Game Design

The First thing any Mod has to do is design the game, and it’s probably in your interest to start design before registration begins, this is the major reason why Mod’s are assigned in advance of the previous game ending. You never know until registration closes how many players you will have, and it has always been our unofficial policy to have no set number of players, even an upper bound on player numbers, so it is advisable to avoid games which are built around a set number of players.

Every game is expected to have a Theme, and by preference the theme should be announced when registration opens as it might draw new players. While bigger isn’t necessarily better, keeping a flow of new players into the Mafia game series helps ensure the game has both new blood and replacements for anyone who is skipping a game or ceased playing. The big thing to remember is a theme, whatever you select, is not a straightjacket for role design.

Fundamentally the most important decisions a Mod makes take place before the game begins, and the two primary goals are for a Fun and Fair game, everything else is basically secondary to achieving those two goals and most things a Mod does should be aimed with that in mind.

Themes
Themes generally breakdown into two groups. A mod might select something specific, like Lord of the Rings, and make roles for characters from it, or non-book characters with it merely as a flavor setting. Or they might merely select a genre or similar general theme. Players generally expect the theme and flavor to have in-game effect, like a Sherlock Holmes game would feature Sherlock as the Cop, Dr. Watson as the doc, and various criminals from the stories as bad guys. You will generally want to avoid throwing too much of a wrench in that, and if overall character-to-role matches are bordering on the random you may want to avoid themes that feature named characters. This does not mean Sherlock must be a cop and Moriarty must be a villain, but you should try for alternatives that ‘feel right’ for that character, or the character in regard to the overall plot, such as Moriarty as Miller, and one should avoid too many surprises of this sort, as the game fundamentally revolves around gathering information and extrapolating from it. We’ll discuss some example themes later.

Essentially, when picking a theme, the biggest question a Mod should ask is if the players will find the theme fun, running a game off a popular book series or genre as opposed to one you know well but most don’t is probably a better idea on the whole, but almost anything can work.

Balance
The biggest problem a Mod has is setting up a balanced game. In a straight town vs scum setup this means the town and scum factions should have a roughly equal chance at victory. When adding in an entirely complete third faction, they should also have an equal chance at victory, but lone wolves such as a SK really do not need an equal chance, but they need to have a decent chance, and you should generally ask yourself if they do before inserting them.

The accepted baseline game that is considered generally fair is a 12-person one, with 3 scum goons and 3 standard town roles plus six vanilla players. There’s a lot of variation in what those 3 roles could be the most common is cop, doc, and one extra role such as vig, roleblocker, bulletproof, or two masons. The game is still fairly balanced if the scum have one role, but keep in mind that scum roles generally are more powerful than the same role in town hands, the game is not still balanced, if its cop, doc, vig vs 3 goons by turning one of the goons into a roleblocker and giving the town a roleblocker, the town roleblocker is more likely to block town actions early on then scummers. Nor is the game balanced if you go from 12 players to 14 by giving each side one extra player. Generally speaking 3:1 is a good guideline for your town to scum ratio, and 2 roles for each scum role, but some roles are worth more than others, some have their value change based on how big the game is, and others on how many roles are in play.

Standard Roles: Variation in Power
We discuss this in greater detail in Role Variations, but for purposes of balance the thing to keep in mind is what tends to make a role more or less powerful based on Game Setup itself. For example, a doc is much more powerful in a game with numerous NK-capable characters, a paranoid gun owner is much more powerful in a game with many roles, as is the roleblocker, but the PGO and RBer can have that power boost occur in a way that hurts the town, where as the doc is not too likely to interfere with kills that are likely to help the town. A bulletproof character, on the other hand, is not too strong in the classic 1 NK per night setup, and much more so in a game with numerous NKs, they even strengthen the vigilante role by slightly decreasing the odds the vig will kill a townie. Questions to ask yourself are:

Is this role stronger or weaker than normal in my setup?

Does this role have any potential conflict with other roles?

You should always ask yourself, for each role, what happens if any of the other roles in the game interact with them at night, what if they both target the same player, or each other simultaneously, this happens fairly regularly.

Nudging
So we know the classic 12 player setup is pretty well balanced, and we have a number of fairly balanced examples below, but the fact of the matter is not only do most Mods like to add in something extra but most games won’t have 12 players and most pre-designed games will not have the number of players you envisioned. When player 13 registers, you now have an unbalanced game, not too unbalanced but just tossing them into the default setup as an extra vanilla will skew things slightly for the town. Similarly, just removing one vanilla if you only have 11 players will skew it the other way, and adding or subtracting a scummer will represent an even bigger skew. Adding a vanilla and giving the scum one extra single use NK or a RBer is fairly balanced, adding in a tracker isn’t. Adding in a third party, like a SK, is very hard to determine, but probably is, but a cult probably is not. A somewhat anti-town role can be, like a miller, a PGO though, while more likely to kill a townie and a roled townie at that, is also probably still fairly balanced because the reality is that a scummer is generally ‘more valuable’ than any regular town role.

A very loose method for checking balance is to use the Zero Total Method, or ZTM, treating townies as having some positive value and scummers as negative, adding them up and aiming for a value of around zero, plus or minus one or two, in this, you may want to assign values roughly along these lines:

1 Vanilla: +3
1 Goon: -11
Cop: +6
Doc: +6
Mason: +4
Miller: +1
Scum RBer: -15
Scum One-Shot NK: -14
Scum Godfather: -18

And so on, a scum one-shot kill basically adds the life of one vanilla to a normal goon, they may kill a role using it, but they may also die before they get to use it, or get blocked or docced or tracked using it, so it roughly evens out, and as odds of the NK nailing a role go up, the odds of them getting tripped up by a doccing or tracking or similar also rise. This won't always be the case, but when assigning a value to a given role using this sort of chart you want to consider things like that when assigning a value. You will probably be safe using this chart if you stick to thinking of roles as being worth 4, 5, 6, or 7 by contrasting them to the cop or doc, and by rating anti-town roles like Miller based on how much damage they can do. But this will only ever provide a loose check process.

A last note before we get into examples, although there is no official rule about randomly assigning players, this has generally been viewed as the best method, and a Mod should probably avoid the temptation to assign any player a specific role or alignment that ‘really fits them’.

As we move into examples, it should be noted that a Mod doesn’t need to pick themes in a vacuum, you will usually be selected to Mod around the middle of the prior game and generally know your turn is coming up even further in advance. Posting into the current game, even if you’re dead, to float a few ideas and see which people lock onto is generally acceptable, but you should try to avoid interrupting the current game much, and extend courtesy to the current Mod – this includes not opening registration while the previous game is still running or endlessly posting about your upcoming game, and of course you should extend similar courtesy during your own game to the next Mod and expect them to abide by that. Post-lynch is probably the ideal time to hold any extensive talk if you feel it necessary, but many Mods do not like people to post in threads after the day ends on any subject, if you lean in that direction you should probably say so during your own game, or indicate otherwise by saying “The Day is over, no game related discussions may be held after this point” which allows general chat or next game talk and limits only discussion relevant to the current game.

Example Themes
This section focuses strictly on brainstorming, to help Mods think up their own, and additional examples are welcome, additionally scanning the Game Archive is an invaluable resource. Popular Fiction like Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, and Stars Wars all represent well-known setups. Themes like these will generally result in games where players focus on what they know of those stories to make conclusions off of. This has its ups and down, and if you do decide to go this route, your best bet is probably to search the web for some Top 10 list of series in that Genre and pick one or more of them that you have read. Popular movies generally work. You may want to go with a TV series, and if so, checking to see if episodes are available to be watched on the net might be a good idea too, giving players a fun chance to find out about the setting if they don’t already know it. You can pick theme then figure out function, as would be the case with much of the above, or you can figure out function then pick a theme, if you want a game that uses the Hot Potato option mentioned below, you can then pick a theme that fits it.

Replicants! – In any setting where you want to use known characters and drop flavor or clues, a good choice of bad guy is impostors, this minimizes the chances an accidental slip in flavor will expose one of the scummers. Shapeshifters, androids, or puppetmasters tend to fit this bill. The Go’ald from Stargate, the evil twin who remembers to shave his goatee off, or any number of other options apply.

Tropes – Most of the players for this game tend to have a fondness for the website TV Tropes, a game revolving around roles and clues that’s entirely cliché, or even placing role powers that are contingent on in-game displays of that cliché, is an option with some player appeal.

Classics – You’ll rarely go wrong with running a Wheel of Time game, and a flat out 20th Century gangbusters theme is likely to go over well.

Cliché – You can never go wrong with vampires, werewolves, zombies, ninjas, pirates, and robots.

The Council of Doom – An Evil Overlord has resurrected Caligula, Gengis Khan, and Machiavelli to help him take over the world. Seizing control of the machine, Good Guys Inc. has returned many other legends to life, like George Washington, Ben Franklin, Archimedes, William Shakespeare, and others to fight them. William Shakespeare is a role detector, able to target someone and find out if they have a role power, but must quote at least one well-known line from his plays on any given day to use his power at night, George Washington can not tell a lie, and so on.

SplatterCon!!! – The players play themselves, and find themselves at a horror movie convention. The bad guys are taken over by classic horror movie monsters when they pick up a hockey mask, a glove with knives on it, and so on. Townie roles are empowered by similar artifacts, perhaps the bad guys have one extra item, that they can hand to any player at night instead of a NK, and convert them.

One hero is known – The game begins with one bulletproof (or bulletproof for the first few rounds) player in the role of the Main Hero, and everybody knows who he/she is. Alternatively, one lynch proof character can be the Arch-Villain, invincible till all their allies dies, this would strongly shift game dynamics.

Role-Hopping – The town has relatively few roles, but they can jump randomly each dawn, including to the scummers.

Hot Potato – Each dawn a player randomly receives the potato, and can pass it to anyone by voting for them, whoever has the potato when the lynch happens explodes, if they get lynched they explode along with the hammer, adding in a double voter makes this even trickier.