Mafia

This thread isn't about anything overly serious or anything, but it seems like the game is going to be delayed just a little bit longer. I figured I'd take this time to talk a little more about the game and just let everyone know that things are ready on my end to start and that it will start as soon as possible :).

Something I wanted to clarify is that this game will be a bit different than normal mafia games. Despite the slightly new mechanics, I spent a good amount of running through hypothetical scenarios to make sure things are balanced, and more time making sure things didn't end up needlessly confusing. I really wanted to get some use out of the NIFE-specific features and I think this will be an interesting way to do that :).



The Major Changes

First up, the town has power roles and townies, as usual. Each of these roles, however, will have a secondary role attached to it: Doctor or Patient. About half of the town will be doctors, and the rest will be patients. None of the mafia will be doctors. There will be one Active Doctor. The Active Doctor is a special role assigned randomly to a member of the Doctor group of players at the start of the game. If the Active Doctor is killed, a new Active Doctor will be randomly selected from among the rest of the living Doctors. The Active Doctor will be one of the most important roles in the game.

In this game, the Mafia will not make direct kills at night. Each night, the mafia will pick two targets that will be poisoned. When a player is poisoned, they will receive a status of "Poisoned" near their role. Any player that isn't cured of the poison the day after they are poisoned will die.

During the day or night round, the Active Doctor can choose to cure one person from the poison.

The players who are poisoned will not be publicly announced. It will be the responsibility of the poisoned players to announce that they were poisoned, and the responsibility of the town to determine if they're telling the truth. It will be the responsibility of the Active Doctor to determine which person to save, and ultimately, which will die.

Special Roles

Given the new mechanic of poisoning being the only way to be killed, I've added a few new roles to the game:

Caretaker (Doctor) - This role is basically like the doctor in all of our previous games. Each night, the Caretaker can visit one person. If that person is targeted to be poisoned, the poisoning will fail.

Lab Analyst (Doctor) - This role can be used once per round (Day or Night) to determine whether or not a person is poisoned. They'll get their results immediately.

Turncoat (Patient) - This roles starts off town-sided. Once they're poisoned, however, they'll become a Mafioso. Catch is, they're still poisoned, so they've still got that to worry about.

Public Killer - Once per game at any point--day or night--can choose to kill a player regardless of their protection status, without poison. Once the kill is made, the identity of the killer will be made known to the town. For desperate times!

There are still other roles present, but these are the noteworthy new roles.

In Summary

I'm hoping this will be a fun game despite some last minute major changes :). Again I apologize for not going into details during signups, but I was still unsure of how exactly I wanted to implement the NIFE features in a way that wasn't as overwhelming as the last game, but in a way that will still have a unique effect on the game. I think it should be pretty interesting with the whole idea of "deciding which person to save," and the need for players to self-report their poisoning. I have not yet fully decided on whether or not I will allow Out Of Game communication. I'm leaning toward leaving it off, but I'm going to consider the pros and cons of it in a game like this up until the game starts. If you guys have any input on this, feel free to say so! Or if you have any other concerns, post them here as well.

The game will hopefully start tonight. Maybe a bit later. It depends on when I can get access to NIFE related tools. I'll be sure to post updates on this.