Quote Originally Posted by TinCow View Post
This might be as good a thread as any to bring up something I've been thinking about for a while. Would anyone be interested in having an in-depth discussion about creating and balancing mafia games? There's a lot of resources on the web with respect to small-sized games, where balance seems to have been finely honed. However, there's almost no guidance about balancing games of 30+ players which we do constantly. I'm interested in talking about stuff like:

1) What's the ideal mafioso to town ratio?
2) How do multiple mafia families and/or independent roles impact game balance?
3) What roles are overpowered/underpowered and overused/underused?
4) Does the entertainment benefit of giving all players something to do outweight the balancing difficulties that result?
5) What's the best way to minimize lack of participation/WoGs?

There's lots of other stuff as well, but that's just off the top of my head. Would anyone be interested in and participate in such a thread?
Quick answers as I am tired:

1) The main principle is informed minority (Mafia) versus Uninformed Majority (Town). Thus, balance has to be the ratio which doesn't unbalance either side.

2) Depends on the victory conditions. One of the recent large games possessed a really underpowered mafia. Mafia should be the most powerful "faction", at least at the beginning (when there is zero information). Multiple familes and independents affect balance a lot. Too many famiilies can make it basically impossible for the town to win, and true-independents are often underpowered and basically a Mafia/Town random counterbalance.

3) YLC's role in Netherworld 2. It is a combination of a roleblock + investigation + immune to night-kill especially with the original town-aligned objective. Totally impossible for a Mafia to get rid of. Only way he was disposed of was due to being recruited by a Mafia-aligned. There are many underused roles, however, the most overused in a bad way is probably the "serial killer" or the joker. Only in games such as Lift-Escape or Bakerboy's last game, is where a joker role is quite balanced.

4) Answering directly from personal experience from the .ORG series, amazing large number of people do not do any actions at all, even if the game expects them to do it. This also unbalances the game as if a counterbalance isn't being used, it can overpower other abilities or roles. It does come down to the argument that a game host should select certain people who know how to play a role, however, this results in elitism and other various community problems.

5) You want the really harsh answer to this? Refuse people participantion in your game who are known to act this way. By being refused, it means they are then expected to act in a certain way to actually join a game, however, then it gets into a circular argument where some one so bad cannot seek to show they changed their ways as no one will trust them, as it will ruin their game. Again, this results in elitism. There are however, things which can result in low participantion.
a) Bad hosting quality, as in lack of write-ups or imagination by the host. Sometimes, a player would like more than what looks like a half-hearted sentence as a end of phase write-up.
b) Lack of Ability: While this doesn't effect everyone, some people are simply sick of being bog-standard townies. They want to be the mafia! They want to be the doctor! When some players are on a role-dry spell, they simply cannot be bothered playing much due to lack of reason why.
c) All the active players get lynched. Trust me, I know this from experience, so will many other regulars. This leaves the lurkers and as they don't bother to contribute, the game can dry up.

There have been some successful counters to this. My favourite was infact how I handled it in socially unacceptable mafia. I enforced a rule where some one had to post a minimum of three times per round. This forced anyone purposely trying to lurk, make their lurking obvious, which then generated discussion. Infact, I might re-implement this system again for my large game...