Casilu's game is in lynch-or-lose, so here come sign-ups!

I will happily yield to Jack or Xiran if they show up, but I haven't seen either in a long time. Barring that, this thread serves two purposes. One, if you want to play, say so. Two, regardless of whether you want to play or just enjoy reading the games as they go, feel free to vote in the poll for what sort of game you'd like to see run.

Semi-open refers to a game where the total number of each role is announced up front. These games are considered "easy" (in the sense that one can try to work out what happened every night without huge surprises) and are frequently run themeless and small. An example would be MafiaScum's Newbie Game.

Themed vanilla and power heavy both refer to a game with an unknown setup based around some thematic element. Themed vanilla would have a "normal" power level, whereas power heavy would be the sort of tenuously balanced and nearly impossible to play skillfully games that've become popular on Lusternia's forums. (Balance, shmalance. Having a power is more fun than being a vanilla for most, especially if you're bad.)

Smalltown is a fully open setup where you're allowed to pick your role. We've run one here on these forums if someone wants to grab the link for it. Otherwise, you can read more here. My vote's going here.

Experimental refers to a game with some sort of novel mechanic not normally found in games of Mafia. The unpredictability can be fun, but no promises that it actually turns out well! Bali's Quest games or the Sonic the Hedgehog game (Silf's?) are fair examples of this.


A note on sign-ups:

I don't know how many spots we'll be filling right now, since that depends partly on what you all pick. I also won't be doing first-come, first-served sign-ups. Placement will be pseudorandom: if you have a wicked history of lurking that spans several games, I'll take others before you. I certainly won't unconditionally bar anyone from playing, though. If we need players, I'll take anyone and everyone. However, in the interest of full disclosure, that's what'll happen if there're more people who want to play than I can reasonably mod.

The game won't start until Casilu's ends, and no sooner than 48 hours from this post.

Casilu's game has ended.

Also, I'm in.

EDIT: And we have a working poll.

Go smalltown!

I wanna be a lab rat!

Make something up! Doesn't matter what, so long as I can play again.

In!

In for whatever!

Shiri made me vote.

I have never done one of these, have no idea how to play, and am not a team player. When I was six I got in more fights than most people do throughout middleschool and highschool combined. My favorite color is whatever variation of blue, and I think that most corporations and government offices are run by firm policies of armchair philosophy. Sign me up.

Oh, and let's vote like we did in 2008. This word is aesthetically pleasing..!

In. SMALLTOWN!

In! I don't even know what those mean! I shall look it up!

Go Smalltown!

In for the experimental game.

I'd give it a shot.

I'll go again

I'm in. I'd do smalltown if it was more balanced. (meaning, all the roles have some benefit but don't make either side too strong if they have all the "right" roles) Having the doctor randomly be the mafia is not a good thing.

I don't think the doctor being mafia is that threatening. Last time the reason the scum won wasn't anything to do with the fact the doctor was scum per se - rather, it wasn't his powers, it was just that the remainder of the town was bad and ran in circles for days and got misled. Some roles are always going to be awkward if the town doesn't get them.

If the investigator or the doctor is scum, it's highly likely the scum will win. What I'm suggesting is that all the roles are things like watcher, or redirector, or block/protect(prison)... things which arn't so cut and dry helpfull or harmfull to either side.

edit: Just like how in the shogun game, the winning side had the best combo of power roles.

I'm not so sure investigator is even THAT useful to scum. You have to be constantly aware that the investigator -could- be scum so when they clear people as innocent it may or may not be meaningless depending on their track record in the thread for behaviour. And since an investigator in a smalltown game can only clear alignment the power isn't actually that useful to the scum - and the town can live without it if they're not really bad. Overreliance on power roles like investigators is an emergent property of the quality of games we have here, not a core principle of mafia.

Doctor is similar. You can't rely on the doctor to, you know, work, so you play around that. If you figure it out in a given game there are even ways to bluff and use it to your advantage. And being protected from the SK isn't really a gamebreaking scenario for the scum. Likewise, the doctor isn't a gamebreaking advantage for the town at the best of times, although the knowledge there is one can let an investigator come out for a while. Another issue here is that since the scum can have the investigator and as such it's considerably harder to confirm people, the doctor protecting the investigator might be a waste of time anyway.

Basically, it nullifies the whole mod-guessing thing we have going on around here because the setup is a known quantity and there aren't going to be any annoying tricks coming. It'd be a lot harder to break it than just assigning doctor or investigator to scum.

The shogun game was more like some really awkward game theory experiment than even the weirder mafia we have around here (except lazy mod)...they're not really comparable.

I'll join

Actually, in the shogun game, we won because I was the nightvig and used my vigging quite effectively. The Shogun had by far the worst power of them all.

Basically, my point is, it ain't all about the power. More importantly than anything is how you use it. Of course that's also thrown out of whack if you have a random element but that's for something else entirely.