I can now say from firsthand experience that hosting these kinds of games is a
pain. Highly rewarding, yes, but still a pain. There's so much preparatory work to be done. I knew this was coming and had been working on it on-and-off since May 2008 (which is earlier than some of your join dates. I feel old), but when the time came to finally write up all of the roles and do the entire night phase process, from processing to writing to sending out the feedback PMs, I was still shocked. This was so far from a typical GH game that it felt like it wasn't mine anymore.
I did implement several measures to reduce the possibility of this game turning into a repeat of Capo III, and I think I was successful at this. While the results may have been same, the methods that achieved them were not, and in this I take solace and claim victory. First of all, there was the entire treasure aspect of the game, which forced people to choose their priorities. I'll get to this later. Secondly, which has been mentioned numerous times, was the nerfing of the protection group's power. It was a strict 1-for-1 trade, with no single group being able to thwart multiple kills. In addition, if the mafia or town vigilante groups ever brought more than the minimum amount of firepower, protection groups would have a greater chance of failure.
In addition to this, I totally masked divining other players' actions through your own feedback PMs. Anyone in a protection group that received a night PM from me can attest to this. First of all, whether the protections were successful or whether they were just inconclusive, they read the same way: "XYZ is still alive." Secondly, you received the amount of gold you were expecting to receive, so you wouldn't know if anything went wrong that way. For example, if you sent orders in for a protection group that had 4 people, and only 3 people sent them in, you still only got the 7 or 8 gold instead of the full 10.
Moving away from the groups, the forced recruitment mechanic also helped. One thing the mafia are always concerned about in Capo is, during their recruitment efforts, going after a target that would end up exposing you all (I believe Andres and Louis are intimately familiar with this). In Pirate Ship, you're either susceptible or not, and you get no say in the matter. Once again, I think this mechanic proved to work quite well when CA and the British loaded up on recruits early on and looked to compensate for a sagging Maven team. They were even lined up to get a third, Lord Winter, and I think they found taka susceptible too at that point, but were unable to get it through thanks to a chronic case of Four Horsemen-itis.
I was asked about how I think things would have went had it not been for the presence (no pun intended) of the Horsemen. Ultimately, I don't think it would have changed the end result, although things would have been a lot closer. Say gibson doesn't get whacked early on. Sigurd still gets lynched, but he and Reenk team up to kill for a while, and his presence provides another lynch buffer. Meanwhile, on the British side, ricera still gets lynched and CA still gets targeted by CR's network, but they have one original member alive in scottish. Sasaki may or may not have survived by this point, but I think the ultimate result is two weakened teams by Day 7 instead of just Reenk allying with a desperate TinCow. From there it's anyone's guess, but ultimately CR was still too entrenched for the mafia to really cause chaos.
Moving on to the Faustian treasure offer of Night 7, this was something I had in my mind for a while, kind of a final safety valve to pull in the case of all of my other balancing measures failed and the town was looking supreme (it was, but not because of my balancing). The premise of it was to allow for one night's total breakdown in the testudo strategy and see exactly how much damage the mafia could cause. Gamey? Perhaps, but at the time I was a bit depressed at the game's direction and already treating it as a test run for Pirate Ship Mafia II. I sent the PM to everybody save for CR, Louis, and TinCow, who were the officers at the time, under explicit instructions not to mention it to anyone. Eventually word got out, but most people still went for the treasure. In all, there was 150 treasure waiting to be divided up. I originally thought that 14 players went for it, meaning everybody would get 10.7 treasure (rounded up to 11). However, upon rechecking my PMs I discovered a 15th, but at that point I was too lazy to go back and rework everyone's totals. Congrats on those who resisted the impulse, especially before the leak (only ACIN explicitly refused it before word got out, IIRC).
All in all, I think the treasure mechanic had mixed results. Was it a godsend for immersion and roleplaying? Yes, or at least I think so. However, did it make this game the game theorist's paradise that I dreamed of and Louis made a note of early on? I don't think so. The only time I really felt the game was truly providing the chaos and mayhem and agonizing choice-making I was aiming for was Night 7, when the treasure offer was sent. I attribute this to making the differences in rewards between protection and vigging marginal. If you sent in orders with the minimal amount of partners, you got the same gold, regardless. Likewise, if you upped your crew count by one over the minimum, the average gold given out for protections was 7.5, or 0.5 less than if you did a vig group +1. Combine this with the inherent difficulties of a vig group (lots of protection groups and the stewards/Quartermaster) and it just wasn't worth making up the essentially meaningless difference in treasure. As a result, the individual townie's strategy quite often matched up with the town's as a whole, which is not what I was aiming for.
In tweaking for the sequel, I am going to spend the majority of my time reworking on the above aspect. I want to create the distinction between individual and group motivations. I want the players to have to make difficult choices about what they do every night; almost to have them in
Diplomacy-esque situations where you have to screw
somebody over. I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to do this yet, be it through increasing the treasure total if you do vig kills, making it harder to gain treasure through protection groups, or more common but less large-scale Faustian offers, almost making them in-game random events. I don't know how it will happen, but it *will* happen.
ATPG mentioned in his wrap-up post that how we needed to shy away from the group games because they were becoming unbeatable. I respectfully disagree. It took me one Huge game to figure it out, but the groups can be overcome if you provide enough incentive for players to
not join a group. I'm going to be spending my time figuring out exactly how to do this, and once I finally do, Pirate Ship Mafia II will roll around the corner and we'll be able to test out if I was right.
First, though, I will be returning to my roots and hosting the ultra-vanilla Mafia IX, where the town must root out the mafia purely through posting behavior and good detective work. But after that, though... well...
...the sky is clear, the decks freshly swabbed, and the ship afitted with new sails. Treasure awaits, laddies, and the
Presence may just be ready for another voyage. I hope you'll all join me aboard when the time comes.
~ General Hankerchief
Originally Posted by The Fanatical Loyalist
Re: Pirate Ship Mafia (Concluded)
The idea of Split/Tincow fanfiction is both hilarious and disturbing. The game room sure has gotten weird these days.
). When you say "we" figured everyone out, you must mean you, because as far as I could tell in the thread, only Yaropolk strongly had the opinion I was Mafia, aside from that brief voting period which was rolled back just as easily.
As a lot of that had some interesting commentary, here's some more of my thoughts regarding balancing and such:
- Horseman of the 
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