Game Start
Mafia:
Chaotix and
Subotan
It felt a little weird again hosting Mafia after all this time. For once, I didn’t have to look to other games for inspiration or rules clarifications. The game I was hosting was truly mine. And, like riding a bike for the first time after a long, cold, dark winter, it felt good.
Still though, too much time had passed since Mafia VIII to be entirely the same. The Gameroom had evolved; maybe it matured, maybe not, but it definitely evolved. The players’ connection to the First Golden Age of Mafia, late 2006 to early 2007 (the second one being Spring to Fall of 2009), was all but gone. My primary goal for this game was to provide all of the new blood a link to the past, to see the game played in its purest form. Hopefully, this would entail the formulas that I had been extraordinarily lucky with in the past: Excellent mafiosi and a slow buildup of action leading up to a truly dramatic endgame.
As far as the first part of the formula, random.org served me well.
Chaotix had been a Gameroom mainstay for a while now and was a solid, consistent player.
Subotan was a bit newer, bursting onto the scene as one of the Four Horsemen in Pirate Ship Mafia and showing a lot of promise in general. He was using that experience to create a game of his own (which I eagerly look forward to taking part) in June, but for now he would have to use an entirely skill set to get through this one unscathed.
As for the other players, I noted with pleasure that a lot of old and new friends had signed up. Especially pleasing were the additions of
Kagemusha and
Crazed Rabbit, the only two Orgahs to take part in every single Mafia game and, perhaps coincidentally, the only two to survive and win as mafiosi. All in all, we had 34 players, which I consider an accomplishment considering this game took place alongside the mammoth that was CR’s The Shadow Fort.
After I sent my customary PM to the mafia (as well as one to the townies, which prompted a PM from an unsuspecting
Reenk Roink that said he had gotten his hopes up for nothing since I never used to send townie PMs
) I waited for the mafia to send in their kills and we were ready to go.
Day 1
Subotan kills
Crazed Rabbit
Chaotix “kills”
Andres
The game stumbled out of the gate a bit when I received a PM from
spL1tp3r50naL1ty informing me that a nasty storm had knocked the power out of Chaotix’s house and that he wasn’t sure when he’d get it back. Cursing to myself, I had flashbacks to khaan’s sudden disappearance in Mafia VIII and my mind was already racing, wondering what to do in the case of me needing to WoG Chaotix so early in the game. However, the worrying was all for naught. Chaotix PM’d me during the round saying he was back and Subotan was able to fill in nicely before anybody got suspicious about why I was late with the first kills.
All in all, Subotan’s targets for the round were pretty high-profile, though his reasoning for taking CR out was to give him more time to host Shadow Fort. The gamble paid off, as neither victim was very active during the game.
A subplot of this game was the new Frontroom Chief of Police’s baptism by fire, of sorts. The old Frontroom mod
Beirut had filled the NPC role for the previous eight games in the series but hung up his robes sometime after Mafia VIII had concluded. After I had obtained permission from
Lemur to take up Beirut’s old mantle, I wrote what I hoped was a nice little homage/transition scene in the traditional space after the kills.
Once the actual round started,
Csargo got things going in high fashion by lodging his standard
Sasaki vote, the first of many that Sasaki would receive in this game (but never enough to actually lynch him). However, one post later,
Yaseikhaan began a ridiculous bandwagon on
Diamondeye that quickly picked up steam probably because it was a) Round 1, and b) the most forceful opinion anyone had lodged in the entire round, even though, in typical khaan style, there was absolutely no reasoning.
In other votes, more were thrown around in several directions, as per standard, and Reenk brought back an old favorite: The courteous abstention. There was also a small backlash against khaan, and Renata would pick up a lot of votes near the end once Diamondeye logged on and defended himself against khaan’s weirdness. However, he ended up being one vote short.
Executed:
Diamondeye
Day 2
Chaotix kills
atheotes
Subotan kills
Double A
This round was an absolute dagger for the mafia that started off poorly for them and ended up worse. Chaotix’s kill of atheotes was an interesting choice, due to the popular conception that “atheotes is always mafia”. I personally had atheotes pegged as a midgame lynch myself. In addition, he used the classic “sniper kill” on atheotes, although that thing’s now been used so much that any WIFOM value is probably gone.
Things started ramping up in the second post after the round, where khaan’s daily bandwagon target was Subotan. Chaotix, probably wary that it was this exact strategy that had gotten Diamondeye the last round and that Subotan was now subject to the same fate, attacked khaan with this post:
Originally Posted by
Chaotix
Vote: khaan
We do NOT need another runaway bandwagon this round. Last time was forgivable since it was Day 1... but let's not continue that tradition longer than it needs to go.
I say, since there's absolutely nothing else to go on, we start voting by good old behavioral analysis. And I think we are due an explanation from our new eager bandwagon-starter, khaan. Pressure vote for now.
This post was in poor form for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was lodged very early on in the phase, before Chaotix had a chance to gauge town reaction to the continuance of khaan’s strategy. Second, it was far too serious for the still-goofy early game. Had Chaotix sat back and waited, he might have seen a more natural bandwagon on khaan emerge and thus a threat be removed (indeed, Sasaki had already voted for him one post prior, and the only vote on Subotan at that point was khaan’s own).
I believe that Chaotix became a victim of the classic “overly paranoid mafioso” disease that’s hit all of us from time to time (even me) where you tend to overreact to and overanalyze every perceived threat, real or not. He immediately got into trouble over use of his wording and it just went downhill from there, as his defense and general behavior was far too serious for that point in the game.
A final effort to save himself and switch the vote to Methos was not enough for the mafioso. Yes, Chaotix had spared his partner from the wrath of khaan, but at the cost of his own life. Subotan would now have to make Mafia history and fly solo for probably eight rounds in order to win the game. To put this feat into a bit of perspective, the only mafioso to ever survive more than
one round than his partner was Crazed Rabbit, and that was because he had decided to discard The Truth in order to win.
All in all, I think Lemur said it best during Chaotix’s lynch write-up:
”Should have kept his mouth shut.”
Executed:
Chaotix
Day 3
Subotan kills
Centurion1 and
Csargo
This entire round was khaan’s last hurrah. After two rounds of being the center of the action, people were finally tired of his antics and, without an odd, overly-serious backlash to distract them, the town was ready to silence him. khaan, for his part, couldn’t really care that much as his school, the University of Northern Iowa, had just delivered Kansas one of the biggest March Madness upsets of all time.
In other news, during this round a couple of allegations were pointed towards a couple different forum members apparently due to the content of the write-ups. However, they were all off, because I was writing every word in this game save for Subotan’s nightly weapon choices.
This round marked the transition from the goofy beginning game to the long slog of the midgame, where the lynches would be to whittle down the suspects list more than anything else. The transition from the midgame to the endgame varies from game to game, but I usually do it when the player list is at either 10 or in the single digits, in which case there would be three rounds left regardless of the outcome. Here, this would make the midgame last a whopping five rounds.
All things considered, the town’s lynch for this round was probably a good choice as they got to move on from endless khaan bandwagon drama. khaan was the runaway lynch this round, with Subotan jumping on the bandwagon for once to get revenge for Chaotix, and I got to flex a bit of creative muscle with probably my favorite lynch scene I’ve ever written.
Executed:
Yaseikhaan
Day 4
Subotan kills
Winston Hughes and
johnhughthom
With Winston’s death began the “door-to-door mafioso’s” string of kills framing
Askthepizzaguy. Interestingly enough, I didn’t originally see the ATPG connection until it was pointed out in the thread by ATPG himself. A quick PM conversation with Subotan said that he didn’t mean it that way either, but he would soon piggyback off all of the WIFOM and continue gunning for ATPG in the writeup right until the very end.
With the advent of the midgame, the lurkers began to be targeted, first up being
Sigurd and
Cultured Drizzt fan. General sentiment was that CDF had disappeared .Orgwide and wasn’t deliberately avoiding the game, therefore the town would leave CDF to his fate. Sigurd, however, was a different matter. After making the most blatant “I’m around, don’t WoG me” post I had ever seen:
Originally Posted by
Sigurd
vote: Beskar
bla bla bla bla bla...
Happy?
…the votes began to pile up, and thus Sigurd’s onetime “lurker victory” performance in Chicago Soirée from well over a year ago was invoked yet again. Sigurd, beyond fed up with catch-all excuse to lynch him, took umbrage to this and carefully explained why the “Soirée justification” was becoming tiresome (for future reference, he was mafia in a disproportionate amount of games in that time period and thus had to lurk in one of them, and it had also happened a grand total of one time and thus wasn’t fair to hang over his head for the rest of eternity), but it was really a doomed effort and everybody knew it.
Town doctrine in the midgame, especially early on in the midgame, is to get rid of the lurkers, and Sigurd was far and away the chief lurker of Mafia IX (exempting CDF). This was ultimately shown in the tallies, as Sigurd beat out the nonlurkers Sasaki and eventually
Ibn-Khaldun in a tiebreaker to get the chop.
Executed:
Sigurd
Day 5
Subotan kills
spL1tp3r50naL1ty and
White_eyes:D
I quite liked the kill I wrote up for White_eyes, which made me a bit disappointed when WE blasted it in the thread. As has been pointed out, the only thing the mafia did when sending me the kills was give me the final weapon to be used. Everything before that was totally at my discretion. Therefore, when some of the weapons used got really outlandish, I had to be a little bit creative to arrive at that final kill. The White_eyes kill was the greatest example of this.
Subotan informed me that WE would be devoured by a swarm of snapping turtles. Upon writing the kill, the first challenge that I had to overcome was that White_eyes would have to be first
put into a position to be devoured by the turtles, since turtles are not known to be the greatest of predators. I decided that this would be best met if WE had a paralyzing agent in his system at the time of the attack. Of course now, the next challenge was the origin of that paralyzing agent. After a bit of a thought, the origin story would be that White_eyes had to call in a doctor or someone he trusted because he had a weird disease (I picked Dutch elm disease for personal reasons). Then of course, I had to think up a reason why White_eyes would have that disease in the first place, and thus came the backstory of the mafioso secretly injecting him with it in a prior voting session. All in all, from snapping turtles, I worked backward, got all the details to fit in nicely, and came up with a (mostly) satisfying kill.
(As a side note: It’s interesting to note the Gameroom’s evolution when it comes to analysis of the kill write-ups. If this were in years past, I’m sure the town would have been hung up on Pancuronium, trying to figure out who among them would have a knowledge of medical drugs. Better for the players in the long run, perhaps, but far less amusing from a host’s perspective.)
In terms of the actual in-game events from the round, it was the standard midpoint bad lynch. Votes were really thrown around haphazardly; ATPG had a minor bandwagon going on him in what was probably the mafia’s high-water mark in their repeated attempts to frame him.
Methos got a couple of votes, prophesying his fate later on in the game, and Sasaki’s attack on [B]Secura[B]’s lack of commitment to voting garnered her some suspicion as well. Subotan, exhibiting his game’s trademark of avoiding bandwagons like the plague, went the other way and voted Reenk. Finally, Subotan himself gained two votes from the bloc of Sasaki and TinCow.
However, the round’s “winner” was shlin28, who was executed with a whopping three votes, one of them being his own. In an interesting bit of trivia, shlin was also lynched around this point in the game in Godfather with a similar lack of reasoning.
Executed:
shlin28
Day 6
Subotan “kills”
Secura and
Beskar
The architect of these two kills was actually Chaotix, stepping in for a temporarily AWOL Subotan. Subotan later returned and approved of the kills and their methods however, so unlike in Mafia VIII there won’t be endless speculation of how things would have turned out if Subotan himself was around. In any case, I was glad Chaotix was still helping his team out so long after his own demise.
This round was also the first appearance of the mad cow Bessie, which is probably one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever written and also one of the things I’m most proud of in this game. Bessie would provide endless amusement for me after I realized the door-to-door killer would continue killing with only pizza-related items.
The early target of the round was
Kagemusha, who was once again going deep into the game, seemingly immune from death due to the Curse. ATPG and TinCow also received a lot of votes. All in all, we had a pretty factionalized round at this point in the game, probably due to backlash from shlin’s lynch the day before.
The factionalization gave way to the round’s main argument: Kage leading the backlash against the game’s “power trio” of Sasaki, TinCow, and ATPG voting in the same way. This particular argument had a lot of metagame aspects in it, which meant I was more naturally attracted to it and followed it more closely than I normally would have. Basically, Kage was chastising the three for apparently discouraging the rest of the town from thinking for itself, while ATPG was defending himself by saying that it was just a one-time strategy. In the end, both sides had their merits and I’ll refrain from further comment on the matter, though if you held a gun to my head I’d probably take Kage’s side.
The major side effect of the argument, though, was that Kage’s position convinced Sasaki that he was innocent and thus once again the old survivor lived to fight another day. Instead, the new wagon was directed at
pevergreen, under the basis that the kill choices would make a lot of sense if pever was a mafioso. The end result was a tie between pever and TinCow.
In one of the weirdest tiebreaker rounds I’ve ever been witness to (and trust me, I’ve seen some truly weird ones), both pever and TinCow voted for themselves instead of each other; pever because he thought that TinCow would be more helpful in the endgame than him, and TinCow because he hadn’t been paying much attention so far and that he wanted to focus his efforts on Shadow Fort. In the end though, pevergreen self-voted first, thus making his suicidal strategy make him appear innocent to the townies. TinCow’s self-vote was actually the effective one, then.
Executed:
TinCow
Day 7
Subotan kills
Joooray and
pevergreen
Subotan and Chaotix had apparently decided that pever’s strategy during the previous day’s tiebreaker period was much too risky and he had to be removed. I’m not sure if this was the proper move or not. We were still in the midgame after all and the town *thought* they could afford one more lynch before they really got serious with the suspects (although in actuality, they had two or three more lynches to spare, since everybody was operating under the assumption that they were still facing two mafiosi).
I haven’t really spoken much about Subotan’s performance in the thread to this point, which is probably a mark in Subotan’s favor. He was doing quite well in staying low, out of the limelight, while the more visible suspects were identified and either disposed of or spared. However, I was starting to think of the endgame implications of his strategy. Subotan’s biggest problem was precisely what had allowed him to cruise through six rounds so far: He didn’t put himself out there enough.
I’d most closely associate Subotan’s performance in this game with that of
Kommodus from way back in Mafia III. Kommodus, at that point, had only played one game on the .Org, but had already gained a reputation for being verbose and analytical, already well on his way to becoming the legendary figure of the Gameroom that he is. His problem in Mafia III, though, was that he didn’t hold true to the pattern. Yes, he was able to skate by until the endgame, but when the suspicions finally turned his way, he had no way of refuting them. As Kommodus himself later put it at the end of Godfather 1, perhaps the best way to survive the endgame is to put yourself at risk in the midgame:
Originally Posted by
Kommodus
My tactics depended on totally avoiding suspicion, and once accused I couldn't defend myself effectively. You, on the other hand, seemed to laugh in the face of multiple accusations, and successfully defended yourself each time.
It remained to be seen if Subotan would avoid Kommodus’s fate, but so far he was doing quite well (almost too well, considering the above). Once again he sailed through a round without coming under much of anything.
However, the same couldn’t be said for a lot of other people. The Power Triad officially split this round, with Sasaki gunning for the Subotan-like
woad&fangs and ATPG unleashing one of his trademark wall-of-text posts that implicated
Methos. I started having flashbacks to Godfather 3 for more than one reason. Interestingly enough, the only one to vote for Subotan was woad himself, precisely for the same reason he was under suspicion from Sasaki.
All in all, I’d attribute Methos’s WIFOM-heavy behavior to him being a relatively new player and thus not quite yet being fully attuned to Gameroom catechism of townie behavior (doubly so in vanilla games), but of course the rest of the townies didn’t pick up on this and strung him up. I wonder exactly how many new players we’ve lynched over the years for the same exact reasons.
Executed:
Methos
Day 8
Subotan kills
Beefy187 and
Captain Blackadder
With the deaths of Beefy and Blackadder, there were ten total players left. The endgame had finally arrived, and Subotan would have to survive three more lynches in order to secure his place in Mafia history. In his way were the following players:
- Reenk Roink, not quite as verbose as usual but still as contrarian as ever. I thought that Reenk would either be an early kill by the mafia or one of the final scapegoats, perhaps to shield Subotan since he had likeminded posting behavior.
- Psychonaut, also a bit low-profile but dependable, another potential “Subotan shield”. He had been going after Thermal a bit recently, but since he wasn’t as high-profile as Reenk, I had him marked down as a probable kill.
- Ibn-Khaldun, who, after surviving several early rounds of suspicion had fallen off the map, almost entirely. Contrary to Subotan, he spent a lot of time in bandwagons. I had him down as a probable kill.
- Renata, another early/midgame survivor, she had been a thoughtful poster, arguing with Kage a lot in the thread. For her non-willingness to simply follow the Gameroom heavyweights, I had her as lasting to the end.
- Thermal Mercury, the initial scapegoat of Day 8. Another thoughtful poster, he was the one most spooked by all of the ATPG frame attempts. As such, I had Subotan as leaving him alive long enough to lynch ATPG, and then disposing of him afterwards.
- woad&fangs, Sasaki’s bête noire through most of the latter half of the game. Right idea, wrong person, Sasaki. Subotan was probably going to leave woad alive longer than he should have been. If this were still the midgame, woad was probably the likely lynch target this round, but with the endgame everyone buckled down and took their suspicions elsewhere.
- Askthepizzaguy, probably the person Subotan was trying hardest to take down. He had gone into “analysis mode” the round before with a misguided lynch on Methos, but realized his mistake after the writeup. Subotan may or may not have successfully gotten him lynched, as it looked like Sasaki was in more danger than ATPG. If Subotan had ever gotten the chance to realize this in the endgame, ATPG would have been dead meat.
- Sasaki Kojiro, the man who had gotten a vote every single round, the man who was so dangerous in the endgame. Subotan was trying to get ATPG lynched but probably should have been focusing his efforts on Sasaki, who looked to be in more trouble. Had Subotan survived, I had marked Sasaki’s fate down as eventually getting lynched, perhaps in the final round, due to nothing more than sheer town paranoia.
- Kagemusha, the old survivor. Kage more than anyone else always seemed to make it to the endgame, being one of the final three survivors in Mafias VI and VIII, Crazed Rabbit’s final victim in Mafia VII, and of course the winner of Mafia I. Chaotix and Subotan were wary of killing him due to fear of their loss being attributed to the Curse that bears his name, and Kage once again seemed to rise to the occasion in the moments where he was most in danger, avoiding a sure lynch on Day 6. Kage would once again probably make it to the final round.
Subotan was probably hoping that, true to form, woad would be the day’s target, or barring that, the early bandwagon on Thermal (helped by some encouragement from the dead) would hold. Psychonaut also was under fire for perceived insecurity in one of his posts.
Of course, things went differently. Sasaki did his reread of the thread and, as usual, sniffed out the right suspect, shifting his focus towards Subotan. Subo’s low-key behavior finally came back to bite him, as he only stepped it up to be his usual serious, thoughtful self when he was briefly under fire early on in the game.
Subotan, posting from an iphone due to lack of internet at a relative’s house, gave the best defense that he could, but once again it was the defense itself that hurt him more than anything else (see: TevashSzat, Godfather 3, The), as his ever-growing list of attackers cited the fact that he seemed to be overly concerned about this one particular thread if he was taking the time to post long, coherent defenses from at iphone at a relative’s house.
All of a sudden, it happened again. Subotan went from a man on an easy cruise to in serious trouble, and it looked like I would go 2-for-11 in Large or Huge games in terms of having a mafia victory. Subotan’s nearest competitor was (of course) Sasaki, with one vote each being thrown in the direction of Thermal and ATPG. Even if both of those votes were to come off their respective targets and onto Sasaki, it still would have been a 5-5 tie, and it would have only been a matter of time anyway.
Due to an unexpected all-nighter I had to pull the night of the final writeup, I gave Subotan a 12-hour stay of execution, but in the end the result was the same. The mafia had gone down to defeat once again.
Executed:
Subotan
Game finish
I think the killer round for the Mafia was Day 2, even more so than Day 8. You have to expect to take casualties in the endgame unless you play a perfect game. Chaotix’s early downfall meant that Subotan had lost his wingman, but more important than that, he had lost his margin of error.
All in all, Mafia IX was very entertaining, even if the endgame drama didn’t live up to some of them from games past (if you’re interested, Mafias III, V, VI, and VIII especially are very good reads), and I feel as if I accomplished my mission of reintroducing vanilla mafia to a whole new generation of Gameroom players. Hopefully you’ll all still be around this fall when I host my next, non-vanilla game, and then in June of 2011 where we celebrate Mafia’s fifth anniversary with the sure-to-be epic
Mafia X.
Congratulations to
Chaotix and
Subotan for a game very well played, even if you guys came up a bit short at the end. As I’ve told you in the thread and via PM, it’s
hard to win as Mafia, and your effort was more than commendable. And of course, congrats to the townies of the game for once again saving the Frontroom.
So, as I officially bring Mafia IX to a close, I leave you all with this one thought:
Beware of rocket-propelled cows in the night.
Re: Mafia IX: Information and summary thread
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