This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

That time you turned into DimJim was and still is the only experience i've had with mafia.

The rules are usually that you have to intend to win so that you don't straight up completely ignore what your job is supposed to be and use your powers to cause chaos, unless you think you have good reasons that the game would be more fun for everyone if you ignored what is supposed to be your objective at the time.
Most mspaf mafia didn't really have much roleplaying in it at all? I don't know, I've enjoyed serious mafia and ridiculous mafia to about equal levels the latter is just a lot less stressful and time consuming so more likely to attract me at the moment.

Actually got to teach about 30 kids (ages 14-18) how to play mafia today. They had fun with it but they were a little wound up and I think the temptation for cheating was a little too great for some of them. All in all good fun.

Eh, mafia.

To be truthful I have never played it before, but then from where I look it's a bit like Monopoly: though game play time is finite, it ends up looking a lot like a logarithmic curve: fast first, dreadfully slow later.

It can be, depends who lives and if the mafia employ a "let's shoot everyone who talks a lot" strategy

Whether or not there is strategy to it, I am absolutely 100% convinced that Mafia is complete and utter rubbish as a roleplaying game.
UTTER RUBBISH.
You are better off just going completely freeform and having no rules.
As in, if it were a board game the way it is an RPG, it would be this: "Okay, here's a board with some colored squares, and everybody gets a pawn I guess, the pawns are different colors, and the rules are that on your turn you can move the pawn around on the board or something. And then after everyone's had a turn, we vote for whoever's out, and they're out of the game. And then we do another round of moving on the board and another round of voting and so on until only one person's left, and they're the winner!"
Roleplaying has as much to do with playing Mafia as the board and pawns have to do with gameplay in boardgamemafia. If you want to go play a proper board game, fine. If you want to throw away the board and just play Mafia, fine. If you want to integrate the board game into the voting so that the players' moves on the board are actually significant, fine, though you'll have to redesign the game and you won't really be playing boardgamemafia (or regular mafia) anymore. Playing it as described, however, would be pointless and stupid.

Yeah I can't ever get behind roleplaying in a mafia game. The roles give you powers and set your win conditions, there's no real reason to hang up a diploma and perform routine prostate exams as you save someone's life and try to figure out whose doing the killing, while also trying to figure out exactly how you can roleplay as a doctor without alerting everyone to the fact that you are the doctor

COPDOCTOR: The pediatrician who secretly investigates people in his spare time.

Just have a phobia of apples And say "i'm losing my PATIENTS"whenever angered

You guys know you could roleplay based on the flavor of a character's description, not based on the role.

For example: Tweet-town, a genuine work of art that everyone should read

The internet is some kind of bizarro world where you have to take your leisure stuff too seriously and take the serious stuff too leisurely.

Mad Props Bro.


I don't know why, but when it comes to these type of long term games, I find myself almost drawn to the most back-stabbity route possible. Sometimes I'm having too much fun for it to take full effect (chesterafia) but even then I start to over analyze and over think and try to design far more elaborate schemes with a complete disregard for other players. This ultimately leads into a "bad time". I personally enjoy mafia more in real life because, as stated, it is much more laid back. What I've found, is that the more your goal strays from "have fun" to some other objective, the less enjoyable the game becomes.

Today in Wellington: holy fuck what possessed me to buy seven pairs of socks (also I went to Parliament and watched a throng of Literal Children running the country

It was surprisingly fun to watch! The architecture was wonderful)

Oh no it is contagious

Solaris, what'd you do.

Regarding mafia, there is honestly a lot more strategy that goes into it beyond "lol lynch a random dude each day and hope we win!"

It's just getting everyone to actually play without relying on one or two people to lead/start the discussion every single game is really, really boring.

SeaWyrm you are talking about an internet game that, on last page, you said you haven't yet taken part in. Have you at least read a game that's had roleplaying in it? That'd probably be something you'd do before becoming 100% certified-convinced.

You guys know you could roleplay based on the flavor of a character's description, not based on the role. Like "you are Mildred Robocks, a wealthy trophy wife who drinks plenty of wine and gets drunk all the time, leading to wild outbursts of rubbing up on people." This flavor is assigned independent of the role. Maybe she's a town doctor, who performs sexual healing; maybe a cop who coaxes information out in moments of passion; maybe she's a mafia roleblocker for hookery reasons; maybe she's a mafia janitor who has connections to a wine manufacturer and will once a game turn someone into a bottle of Château Soylent.

To be a roleplaying game, the mechanics need to interact with the story AND the story needs to interact with the mechanics. Mafia mechanics only interact with the story by providing a vague setting/situation (which doesn't really count) and by removing characters from it periodically for reasons that don't really have anything to do with what's happening in it. The story doesn't interact with the mechanics at all, except if you decide to make your game mechanics decisions based on the story rather than based on, say, strategy. Which you can do, but you could also do that with any game.
Chess, for example. You can move the pieces around based on a fiction, sure, in which the knights are actual knights and so-forth, but if you're playing against an opponent who's not in on it, they'll beat you solidly and laugh because they're using actual strategy. Their move decisions won't likely do wonders for your story, either. And if they ARE in on it, you guys aren't really playing chess anymore, you're just telling a story and moving bits of wood about.

Or, to throw your example back at you, you could roleplay while playing, say, softball. You could make up descriptions based on the field positions. Like "you are Anthony Pieterson, a wealthy corporate man who built his own fortune and has no patience for others who don't share his luck and business acumen." Maybe he's a left-fielder who catches the ball with diving leaps of daring-do; maybe a pitcher who pitches fastballs as smoothly as he pitches tricky business propositions.

Can you have FUN playing Mafia and roleplaying alongside? Heck yes! And I'm not saying you shouldn't roleplay with Mafia, either. Roleplaying probably brings a lot of enjoyment to Mafia. But Mafia doesn't really bring anything to the roleplaying. Because it's not a roleplaying game. (Which is different from saying it's "utter rubbish" as a roleplaying game, yeah. But this is what I really meant. I think the "utter rubbish" bit comes from the fact that it looks, superficially, like a roleplaying game, so it's utter rubbish as a roleplaying game in the same way that a toothpick is utter rubbish as a match.)

And for what it's worth, no, I've never played it on the internet, but when I first played it with people, it was under the (extremely naive) impression that it was meant to be a roleplaying game. This quickly proved to be an exercise in frustration, on multiple occasions, with multiple groups of people. So I am talking from personal experience here. But even if I wasn't, well, I've never played Stratego before, or Baccarat, or ice hockey, and I can still tell you that they're not roleplaying games, either.

Having said all that, I do want to clarify that I'm not saying that Mafia not being a roleplaying game makes Mafia+roleplaying bad or wrong or something. I'm sure all kinds of awesome stuff has happened from that combo! It's probably a lot of fun.
Whenever I play Diplomacy I like to adopt a persona and write all my in-game notes to the other players with an in-character voice. I do this myself and am disappointed when they don't return in kind. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do and it makes the game more fun. It also doesn't impact my strategy one whit - I still make the alliances I'd make anyway, backstab the people I'd backstab anyway, and play just as strategically as if the added flavor were missing. Diplomacy is not a roleplaying game. But that doesn't mean you can't have fun by roleplaying alongside it. I don't mean to imply that the same isn't true of Mafia.

tl;dr:
I DO mean to imply that it's foolish to try to play it as though the story you tell is important and consequential. It isn't, it's just flavor.
That's all I'm really trying to say, here.

Happy St. Drunks walking into my store before noon attempting to buy alcohol day.

Maybe they just want to beat the rush?

Last Saturday half of campus was smashed by 1pm.

(I guess my view of Mafia has to do with the only Mafia game I read was administrated by Wheat. The aforementioned Tweet-Town)

Whether or not there is strategy to it, I am absolutely 100% convinced that Mafia is complete and utter rubbish as a roleplaying game.

True story: In my first ever mafia game, we spent the majority of day one arguing with the cop about whether "Everyone sleeps in the same room at night and people take turns keeping watch" was really a legitimate strategy for winning the game.

Oh hey looks like the last episodes of girls und panzer got created

I found and caught a mouse red-handed in the trash bag this night.

It escaped, but I tied the trash bag to a place that I am absolutely certain that the mouse wouldn't be able to reach.

I found and caught a mouse red-handed in the trash bag this night.

That, combined with your avatar made me think: "Is this person pretending to be a hawk?"

I found and caught a mouse red-handed in the trash bag this night.

That, combined with your avatar made me think: "Is this person pretending to be a hawk?"

Are you pretending to be nothing?

Also it's a crow not a hawk.

*crow high fives Eldrake*