Okay, post-game brown townysis.
My opinion on this game went through several phases. At first, I thought it was going to turn out to be a very interesting game. Then, I thought it had been somewhat crippled by bad rules planning, or too-swift voting. Then, I thought it was a genius stroke by the innocents and a brilliant collaboration. Then, I was forced to regress to thinking it was too-swift voting.
While many of you seem to be familiar with the game, I think that this actually worked against you a bit, because Mafia can be a very different beast depending on minor changes to some very specific rules.
Specifically, the Hammer Rule.
In a game without the Hammer Rule, people vote more or less willy-nilly. There's a lot of back-and-forth, random voting, etc. Game usually starts with day, and votes form into big bandwagons, which people later brown townyze to try to form more bandwagons on people who try to bandwagon. It's a whole mess, and it's very fun, while often not requiring a whole lot of commitment for games that can go on a while.
But with the Hammer Rule...
Well, let me put it this way. Let's imagine childofdarkness had voted any other person besides Gojira. Let's suppose he voted Charles.
Now let's suppose Gojira and Resonte were both watching the thread closely at that time...
Gojira votes Charles. Resonte votes Charles. Three votes on Charles. 50%.
Charles dies.
That day was MILO. (4 innos, 2 mafia.) Mislynch and lose.
Now there's 3 innos left, 2 mafia. Mafia kills a player. Mafia wins.
Yeah.
A single random vote, misplaced on that day, could end the game. That's what the Hammer Rule means.
So in a game with the Hammer Rule, people don't vote. They think. They use Finger of Suspicion or something like that to indicate people they're suspicious of, and they debate a lot about who they're suspicious of, and they only vote when they mean to kill someone.
This makes the game a big festival of logic, a grand game of persuasion, etc, while still allowing people to end days quickly if there's no question as to what people want. Games usually start with night so that players can draw conclusions based on how the night went, rather than having to vote randomly. It's a very different style of game. Some places it works well, other places it's much better to forego the hammer rule and get a better game.
So, yeah. Idunno. Maybe next game, we should remove the hammer rule and the no-edit rule and go for a good, long game with lots of voting. Or maybe now that we're familiar with the hammer rule, we can run hammer-rule games with a bit more safety.
Most importantly, though, we learned that there's a lot of interest for this! So, next time, we could maybe do a 12-player or 16-player game and get a bunch of power-roles (roles with special abilities) and less LYLO/MILO. That oughta be great. Watch out for it.
