I must say that this game has been work, work, work. I had totally forgotten how much time you actually need to invest hosting a large mafia game. The planning part is the most fun part in my opinion. You never know which end you will start from, and the finished product is always a surprise. At least, that’s the way it is for me which to the psychologists among you should indicate that I don’t like doing things more than once or twice.
In this game, I started out with the base idea of wanting to redo a former
StarWars game that Elite Ferret once did
I especially liked the
rule of two idea where the Sith just recruited a new player when one of them died.
As such, every player could potentially become a Sith. This was where I started designing my game. I started with the Sith and made 39 Sith characters. I picked some well known ones and some lesser known ones. I wanted to have some that turned back and forth and some that had been Jedi before falling to the dark side. When the Sith was made, I needed 40 Jedi roles. One was to be the first Grand Master, the only character in the game that wouldn’t be turned into a Sith. The choice was simple, who other than Yoda could fill that role? The rest of the Jedi characters would be Sith cover roles. Many of them were accurate like Anakin -> Darth Vader, Count Dooku -> Darth Tyranus, Palpatine -> Darth Sidious and Shira Brie – Lumiya. Others were customized and slightly altered to fit.
My prime goal was to find Jedi cover roles of same species, secondary: that they at least looked alike or resembled the Sith characters.
The final character list was this.
Balancing the game
When I started doing this part of the game, I soon discovered that it was a large job to make sure that every player would have equal opportunity to win. There were already the problem with Characters that had too close connections with the Sith (Palapatine anyone?) and characters with no connection at all (Yoda, Mace Windu, Obi Wan, Qui Gon). I had planned that all characters should received a rank which determined their “easiness to kill”. I landed on a 5 tier rank system with Initiates at the bottom and the Grand Master at the top. The game started out with 1 Grand Master, 4 Jedi Masters, 8 Jedi Knights, 10 Padawans and the rest Initiates. I had initially decided on a system where Masters had to train Initiates to become Padawans and Padawans to become Jedi Knights, but left that idea as it would be just one more administrative thing to handle. But players had to advance in rank and I let the Sith decide by killing players. If they killed someone above the rank of Initiate, a random player would fill this spot.
Players need to have something to do, which will generate discussions in the game and a doctor role and a investigator are good choices for making a game a little more interesting for some of the players.
Yoda got both abilities and the investigator role went to one character that probably wouldn’t be believed (Count Dooku) and the doctor role went to Qui Gon (both Masters)
I soon found that balancing the game was a too large job when adding in all the features I wanted. There would be too many rules to implement should this be a perfectly balanced game.
I then came over the discussion you guys had on balancing. I particularly liked the mafia scum article on this subject. The one that states that balance is not important. The most important aspect of a game is the illusion that it is winnable by all factions.
I just had to test this out and I believed that it was a successful try out.
With the Sith able to recruit new players every time they lost one, the game was set up to run until the last player, much like a bicycle race or a cross country skiing race. You have teams or nations with several participants in each, but there can only be one winner. The illusion, if you want, is that every participant could win. But reality is that only one will cross the finishing line first and it is usually the one who is either lucky (Australian gold in Salt Lake) or better trained. But since there are teams involved, they will help each other and finally one will win the price for himself and for his team or nation.
I believe all these aspects were in the game. Luck played a major role when it came to who became Sith, and skill (training) played a role when trying to survive until the end.
The Sith needed to be two to be able to defeat the strongest characters like Masters with multiple abilities and Grand Masters, but the Sith was weak when they just turned Sith. I had a progression system where they only learned one killing skill when they first became Sith and which grew by one other by every round. In addition they participated in the great force lotto like everyone else.
The great Force lottery.
Some players got abilities outside the great lotto, but let’s explain the lotto first.
The character sheet was maintained in excel and every player had therefore an integer number with their character. I sorted the excel sheet many times during the game. Every lynched or killed player dropped to the bottom and I had the list sorted on current rank with the Sith having the first two places in the list.
Every night I used the integer Random.org feature where I would pick 4 integers within the living list’s integer range (3-42 with the last number decreasing every time someone was removed from the game)
These 4 numbers corresponded to a living player who had now “won” the force lottery.
Depending on rank, abilities were handed out. Padawans could only learn one ability every night and from the Padawan tier of abilities. Grand Masters and Masters could learn 3 abilities, one from each tier (knights could learn 2).
Each ability was attached to an integer and it was again Random.org who determined which ability a player got. Padawan abilities ranged from 1 to 4, Jedi Knight from 5 - 9 etc.
This system could potentially receive multiple same integers, which it did. Sometimes a player got double lottery wins when their integers showed up twice. I think Subotan which had number 3 in the list received double lottery more than once. I think he was maxed out on abilities long before he was finally lynched. (Note: with multiple integers being picked and a 40 number range, nearly every time the random picker picked a small number as one of the results).
In addition, Grand Masters and Sith had their own tiers which they learned new abilities from outside the force lottery. (incremental by rounds).
When Jedi Knights and Jedi Masters were lucky the first time, it was mentioned in the write-ups as being awakened to the force. Padawans, just got a “you stumbled over a holocron and it taught you an ability.”
The full list of Abilities with their integers are:
Padawan tier
1 Breath control.
2 Absorb
3 Push
4 Speed
Jedi Knight tier
5 Blinding
6 Deflection
7 Grip
8 Protecting
9 Stealth
Jedi Master tier
10 Cloak
11 Ghost
12 Healing
13 Lightning
14 Sense
Grand Master tier
15 Interrogation
16 Morichro
Sith tier
17 Choke
18 Destruction
19 Drain
The Padawan and Knight abilities were more or less just defensive abilities to be used if they were attacked by the Sith or vigilante Masters. I had devised a paper scissors rock kind of system, all though in reality it was just a Paper Rock thing
Kill abilities vs. Defence abilities:
Force Lightning is countered by
Force Absorb,
Force Deflection,
Force Protect, and
Force Cloak.
Force Choke is countered by
Force Push,
Force Speed,
Force Blinding,
Force Grip and
Force Cloak
Force Destruction is countered by
Force Absorb and
Force Protect.
Force Drain is countered by
Force Push,
Force Speed,
Force Blinding,
Force Grip and
Cloak.
Lightsaber is countered by
better rank,
Force Push,
Force Speed,
Force Blinding,
Force Grip and
Force Protect.
Other attacks
Force Sense is countered by
Force Stealth and
Force Cloak (Stealth hides alignment, Cloak hides player)
Force Interrogation is countered by
Force Stealth (alignment only) and
Force Cloak (Cloak hides player and loses therefore not an ability)
Force Morichro is countered by Force Cloak.
In the early game, players could only use one ability when killing and defending. I think it was when the number of players was reduced by half when I introduced multiple attacks and multiple defences. Advanced Masters and Sith (The Sith Lord was in the Master level tier and the Dark Lord of the Sith was in the Grand Master level tier) would eventually learn to use two abilities pr action and finally able to do two actions with two abilities in each restricting it to one kill pr round.
The players were all susceptible to the dark Side since they all had a Sith character waiting for them. Investigators would sooner than later find players that were using Stealth or actually finding Sith before seeing different results.
And using blocking before investigating was a terrible idea. The results would be warped.
Putting the susceptible to the dark side into the vig ability was meant as psychological restrainer. It worked...
The Back story
I needed a story for the game. All Mafia game needs a good back story; a backbone which you use as a red thread throughout the game. It needs a plausible Town vs. Mafia situation and a system which allows players to be removed from the game.
I had 39 Sith roles and 40 Jedi roles. The game started out with 40 town players where in the first rounds two were moved to the Sith faction.
How do you do this in the StarWars universe?
Since all my characters came from different times in the StarWars universe, I had to be creative. I remembered the Robert Jordan wheel of times concept about the wheel that turns and eventually generates iterations of the same movement.
I had to put this in the distant future at a time where the characters were all ancient history. But I also had to bring in elements from the past – like the holocrons. I had to trap 40 characters some place (common to all mafia games).
The story about a universe where the balance of the force was non existent began to form.
I made the Jedi a non religious and scientific faction without knowledge of the force. The good needing evil as in if you know no evil, you wouldn’t know what good was, began to form. The holocrons were obviously something that had to come from the past and would probably have been hidden from the Jedi until now. The lost Star Destroyer with old Empire artefacts seemed like a good solution.
The Art work
I early on obviously needed to fix some of the Character pictures, correcting colors and pictures. I started with a program called SnagIt which my company uses to capture screen shots and adding simple drawings, arrows etc to them.
Having screwed up Count Dooku’s character image by using the wrong colors, I realised that this program was too basic for my needs. However I made most of the early artwork including the first banners and the character cards with this program.
I wanted to try out an idea I had about promoting Mafia games outside .org. by making small commercial films. The need for a proper logo and theme was needed and I had to get a better program for my artwork. I came over Gimp 2.6 after investigating what the other Gameroomers used for their artwork. Thanks to Thermal Mercury and the artwork corner at TWC, I got into image manipulation.
I downloaded several textures and fonts for Gimp and started brushing up on all the StarWars themed images I had downloaded.
The logo is basically the font EPISODE 1 and some neon sign filter. The EPISODE 1 font has some special characters which includes # (the StarWars logo on the line above your text), % and & which puts lines above and under that which you are writing.
The actual logo went from StarWars Episode VII: The return of the Sith to StarWars: Return of the Sith and finally to StarWars Mafia: Return of the Sith.
I collected mostly StarWars drawings and not footage as the main bulk of the artwork, as it was easier to manipulate and IMO better looking for the game.
The StarWars Mafia watermark in the pictures was not to say that this was my work, but merely to make the artwork official game artwork and would be a good indication that images posted by players were either official or fake.
If you look at Count Dooku’s character card, I left it with the wrong colors as an additional lynchbait to that particular character. But even that had the watermark.
Noticing that players would check out my photobucket album (Which is OK BTW, I have nothing to hide there) I quickly renamed the Sith stuff to be near impossible to discern.
I only had the current Sith characters uploaded so the job was relatively small. I do remember in hindsight that this occurred in the last Midgard game also, and since I already made a contingency plan then, It was a quick job to implement in this game.
The videos didn’t produce the results I had envisioned as I doubt a single player joined because they saw them on youtube.
But the videos have been viewed a few times.
The first commercial where I played around with a SW crawl text (which I was quite happy with and my first movie ever) has been viewed 178 times. The second with the Sith pictures, which by the way, were a reveal over how the game would function (see the Anakin to Vader pictures, the holocron turning Jedi to Sith - all the Sith characters indicating that there would be many of them ), the second video has 428 views as I write this. The other videos (the opening listing all players and the duel) have 91 and 53 views.
I have gathered quite an extensive library with music and images for this game and the material could be used for creating many videos. But as I work full time and have a family, there were only time to do so much. Ideally I would have made a new video for every round, but I hadn’t the time.
My final arwork pieces, the medals are basically two sith emblems crossed st Andrews style with some gold, silver and bronze texture on it. I also put genuine medal ribbons in the empty circle space of the Sith emblems. I was quite happy with the silver one and tried to make the gold and bronze look equally natural, but I wasn’t that lucky with those. The medallions are multi layer pieces with many techniques for lighting and getting the texture to look 3D-ish.
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I can’t think of anything else.
I am not going to do a night by night thing like I have done previously as that would take forever to produce. But feel free to ask questions…
Sigurd
Re: StarWars Mafia: RotS Summary and information thread
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