The Thing Mafia [Concluded]

[TinCow]

Game Starts In:

Rules, partially (and shamelessly) ripped off of GH's Mafia classic format.

Introduction: The Thing Mafia is a spin-off of GH's classic Mafia series. It will take place in Antarctica, but will involve the usual Frontroom gang of misfits. This is a traditional mafia game with only one power role: Mafia. There are no serial killers, no vigilantes, no doctors, no third-party roles or extra victory conditions of any kind, and no Detective. It is simply Mafia vs. Town. There is, however, one very significant change in the mafia's killing ability.

Anonymous Accounts: All players in this game will be required to use Anonymous Accounts. These accounts were introduced as part of the Gameroom Anniversary, and have been used in The Copa Clash and Mafia X. When the game starts, every player's forum account will be linked to an Anonymous account, as per this post. While alive, you will make all posts in the game under this anonymous account. It takes a single mouse click to switch between your normal forum account and your anonymous account... you don't even have to log out/in or remember a password. Anonymous Accounts are mainly being used to allow for the implementation of the Doopleganger Kill mechanism, described below, with anonymity of the players only being a side-effect. Players are free to state, withhold, or lie about their real identities as they see fit. There will be no confirmation of a player's real identity when they are killed.

Roles:
The Thing (mafioso): (1)
The bad guy. The mafioso gets one kill per night, however the mafioso will have two options on how to kill:

• Option 1: Normal Kill. The mafioso kills a person and they die. Dead player's account is unlinked to their Anonymous account.
• Option 2: Doppleganger Kill. The mafioso kills a person, but takes their form. The dead player is unlinked from their Anonymous account, while the mafioso takes control of the dead player's Anonymous account and uses it as his own. The mafioso's old Anonymous account shows up as dead.

The town will not know which option was used. The night write-up will narrate a kill, but the identity of the person who died will not be part of the narration. Instead, at the end a body will be found. The townies will not know whether the body is from a new victim, or The Thing's old (now discarded) doppleganger body. The mafia have some say in how much/little they put in their kill descriptions. It is up to the town to figure out how much is their work and how much is mine.

The Frontroom Mafia (townies): (everyone else)
Are you a townie in this game? Don't fret, so is (mostly) everyone else. Unlike in some of the more role-heavy games though, the townies are absolutely integral to the success or the failure of the town in the game, since there are no power roles to do the heavy lifting. The townies will only be able to win this game if they come together and take some time out to seriously do some detective work. Being talkative will be especially important in this game, as the more you talk the harder it will be for The Thing to successfully impersonate you.

Communication: No players may communicate about the game anywhere except in the public thread. No PMs, no IRC, no IMing, no email, no carrier pigeon. This is to prevent players from establishing pre-generated code words so that other players will know if their account has been taken over. Find The Thing with good old fashioned scum-hunting, not cheap tricks.

Death: Once you are dead, you will be given a link to a Quicktopic forum where you can discuss the game with other dead players. Other than inside that Quicktopic, you are not allowed to talk about the game to anyone in any way until it is over. Sorry if this rule is frustrating, but it's the only way to make the doppleganger system work. Anyone who's account is taken over by The Thing will obviously know it because they will see their account continue making posts. So, all dead players must remain totally silent to keep the game fair.

Game procedure: The game will start with a night phase. Unfortunately, this means one person will die before they even get the chance to cast one vote. You can still help your fellow townies by talking as much as possible the first night, so that they have as much 'natural' dialog from you as possible to be able to compare later to see if you've been replaced. Voting procedure is in the usual format, i.e.:

Vote: GeneralHankerchief

If you wish to unvote, then please do so in the following manner:

Unvote: Ser Clegane
Vote: GeneralHankerchief

Voting abstain (you are present for the round and have no lynch preference) is allowed, but "No Lynch" is not. If you post in a round but do not vote, I count it as an "abstain". Additionally, after a certain amount of rounds, usually when I deem it to be endgame, "Abstain" will no longer be allowed, meaning you must vote to lynch someone. I will let you know in the thread once this threshold has been crossed.

WoGing may or may not be used, depending on how I feel when I wake up in the morning. ph33r

Joining the Game: You may join the game with the usual 'IN' post. However, using The Thing's special doppleganger kill ability will require players to impersonate other players. This can be very difficult. As such, players will have to OPT IN in order to be put into the group from which The Thing will be randomly chosen. If you want to volunteer to be The Thing, PM TinCow when you sign-up to say so. This will allow me to give that role to a person who thinks they can pull it off without letting everyone else know which players they need to be looking for more closely.

Sign-ups: (17/17) FULL
Montmorency
Populus Romanus
Death is yonder
ATPG
Mr. Stuka
Tratorix
GH
Reenk
B_Ray
TheLastDays
Ishmael
johnhughthom
Major Robert Dump
Captain Blackadder
issaikhaan
Arjos
classical_hero

Original First Post:

I was just watching the trailer for the remake of The Thing, and it occurred to me that the new Anonymous account system makes possible a new variation on the mafia game which might be fun. If you're not familiar with The Thing, the basic idea is that there's an alien which kills people, but it's essentially a shapeshifter and assumes their forms after they die, so no one knows who the killer is. This would be an interesting twist for a mafia game, which I think we can now pull off. It would work as follows:

All players use Anonymous accounts; no communicating in any manner outside the public thread. There is one (and only one) mafioso. Every night, the mafioso kills one person. However, there are two options about how the kill is handled, and the mafioso gets to choose which to use. The first option is that the kill occurs normally, and the player dies and everyone knows it when they find his body. The second option is that the player dies, but instead of their death becoming public knowledge, the mafioso takes over their Anonymous account and begins posting as them. The mafioso's old (abandoned) Anonymous account is then found dead in the player's place. Under no circumstances is any dead player allowed to talk about the game to anyone by any means until the game is over.

I'm interested to hear some commentary on this idea, as I think it could be really interesting, but it could also be very confusing and would depend heavily on strict obedience of the total silence upon death rule. Comments, concerns?

[edit]A follow-up thought on this. The success of the mafioso would depend very heavily on their ability to impersonate other players. This would require a far higher level of skill than most mafia games, as the mafioso would not only need to act innocent, they would need to act innocent in a totally different posting style. I can imagine some people who would want to play this game to hunt the mafioso, but who might not feel confident enough in their own abilities to actual play the mafioso. As such, it might be better to actually take volunteers for the role of mafioso instead of letting it be decided randomly from the entire set of players. Anyone could join, but in addition to joining they would also say whether they were willing to be the mafioso. The mafioso would then be chosen randomly from only the subset of volunteers.

[Double A]

Sweet jebus, that would be scary.

You know what's really scary? About an hour to half an hour ago, I stumbled upon The Thing on TV Tropes.

[TheLastDays]

I kinda like the idea although I think it could be very hard for the town...

Still it sounds like fun

[ELITEofWARMANGINGERYBREADMEN88]

Good idea. think it would cut out the bias to. For example, what if Player A the mafia hates Player B the townie? He might kill Player B despite that Player B may not really have any abilities or anything that could be used against him.

[TinCow]

Uh, well the bias would just be avoided because of the anonymous system, which has already been used twice and is not a new tool for this game. This is just an idea for a different way of using the anonymous accounts. I could see it working in larger games, but I think it would need a small game test first. As I'm imagining it, it would be a small game with player limit up to whatever the max is for small games. The only roles would be townies and the single mafioso. PMing might also be allowed, so long as no one deleted their PMs (so that the mafioso could read all the conversations if they took over the player's account). That might be a bit hard to police though, and most people don't PM in vanilla games anyway, so maybe just restricting it to public thread would be best.

More comments are welcome.

Sample banner:

[Tratorix]

Not sure how much work would be involved, but could the anonymous accounts names be temporarily changed? For a small game at least, it would be a neat touch to actually name the players after the characters from The Thing.

[TinCow]

I thought about that, but there's too few characters in the film to make that work anyway. I'd like to see this thing run with around 15 people. Since it's essentially just a vanilla mafia game with a twist, I was thinking of using the classic Frontroom setting anyway. I almost slapped a fedora on the monster guy in the banner when I made it, and I still might.

Basic background story idea: Following their victory in Mafia X, Kage and CR became immensely wealthy mafioso and founded a new crime empire in the Frontroom. They were given a job to smuggle some odd cargo back from an abandoned research station in Antarctica. They thought it would be a fun vacation, so they took their entire crew with them to Antarctica to help them get the job done. When they get there, the find the station torn to pieces and dead bodies everywhere. Yadda yadda yadda. This gives me an excuse to use the normal anonymous accounts, makes it a bit more mafia-y, and gives me a lot more opportunities to be amusing than I would get with a game that stuck to the film.

Yep, let's do the new banner:

[TinCow]

It is not possible to avoid a lynch. In the event of a tie, random.org will choose who dies. If no one votes for anyone, then all players are tied and will be included in the random.org list.

[[MAFIA] Nick]

Always, my theatrics are wasted. I hope Day 8 eill be resolved satisfactorily. :/

Vote: Frank

[[MAFIA] Frank]

I like the images XD
Reminds me of "I am weasel" lol

[[MAFIA] Vito]

Right, went back and did a reread. I no longer think it's Frank. If it is, then Reenk's pulling off a damn good fake and my hat's off to him.

Unvote: Frank
Vote: Luciano

DiY's timezone is radically different from Reenk's where I don't think he'd try to pull it off. This leaves Vinny and Luciano, and I still think Vinny is khaan unless Reenk pulled the switch last night.

Considering that right now I'm the only vote on Luciano, if there's not a switch to him by the time I go to bed, I'll most likely move my vote to Vinny.

[[MAFIA] Nick]

Notice that the other 3 guys are not voting, even though there are only 10.5 hours left in the phase. COME ON, YOU NIHILISTS

At least Luciano deigns to vote (usually). Vinny has not posted since the beginning. Convince me he isn't a liability.

Unvote, Vote: Vinny

[[MAFIA] Luciano]

Dobbiamo sbarazzarci di lurkers. vote:Vinny. Perché non è il suo nome Vincenzo? Questo è un nome proprio Italiano non, Vinny.