Calling All Mafia Players

[Subotan]

This is probably more apt in the frontroom, but I figured I'd get a better response in here.

I'm slowly trawling through the creation of the roles of my mafia game (See sig), but I need a third party with experience in hosting mafia games to take a look over it. I need to see if it's both balanced, and if the feasibility and fairness of some of the roles would not impede the fun of the game, and the same with certain game mechanics. Not a huge in depth analysis of the game or anything, but just an experienced eye who would be able to give me some advice on my first mafia game (That happens to be a huge one, although I'll probably run a small one prior to that) However, I obviously want someone who will not be playing it in the summer, as that would spoil it a bit.

Thanks in advance. Should any of you be kind/stupid enough to take up this offer, I will show you some concept art for the banner made by our very own splitpersonality.

[pevergreen]

Happy to do it, if you don't mind the potential loss of me as a player.

[Thermal]

I'm sure Pevergreen has wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more experience than me, however I would love to get an insight of the game too (and will abstain from signing up) Besides, I have at least hosted a few successful game.... and a few (many) less successful...

[Double A]

Oh come on, you humble yourself, Medieval 2 mafia was brilliant!

[Thermal]

Oh come on, you humble yourself, Medieval 2 mafia was brilliant!

ATPG finished it though (plus it was horribly unbalanced), I haven't the staying power


Anyway, shush ,this is subotan's thread, (but thanks all the same)

[TinCow]

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?

[Thermal]

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?

Yes, would be a good sticky to guide people hosting a game too.

[Double A]

That would be a great resource for us to have... I still don't have half a clue how to balance games.

[pevergreen]

It gets more complicated when you deviate from the normal roles.

Work through your game. Simulate it on paper from your hopeful number of players.

Each of mine, I expected to come down to only a few people left. Inishmore did, as did The Riftwar.

When you introduce things like Lucifer in Netherworld 1 or Loki in Midgard 1, it becomes harder to predict.

I go through and when I think my game is balanced, I ask one other player I respect for their opinion.

[Beskar]

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...

[pevergreen]

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...

I fully support almost all of this.

I refused entry, and would have refused entry to quite a few players (they didnt attempt to sign up) to a player who I knew would end up not even logging in after a few days. He pleaded and promised he would, but two days after that, he hasn't been back since.

Write ups - Need to be done on time. I have no skill in creative writing, but I still attempt them. They always look cooler in my head though

Bog standard townies are boring to play for many people. I like to think that everyone enjoyed themselves, as everyone had a role. Of course, I had the full backstory of 9 books, but details.

[Beskar]

Bog standard townies are boring to play for many people. I like to think that everyone enjoyed themselves, as everyone had a role. Of course, I had the full backstory of 9 books, but details.

I know from experience, giving everyone a role doesn't mean they will contribute more either. Even had some one whine saying their ability was rubbish, when it wasn't (and the actions of others with the same/similar ability showed this)

[pevergreen]

You can't make everyone happy.

If you could, I'd be the same role I was in Fimbulwinter, cannalbalistc rune carver. Serial killer and leave messages for the town making them think i'm a detective.

[Beefy187]

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?

I'll give it a shot.

1) Found few topics on Mafiascums. But they were starting to discuss the meaning of balance it self so I gave up.
When I started playing here, I often heard that ideal ratio between mafia and town was 1:6 or 1:7. That seems to be the case with 12 player games (2 mafias, 1 Pro town, 1 kill each) where both mafia and town has a fair chance of winning. However in large games mafia seem to have larger ratio like 1:9, 1:10 or bigger and still pull off a good game. I guess it depends on number of pro towns and inactives.

2) A lot. Very rarely does each mafia families attempts to work together. They normally blow each other up early on, which favours the town. Though, if the town are to follow someone just because they contributed in lynching a mafia, they will suffer the consequences.

3) Role blockers can go either way. But in the games where each mafias can kill, Role Blockers can be both medic and a detective at the same time. So in that sense, they are quite overpowered. Jokers are overpowered too.

4) I enjoy the classical games every now and then. Simple games like Mafia series and God Father should be fun even for the towns.

5) I try not to give the important roles to player I don't know that well. Getting roles and getting wogged just ruins the game. As for preventing inactives, I guess smaller number of players and a interesting storyline/write up should provoke activity.

[pevergreen]

Jokers are overpowered too.

Jokers don't deserve to exist. Its simply too easy to get yourself lynched. Maybe if you say that they have to be lynched with at least x number of votes, on y day, including at least z of *small list of players*

[Askthepizzaguy]

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?

I am VERY interested in such a discussion.

Dozens of game hosts have come to me asking for my assistance in balancing their games, because I have some experience with creating and designing games that seem to be balanced enough.

1) What's the ideal mafioso to town ratio?

1) This is largely dependent on what abilities the mafia have, how large the game is, what abilities the townies have, and how many different factions there are. However, 4 mafiosi seems to be the maximum number of mafia in a vanilla game with up to 60 players, because that is a rather large advantage when it comes to voting. You'd need to win any vote by at least 5, probably 6-7 votes just to make sure that you even have a shot at lynching a scum, at least until a mafioso dies. 5 or more scums on one team versus a vanilla town of any size is still greatly advantageous to the mafia IMO, due to the teamwork versus uninformed majority. 3 scums can successfully sneak through most of a large game, 4 is plenty.

The best answer here is that you'd have to define what the intended game is, before there is a guideline response. 1 family, 2 separate mafia families, large, small, or huge game... etc. Too many potential combos for there to be an easy guideline.

2) How do multiple mafia families and/or independent roles impact game balance?

2. If the mafia is overpowered when their rivals are defeated early, the game isn't balanced. Otherwise, I've had a game (Treehouse of Horror) where I successfully balanced 4 mafia families of 2 players, the boss of all 4, which had its own agenda, and the Capo (his boss) with HIS own agenda, and of course, the serial killer. The basic rule is, opposing mafia of almost any typical size are balanced, because the mafia will hit each other. I'd still recommend having at least 3/4 players in the game being townie, so that the town always has a decent shot of winning.

3 scums versus 3 scums versus 30 townies is probably balanced, but the town has a good chance.

Special note must be taken of how many murders each family has, multiple murders per family almost requires pro-town roles.

3) What roles are overpowered/underpowered and overused/underused?

3. 100% effective Detective roles are incredibly cheap and overpowered to me. They are prone to meta-gaming. I just don't like the idea that you can nail a scumbag on round (two) any other way than by a random vote. Detective roles should be balanced by only scanning for night actions (at best) or having a risk of failure, something. IMO. These are purely for balancing an overwhelming mafia advantage, such as having 4 members (too many, IMO) in a small game. And it isn't always effective, so if the detective dies early in a game like that, game over.

Joker roles are decent tricks for mini games, but the general consensus is to leave them out of larger games, FOREVER.

Any pro-town role becomes 100-200 percent more powerful when private reveals are allowed. Then a detective, just one detective, could form a pro-town cabal of 4-5 proven townies before he dies even if he catches no mafia.

4) Does the entertainment benefit of giving all players something to do outweight the balancing difficulties that result?

4. Depends. I personally find a game where everyone has an action to be insane to balance, especially if private reveals are allowed. Remember that every roleblocker can be a PROVEN pro-town role, every vigilante can be a PROVEN pro-town role, and every defender can be a PROVEN pro-town role: They can clear themselves merely with their actions alone... whereas a detective needs to correctly identify a scumbag or whatever to be a proven role (and even then they might have just been lying and guessing.)

In my opinion, roleplaying can help cover up the "boringness" of basic townie roles. But honestly if people need pro-town roles before they give a darn about mafia games, then they will be lame townies anyway. Some players don't want to play unless they have a cool role. And besides, the value of being a basic townie is that you can pretend to not be a basic townie and try to get yourself murdered or lynched instead of a pro-town role, the "askthepizzaguy method" of basic townie play.

Entertainment should be derived from good host writeups, good story, game balance, and the fun of talking and accusing each other, and being surprised by the results.

5) What's the best way to minimize lack of participation/WoGs?

5. I personally don't invite players who habitually drop from games due to inactivity. If they sign up and play, that's fine, but I have a mini-blacklist for repeat offenders, especially when no reason is given (such as RL unforeseen difficulties, which is a perfectly fine excuse). Players can also choose to lynch the inactive players themselves to take care of the problem (also known as day one, day two, and day three lynches... wink wink wink).

There should be an interesting story and an interesting discussion. If you have those things, the only reason why people aren't voting is because they either are too busy to play the game (and will be killed off eventually, and rightly, by the WOG, and probably shouldn't have signed up) or because they are trying to hide, or have no opinion. Voting (at least an abstain) should be mandatory.

Ultimately it is the player's decision to sign up to a game they can't play, so theres nothing the host can do. However, you can encourage participation by making participation mandatory.

[TinCow]

I'll limit my inquires to the basic balance issue to start with. I'll start with the random assumption, based off of Beefy's post, that 1:9 is a good mafia:town ratio in a 30+ player game. So, in a 30 player game there will be 3 mafioso and 27 townies, with the mafia getting one kill per person. Assuming that is balanced, what then happens if we add on a single detective role? Does that skew the balance enough towards the town to require compensation on the mafia side? How much compensation? How about a doctor?

Essentially, I'd like to try and figure out a basic blueprint for a standard, balanced large game. Working from a balanced mafia and townie-only game with no roles, we could then 'weight' all other common roles (i.e. detective, doctor, serial killer, survivor, etc.) according to how much they shift the balance towards the town or the mafia. For an example, I will randomly assign the following values to roles, with + numbers benefiting the town and - numbers benefiting the mafia.

Detective +2
Doctor +1
Mafioso -4
Serial Killer -1

If we assume that the 'balanced' ideal has a starting value of 0, then adding in a single doctor would unbalance the game by 1 point in the town's favor. That could then be corrected by adding in a SK to restore the score to 0. If 2 detectives were added in, a bonus mafioso could be added to balance out the detectives.

Again, the above are just randomly assigned numbers with no basis in reality... I just made them to illustrate the system I'm thinking of. If we could arrive at some kind of consensus about the proper base mafia:town ratio, and the proper weighting of basic roles, that could provide a solid foundation for people to build their games off of. Of course it is pointless to try and account for every possible role and rule foible, but at least with a system like this people would know that if they added something on one side, they would need to then add something else back to the other side.

Thoughts?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

The majority of successful mafia games on the org have tons of roles, multiple factions, possibility for the townies to get promoted, or great writeups.

When doing GH style games, 2 mafia 28 townies 2 kills a night was pretty standard. But honestly, I don't know how well a game like that would do. They seem to be the exception rather than the rule. It's just hard when 2/3 of the people playing don't post or make a 1 post essentially random vote.

Which is ok by me, because crazy private intrigue and plotting make for the best games anyway.

[pevergreen]

One must also take into account if mafia do their own write ups, if hosts gives clues at death, if signatures are used for kills. I might sit down tonight and work on it. Beefy/ATPG/anyone else that uses MSN up for it?

[Renata]

It's wild that mafia:town rations here tend to be so low -- at another place I play, 1 in 4 is typical for games of 16-24 players, which is the norm. Occasionally 1 in 5 or lower if the games are at the upper end of that range or higher. Somehow it all works out just fine.

How is that possible? Balance is a weird thing.

(One thing is, these games have no free communication except among the mafia and sometimes masons. But if anything that seems to give the Mafia an edge, not the town.)

[pevergreen]

That would push the balance towards the mafia, but where you play elsewhere, is it the same group of people?

I've been playing mafia constantly for nearly 3 years, with a core of the same players.

Introduce such things as Holmes...

[Sasaki Kojiro]

It's wild that mafia:town rations here tend to be so low -- at another place I play, 1 in 4 is typical for games of 16-24 players, which is the norm. Occasionally 1 in 5 or lower if the games are at the upper end of that range or higher. Somehow it all works out just fine.

How is that possible? Balance is a weird thing.

(One thing is, these games have no free communication except among the mafia and sometimes masons. But if anything that seems to give the Mafia an edge, not the town.)

1:15 is the original standard. 24-48 hour days, mass lurkers, WoG.

[Renata]

Different people. Much longer days (about 120 hours on average). No WOGs, that's a point. Vigs are extremely common, as are serial killers, but then, they are here, too.

[Beefy187]

One must also take into account if mafia do their own write ups, if hosts gives clues at death, if signatures are used for kills. I might sit down tonight and work on it. Beefy/ATPG/anyone else that uses MSN up for it?

Sure. Tell me when to get on, otherwise I'm going to take a walk outside

[pevergreen]

3 hours 20 minutes from now? That may put it at like 6-7pm your time though.

[Beefy187]

That would be 3: 15 pm for me. Sure thing

[pevergreen]

What?

Aren't you ahead of me in the time zones?

Turns out no. Hour behind me.

[GeneralHankerchief]

In terms of balancing, I don't really have a magic formula. The basis for Mafia I was one RL game I had played several years before, in which there were 60-odd players and 4 mafiosi, four kills per night regardless of the number of scum left alive. After Mafia I got 26 players, I realized that keeping the 4 scum/4 kills number intact would be suicide so I cut it down to two. That seemed to work well so I followed it for future installments. Even as the player count went up to 39, it always seemed to come down to the last round, so I never bothered to mess with a good thing.

Silver Rusher's Godfather series, which I borrowed to host Godfather 3, was based off my system but added an extra mafioso in the form of a Godfather. However, he balanced this by kills being limited depending on the number of grunts alive and the fact that a lynch of the Godfather automatically ended the game.

Pirate Ship Mafia I spent a long time balancing, and while the results may say I still need more work, I maintain that was mostly thanks to the Horsemen's freakish luck, so we'll operate on the assumption that it was fairly balanced. Generally I just went by intuition there, basing most decisions from my observations with the Capo series (remove some mafia paranoia by making recruitment forced/automatic, nerf the protection groups by only allowing them one successful block per night, etc).

Generally, the advice I give to players asking for balancing help is if you're not sure which way to swing, usually err on the side of less potential kills. A tense 3-round endgame is better and more dramatic than there being five kills a night.

[pevergreen]

Generally, the advice I give to players asking for balancing help is if you're not sure which way to swing, usually err on the side of less potential kills. A tense 3-round endgame is better and more dramatic than there being five kills a night.

True.

In my build for Riftwar, I had 45 players, and if somehow everyone with a kill ability used it, there would have been i think 10 kills.

But most were delayed. Delayed serial killers, or sleeping mafia families are a great thing. It adds tension and scares the town as well

[GeneralHankerchief]

In response to two of TinCow's points, which I don't think have been fully addressed yet:

3) What roles are overpowered/underpowered and overused/underused?

Detectives, especially when you multiply them. Luckily, there seems to be a trend of removing them from games or making their investigations take more time to complete (see deep investigations in Capo, my tiered system from Omerta and Pirate Ship). I know khaan hates the role. Mafia IX will not have a Detective.

Finally, if there is an overpowered role, such as YLC's in Netherworld II or the Frenchman in Pirate Ship, compensate by making his objective more difficult. This usually works better in bigger games (Huge or a large game with 35-40 players and up), where said overpowered role also has to slog through more townie lynches. Attrition and general fatigue definitely becomes a factor in the longest games.

4) Does the entertainment benefit of giving all players something to do outweight the balancing difficulties that result?

From my experience with playing and hosting games over the years, this boils down to a simple formula, ignoring the balancing aspect for a minute:

- Multi-role, elaborate games: More fun for players while alive, much less so when dead
- Classic, vanilla-like games: Less fun for players while alive (unless getting a role), only a minor dropoff in fun once dead

A big part of what makes the Mafia series and Godfather 3 (and GF2, for that matter) memorable is the high participation rate of dead players. They can still pull for their team and heavily influence things in the thread with their arguments. I don't really need to give examples of this as you've all seen it. Whereas in the more elaborate games, sure you have a cool role, but once you're dead, you're pretty much out of the game. Gone is your ability to successfully argue in the thread since so much of the lynches there are based on the results of private discussions which you are no longer privy to.

So in the end, the more elaborate games are higher risk/higher reward when it comes to player satisfaction whereas the vanilla games are a safer option. This is assuming all other things are equal when it comes to balancing and host effort, etc, although the vanilla games are more likely to be better-balanced.