Mafia Game 23: The Dresden Files (Registration Open) - Edit 5
Before modification by Isaac at 20/07/2011 02:37:25 AM
Okay the game selected by a narrow margin was Dresden Files, which coordinates well with the new book for the series coming out Tuesday July 26th. For more information on the game check out these links... Dresden Files - wiki, Dresden Files - TV Tropes, and the TV show on Hulu which has all 12 episodes of the series, now canceled. We will be following the book series, not the TV show, but the flavor is sufficient and an extensive knowledge of the series is helpful but hardly mandatory.
The game will follow the traditional Day/Night cycle but in game Day's are roughly 2 week periods between Full Moons and New Moons with Nights simply being that night. Except for Day/Night 1, which will be slightly longer, we will be using 13 day long game Days and 48 hour game Nights as deadlines and of course Days end on a majority vote for lynch or no lynch.
I will be posting to some other boards to see if some new players are interested in joining, as well as putting up a new set of rules later today or early tomorrow, for now if you want to review them the Version 3.2 Rules are here and the eventual v. 4.0 rules are not expected to be substantively different, merely more eye-friendly with some additional links, appendices, and updated glossary. That will likely be up in the next 24 hours or so at which time this paragraph will obviously alter in content. I'd prefer to have that post up before I advertise for new players, but I did want to open registration sooner than later. No formal close date for reg yet, but it will be a minimum of 48 hours after I post up those new rules and recruitment posts. The game will begin very shortly after reg closes though for reasons described below.
In the mean time I did want to give a quick 'sneak-peak' as to the major 'new thing' for the game, and ramble on a bit, insofar as none of it would be meaningful to a new player you can expect this section and most of what follows to get removed when then the recruitment posts go up too so as to avoid needless confusion and complexity. Each of the games - except for the film noire/mafia themed one which was pretty much text-book simple heavy vanilla - featured one or more new things and Dresden Files is no exception. The 40k game for instance had customizable characters and the ability by anyone to purchase 'Wargear', and actually included a registration phase pre-game Coin Game where the 3 people who made it to the end got their remaining cash to buy off their list and optional Russian Roulette games in the middle of the main game where the winner got the gun and the loser got the bullet, and Untouchables included nightly 'Raids' by the cops (the townies) with variable results.
What's 'new' for this game is primarily in setup, which is much more random. Essentially I took just about every character I could find from major recurring characters to minor ones, plain vanilla mortal to minor demigod, and threw them on a 100-entry long list, some names repeating so that there aren't actually 100 characters for the game, just 100 possible rolls. Every player gets rolled on that table, with characters being scratched off as they are picked. Everyone is a named character from the book series. Once a character is selected they have a 'code' that determines which random list of roles they pick from, for instance John Johnson might have 6 possible roles - 1 - vanilla, 2 - vanilla, 3 - vanilla, 4 - mafia goon, 5 - cop, 6 - SK... and if someone else had already gotten cop and there was a limit on that role he'd reroll that 5. The big thing to remember is that with relatively few exceptions virtually everyone on the list has at least one townie vanilla option and one non-town option but will invariably be something that will makes sense in context to the game, though a basic knowledge of the series will help.
I have done several trial runs with it and all have come out reasonably balanced and ranged from role-light to role-heavy, none needed scrapping though because the nature of it is pretty random I will be eyeballing the slate and will toss it and redo it if it comes out unbalanced or particularly bizarre. Once the slate is generated I add on some flavor and window-dressing to make the randomness a tad more cohesive and then send you your roles. Making a slate takes about three minutes hence the early comment about quick turnover between reg closing and the game starting.
Obviously there's more but its not appropriate to go into pre-game and publicly, but that's the major 'new thing', and just about every role that doesn't set my teeth on edge, including some hybrid and cocktails, is on the list though it biases strongly to core roles. Officially this is to make setup highly unpredictable and to field test a setup generation system that can be used by mods that are new or in a rush or looking for a basic template to modify, unofficially it gives me an excuse to throw in lots of roles I've wanted to try - too many to realistically put in a game - without having to pick and leaving it to the roll of the dice, or my computers random number generator.
Please feel free to comment, compliment, criticize, chat, etc in the reg thread, I anticipate the game starting any time between Thursday and Saturday Evening, and the official rules to go up some time Monday or Tuesday. Please feel free when the recruitment posts go up to post encouragement, these will be on the CMB and games board and possibly the books board, hopefully we will get a decent number of new players, I am undecided still on exactly how substitution and modkill will work and how many new players we get will factor into that final decision, even one would be nice but if we grab 4 or 5 previous experience will likely incline me to use substitution at a minimum for anyone who jumps ship on day 1 by having early game deaths do a bodysnatch on a inactive player in limbo rather than an outright modkill.
That's it for now, I do not plan on any registration phase game but if someone wants to run something they are more than welcome to do so.
Players Registered - 7
Beetnemesis
Darth Katie
Fanatic-Templar
Fox and Ravens
Ranagrande
Stephen
Yunalesca
The game will follow the traditional Day/Night cycle but in game Day's are roughly 2 week periods between Full Moons and New Moons with Nights simply being that night. Except for Day/Night 1, which will be slightly longer, we will be using 13 day long game Days and 48 hour game Nights as deadlines and of course Days end on a majority vote for lynch or no lynch.
I will be posting to some other boards to see if some new players are interested in joining, as well as putting up a new set of rules later today or early tomorrow, for now if you want to review them the Version 3.2 Rules are here and the eventual v. 4.0 rules are not expected to be substantively different, merely more eye-friendly with some additional links, appendices, and updated glossary. That will likely be up in the next 24 hours or so at which time this paragraph will obviously alter in content. I'd prefer to have that post up before I advertise for new players, but I did want to open registration sooner than later. No formal close date for reg yet, but it will be a minimum of 48 hours after I post up those new rules and recruitment posts. The game will begin very shortly after reg closes though for reasons described below.
In the mean time I did want to give a quick 'sneak-peak' as to the major 'new thing' for the game, and ramble on a bit, insofar as none of it would be meaningful to a new player you can expect this section and most of what follows to get removed when then the recruitment posts go up too so as to avoid needless confusion and complexity. Each of the games - except for the film noire/mafia themed one which was pretty much text-book simple heavy vanilla - featured one or more new things and Dresden Files is no exception. The 40k game for instance had customizable characters and the ability by anyone to purchase 'Wargear', and actually included a registration phase pre-game Coin Game where the 3 people who made it to the end got their remaining cash to buy off their list and optional Russian Roulette games in the middle of the main game where the winner got the gun and the loser got the bullet, and Untouchables included nightly 'Raids' by the cops (the townies) with variable results.
What's 'new' for this game is primarily in setup, which is much more random. Essentially I took just about every character I could find from major recurring characters to minor ones, plain vanilla mortal to minor demigod, and threw them on a 100-entry long list, some names repeating so that there aren't actually 100 characters for the game, just 100 possible rolls. Every player gets rolled on that table, with characters being scratched off as they are picked. Everyone is a named character from the book series. Once a character is selected they have a 'code' that determines which random list of roles they pick from, for instance John Johnson might have 6 possible roles - 1 - vanilla, 2 - vanilla, 3 - vanilla, 4 - mafia goon, 5 - cop, 6 - SK... and if someone else had already gotten cop and there was a limit on that role he'd reroll that 5. The big thing to remember is that with relatively few exceptions virtually everyone on the list has at least one townie vanilla option and one non-town option but will invariably be something that will makes sense in context to the game, though a basic knowledge of the series will help.
I have done several trial runs with it and all have come out reasonably balanced and ranged from role-light to role-heavy, none needed scrapping though because the nature of it is pretty random I will be eyeballing the slate and will toss it and redo it if it comes out unbalanced or particularly bizarre. Once the slate is generated I add on some flavor and window-dressing to make the randomness a tad more cohesive and then send you your roles. Making a slate takes about three minutes hence the early comment about quick turnover between reg closing and the game starting.
Obviously there's more but its not appropriate to go into pre-game and publicly, but that's the major 'new thing', and just about every role that doesn't set my teeth on edge, including some hybrid and cocktails, is on the list though it biases strongly to core roles. Officially this is to make setup highly unpredictable and to field test a setup generation system that can be used by mods that are new or in a rush or looking for a basic template to modify, unofficially it gives me an excuse to throw in lots of roles I've wanted to try - too many to realistically put in a game - without having to pick and leaving it to the roll of the dice, or my computers random number generator.
Please feel free to comment, compliment, criticize, chat, etc in the reg thread, I anticipate the game starting any time between Thursday and Saturday Evening, and the official rules to go up some time Monday or Tuesday. Please feel free when the recruitment posts go up to post encouragement, these will be on the CMB and games board and possibly the books board, hopefully we will get a decent number of new players, I am undecided still on exactly how substitution and modkill will work and how many new players we get will factor into that final decision, even one would be nice but if we grab 4 or 5 previous experience will likely incline me to use substitution at a minimum for anyone who jumps ship on day 1 by having early game deaths do a bodysnatch on a inactive player in limbo rather than an outright modkill.
That's it for now, I do not plan on any registration phase game but if someone wants to run something they are more than welcome to do so.
Players Registered - 7
Beetnemesis
Darth Katie
Fanatic-Templar
Fox and Ravens
Ranagrande
Stephen
Yunalesca