Pera No Mafia: Once More, With Feeling

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chaoslord: Jan 28, 2009; Nature Abhors A Vacuum

Turned a loss into a win, h*ck yeah

# ? Feb 7, 2019 15:23

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 13:48

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

So the postmortem on this game.

Part 1 - The original game

I said this in discord and I'll say it here. The game did not go the way I'd imagined it from Day 1 onwards. I'd envisioned a version of the game with a single rule getting put forward and countered each day and night. I'd anticipated a flurry of activity around deadline to deal with this. And I also imagined that the rules implemented would be ludicrously silly.

The original game had very very few power roles in it, I'd considered at one point making it completely vanilla apart from the yes / no mechanic. The reason being is that knowing that I'd have to gently caress around with the rules and that people might be granted roles, I wanted a simple game so that I could modify it later. Which by the way, is why the original post says "Role light."

To some extent Day 1 played out as I'd envisioned, except then there was the gigantic argument that happened while I was asleep leading to multiple people killing themselves before I could do anything to intervene or bring tensions down. I also hadn't anticipated that some players would quit over being vanilla town.

That's a loss to town, but in larger games my numbers are usually padded a little because I expect that to happen. But the effect within the game was relatively catastrophic since it immediately killed large amounts of town discussion from players who are ordinarily very active.

I also didn't really think much of the fact that pera had put two rules into the first vote. It didn't seem to crazy but it obviously set a precedent that would impact the game later.

To that extent we got the second vote. pera communicated that to me while I was asleep and posted the change before I'd woken up to read it. And that basically plunged the game into a level of insanity that I was trying to claw back from for the rest of the game. The alteration to the voting method meant I had to spend most of the night rewriting spreadsheets to accommodate for the new voting method and I'll be honest when I say that my solution was really inelegant and badly made.

Largely that's my fault. I gave pera full freedom to do whatever she wanted and I didn't really anticipate that breaking the fundamental basis of how the game had been set up to work would happen. Or at least, if it did, not on Day 1. It's something I should have done and should have been clearer about.

The result was a game where broadly speaking, so many rules went through that even I could barely track what was going on.

I'd wanted a game where this level of complexity ultimately did happen, but so deep into the game that those remaining were still fine with it. Also I'd really not thought that scum would actually get their way on Day 1 either, given the volume of nos to yeses.

By about Day 3 it was basically in full on collapse. Town were rightly so confused by what's going on that nobody could really make a coherent argument and scum, being able to confer over every rule in place effectively had a double night kill and full knowledge of how to gently caress with every single rule.

Ordinarily I'd concede the game as having failed, play it out and see if town could come back despite the odds.

But then pera proposed the Bowser button and it got pressed.

If I'm right and pera is free to correct me, there was no actual plan for what the button represented beyond scrambling the entire game. I felt at least that there was some opportunity to at least try to do something silly that people might enjoy, which is why I suggested a game of serial killers alongside the stone lore that we'd come up with.

Part 2- The second game

Honestly this was relatively simple, I wanted a simple narrative way for everyone to take part in a really silly game of mafia. Everyone is a serial killer, if a serial killer is alive having killed all the other serial killers, the SK team wins! But I also get to write in Gulag as being this godlike being as well as minions of pera and myself.

Largely this game went the way I thought it would, with a few twists like Xiw being absolutely amazing at dodging fire. Honestly, I was largely happy with how it played out and the result at the end. I can't say given what I had to do with the Bowser button that I would have done anything different.

Part 3 - The conclusion

So I suppose the major criticism is that a lot of people ended up in a game they didn't sign up for, or ended up playing a game that didn't go the way they anticipated.

And honestly, I can't disagree, this game didn't go the way I'd anticipated so I'm honestly unsure how a player could have known what was going to happen. So my apologies to anyone who was put off like that.

The other criticism is bringing in the observers and thus having a cooling effect on other mafia games. I mean maybe? I was pretty explicit that you didn't have to care about Part 2 if you didn't want to.

But the second criticism leveled against that was that why keep it as mafia when at that point it was effectively popcon? The answer to that is that the narrative of the game and the second part of the game was literally about who controlled/didn't control mafia and the fate of that game. Also because popcon leads to emotional breakdowns whereas a really really stupid game of mafia seemingly did not.

So again, if you felt you couldn't play another mafia game because of this one then I'm sorry.

In terms of what I've learned about mafia from this?

pera unchained is way way too wild, even by my standards.

# ? Feb 7, 2019 19:59