good? From the testing above, I think it might actually need to cost as much or more xp than the other booster packs.

Half thinking it through it seems like getting more cards gets you more chances for flaws which are pretty good opportunities to increase your utility for relatively cheaply compared to getting rarer cards.
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I understood nothing, contributed nothing, but still got to win, so good game everybody else.