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game 27 pregame discussion

Posted June 16, 2014 by MajorasMask9

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.

There are 35 Replies


Sounds like it's going to be pretty interesting. Looking forward to it.

June 16, 2014
Black Yoshi

Looks like you've put a lot of thought into this and it looks like it will be fun.

As for OOG. I think everyone knows my thoughts on that so I won't beat the a horse, but I will paddle it a little bit.

I just used OOG for the first time in the current Adventure Game and it worked great. That's because it was open to everyone in the group (humans) because it was the only way they could talk with out the Head Zombie seeing it.

The OOG in Mafia the past for the most part has been used to cheat, make deals and give an advantage to select players.

If and when you and set something up like is being used in Adventure as we speak, I would support it 100%.
But the way it's used in Mafia now.
Please do not allow it.

June 16, 2014
chiefsonny
 

{y}

Also, it says my role is Host. For the first time in forever... is there a reason for this.. (crs)

June 16, 2014
Apollo Justice

(aside from the obvious of being co-exec host)

June 16, 2014
Apollo Justice

Oh, I changed that after Xhin's game ended. I'll unset that :D. Since we're using NIFE, it doesn't really matter much for the next game anyway.

June 16, 2014
MajorasMask9

Looks like an interesting set up. Hope everything works as planned

June 16, 2014
Lightvayne

NIFE needs to somehow to used to facilitate OOG conversation into the confines of this forum, but I think the engine would be better suited for games like Adventure rather than Mafia. Seems to me like dual roles are being picked because they can now, which in turn, seems to deviate a little further from the traditional mafia role-sets. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because obviously this has never been done before, but I would say it adds a nice flavour to the game to make it different because I'm sure you've all played vanilla mafia to death. :)

Any plans to make a whisper dropdown for the main thread where you can tag/sneak visible to dead/spectators/host/source player/destination player?

June 16, 2014
LLight

Tomorrow. Something unexpectedly came up IRL today.

June 17, 2014
Xhin
Sky's the limit

Oh best of luck.

June 17, 2014
LLight

{roll}

June 18, 2014
Ghowilo

yo
is it too late to sign up?

June 18, 2014
Yeano

no dawg, we still got some spots {8D}

June 18, 2014
MajorasMask9

On a serious note, I'm pretty sure the game is going to be starting tomorrow. Definitely not tonight anyway :/.

June 18, 2014
MajorasMask9

{:(}

June 18, 2014
Ghowilo

Okay, did not see that coming.

June 18, 2014
Black Yoshi

Tick tock

June 18, 2014
`Roxas`

Still waiting on NIFE access before I can start. Last night Xhin said they should be ready today.

June 18, 2014
MajorasMask9

(suprised)

June 18, 2014
Ghowilo

hello can i play mafia

June 18, 2014
Apollo Justice



June 19, 2014
Ghowilo

jk jk

June 19, 2014
Ghowilo

No hay nada.

June 19, 2014
Ghowilo

Looks like it's not going to be ready tonight. Hopefully tomorrow??

June 19, 2014
MajorasMask9

????????????

June 19, 2014
`Roxas`

(hehe)(hehe)

June 19, 2014
`Roxas`

Tomorrow, tomorrow.....

June 19, 2014
Bubba

There's always tomorrow.
It's only a day away.

June 19, 2014
Xhin
Sky's the limit

Am I the only one who feels like this is Team Phoenix all over again?

June 19, 2014
Black Yoshi

It's the nature of development in general. I've gotten better at calculating ETA's at work because I only do it for small pieces of a project, and then I triple whatever time I think I can do it by and attach a weekend to it just in case.

For large projects it's a lot of guesswork because implementing one piece a different way than you thought can end up affecting the ETA's (and even the project goals!) of all the other pieces.

The difficulty with NIFE is that it's a framework for games, not just a single type of game. My goals are abstract and any new "oops this has to be in mafia" feature that comes up has to be broken down into abstract modular pieces and (hopefully!) fitted into the existing system.

With the control panels (which is what I've been working on), I built a framework for that as well so code can be recycled and new panels can be built effortlessly. So it's an abstract system that accesses an abstract system.

At this point though it's not difficult so much as just time consuming -- there's a lot of ground to cover, and any features I forgot about need to be reworked into the general plan. Mostly the issue is that I do this all day long at work and I've been low on sleep/relaxation this week, so I have to move carefully to prevent burnout and yet still get things accomplished.

June 19, 2014
Xhin
Sky's the limit

Hey Xhin, if I sit out the next game (not this one), could I get access to the NIFE code? I'm not going to change anything I just want to see what it's like and get a feel for it so *maybe* I can help out in the future.

June 19, 2014
Ghowilo

No one is allowed to play mafia right now.

June 20, 2014
LLight

Just to let you guys know, if the NIFE stuff isn't ready to use tonight, I'm going to consider hosting a vanilla game just to get things going again. If I do, it will start sometime tomorrow morning.

June 20, 2014
MajorasMask9

I still don't have access to NIFE. What I'm going to do is get a vanilla game worked out for later tonight, and if NIFE is finished before I get that started, I'll stick with the game I described in this thread.

Otherwise, I'll just use the vanilla game. Either way, we gonna mafia tonight :).

June 21, 2014
MajorasMask9

i love men

June 21, 2014
Hindenburg
Life's path is never straight.

Old knews, buddy...

Got word from Xhin, going to start a plain, boring, vanilla game soon. Threads should be up in an hour or two.

June 21, 2014
MajorasMask9

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