I like the idea of asking about mechanics and roles in detail but a host's decline to respond right should be sacred. If I am hosting a mafia game I simply cannot see myself doing anything but that. I mean, never say never, but really close to saying never.

Jokers can definitely be fun in the right situation. In Neverwinter we got screwed by a Joker, twice, but it was a very fun ending. I agree in large games or even medium size games they are most likely going to be annoying and not fun, but fun is very relative; for me, vanilla townie is simply not a fun role anymore. In small/mini games I would actually like to see more jokers around.

I don't see the perfect investigator ever going away though lessening it is a good idea and I think has occurred here. Every game with a perfect investigator is too much IMO. It is annoying to get metagamed and scanned early a lot but I guess you just have to take it in stride. But perfect investigators in some games are simply a good fit.

Quote Originally Posted by TinCow
Death has a finality about it in mafia games that is comforting to the players. Whether you're townie or scum, you can rest at ease knowing that if you manage to get that certain player lynched or killed, their ability to thwart your plans will be reduced to frantically trying to convince other people to do what they can no longer do. Sometimes, though, some roles retain the ability to do night actions (or even vote!) after they are dead. I do not like this at all. Dead players are immune from all actions, they cannot be blocked, cannot be killed, etc., so they are essentially invulnerable and will remain a thorn in the side of the opposing side for the rest of the game, regardless of how much effort the town/mafia spent on disposing of them in the first place. Being dead should remove a person's abilities to do anything except speak.

...

A final note on dead speech: I wish more hosts would give a lot more thought to their rules on private conversation. I think a lot of game balance issues occur because roles that were conceived of for use in vanilla mafia games (which inherently have no PMing) are used in games that actively encourage private discussion. The balance of a game setup can shift dramatically depending on how much information players are allowed to share privately. In practice, I feel like allowing private conversation, but limiting the content, can be confusing and turns some players into rules lawyers who try and figure out how to stay within the letter of the rules while still sharing information in self-serving manners. I am personally guilty of this. I think it is best to either let everything be fair game, particularly role PMs, or to completely ban conversation outside the public thread. This is particularly true for dead players. With the exception of dead mafioso, who I think should be able to continue private discussions with their living teammates, I think it is generally a very bad idea to allow dead players to communicate anywhere except in the public thread. It can wreck game balance for the same reason that dead abilities can: the players are invulnerable to repercussions. If you allow dead players to organize group efforts, convey investigation results (even if the actual PMs can't be quoted), etc., you are giving players the ability to engage in positive activities to disrupt their enemies, without their enemies having any ability to stop them in any way.

Game balance means just that: balance. If you are adding in a role or ability that the opposing side cannot counter, then the role or ability is unbalanced. It is not enough to be satisfied with a setup where a role or ability is capable of being countered if X, Y, and Z happens, because that still means that the role cannot be countered if those things do not happen. When it comes down to it, the town should always retain the ability to win if they vote for the right people and the mafia should always retain the ability to win if they can just avoid getting lynched. The whole point of mafia is the lynch phase. These games exist for the day phase voting first and foremost, and I'd like to see some focus put back on the day instead of the night.
This is the question that bothered me the most when I hosted. Eventually I decided to let a dead player act like a living player in almost every respect except a vote but I wasn't satisfied with that option.

Ideally, I would put a complete gag on a dead player. Can't post, PM, do anything related to the game once he/she is gone. This makes the most sense from a gameplay/storytelling perspective. Resurrection or speaking with the dead roles would really have a place in the game then too.

However, this can definitely screw over the experience for a lot of the players in the game, especially those invested deeply in it. Also it opens a very obvious strategy for mafia to kill active players.

The usual letting people talk in thread but nowhere else and not being allowed to reveal anything new post-mortem seems like the best way to go for compromise but unfortunately it is really hard to get this to work without something being broken. I mean you don't really know if someone if PMing or not anyway. But that issue aside, I have seen time and time again where dead people walk or over completely cross the line in terms of divulging information. And it's not really their fault. If you've ever been in the position of knowing something but dying before it is really hard to keep your mouth shut and things leak out inadvertently. I usually just shut up once dead in games but by doing that I quickly lose interest in the game and we're back at the starting point.

The most elegant solution to this problem I have seen was in YLC's Whispers of the Night with the ghost town with a minor collective ability (and also the limitation of being infiltrated/affected by the various factions in the game). But that system was very specific to the mechanics of that game and it also violates the death should have a finality thing...