This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

I wasn't going to spectate Schazer's game cause I thought it was fairly obvious it's bananas

(but i might sign up)

Everything alive is dead, and everything dead can kill you. Welcome to murderfia.

sounds perfectly reasonable to me!

Heh, if nothing else I figured it'd be a fun way for all our forumites to get to know each other.

And/or get up in each other's grills.

And kill each other.

Any resemblance between me and a sane and competent admin is completely coincidental.

i dont know who's corpse this is but seeing that it is the only one and solaris is the only one not here i guess he's dead

God i dont get mafia, ive tried playing it several times and it always seems to involve random guessing for like the first couple of days? Its weird and i'm bad at it so its stupid

I've played a bit of mafia and it's not my cup of tea.

Then I become bothered by people looking for "TWO MORE PEOPLE FOR MAFIA GAME *Link*" in chatrooms.

I'm just a sour Gen though.

"sour Gen"

that kinda sounds like a candy, like one of those everlasting gobstoppers or whatever.

Or perhaps just the most crotchety generation ever.

WELCOME TO THE SOUR-GEN GAMES! EVENTS INCLUDE: Fist shaking, the scoffing triathlon, also a lot of mafia for some reason.

It's kind of dumb as an actual game, I think. There is basically no strategy to it, you mostly have to just choose randomly or based on whatever whim strikes you.
But it makes for an amusing... activity? I guess.

Like some of the abilities characters can use at night can definately be used for strategy but for the first few days its just random

If you're picking people randomly or on a whim u r doing it wrong
Even day one can get results that aren't purely based on chance

This is usually the part where someone mentions THE MACHINE but none of you know what that is and also it was ruined.

What, when did THE MACHINE get ruined and why was I not informed?

Man I am so out of touch with mafias. Rightfully so, too, because every time I start playing, I always run across something in real life and I become unable to commit. And then people start voting for me and I just balk.

Mafia is a hella ton of strategy, its just nobody actually likes to make setups that encourage strategy

Its all about FUN and MERRIMENT and THE DEATH OF THOSE DREAMS AS SOMEONE STILL TRIES TO OVERTHINK THINGS

It's kind of dumb as an actual game, I think. There is basically no strategy to it, you mostly have to just choose randomly or based on whatever whim strikes you.
But it makes for an amusing... activity? I guess.

I'm not really sure how you can come to that conclusion, honestly. I've got a whole lot of often-negative Opinions™ about mafia, but "there's no strategy" certainly isn't one of them.

I would guess, given what I know about you and your philosophy of games, that you're framing it as a mechanics problem ("aside from the cop/seer, there's no reason to vote for anyone in particular over anyone else" or a similar complaint); still, I'd argue that vote analysis and setup design/speculation and the like are information that can be used to that end.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, though, so if you'd care to expand?

Mechanics, yeah, and also just based on my own play experience.

I've never played the internet version, just the real people version, and we generally didn't have all the wacky extra roles. So maybe those things make it make more sense. It always seemed to me, however, that the mafia's best strategy is to choose randomly, so as to not give any information to the other players. At that point, the other players have no information and are essentially also just picking randomly. So I don't see vote analysis as actually being all that useful. And I thought setup was intentionally random?

Also, if someone says "I'm the detective or whatever, and I say it's that guy!" the question of whether he actually is or he's lying just seems really uninteresting to me. Again, no real basis for anyone to reach a conclusion. Maybe he's telling the truth, maybe he's a mafia, maybe he's an innocent just trying to save his own skin. Maybe he really did figure out it was 'that guy', maybe he has other motives, maybe he's just screwing around. Who knows? Too much noise, no way to filter it out and get any signal.

Maybe there's some interesting emergent mob psychology stuff that can happen, I don't know. I've never seen that occur, really.

Aaaaaand, well, it occurs to me that maybe there's a read-body-language element that happens if you play face-to-face? But I don't see that working out very well over the internet.

I'd be happy to be demonstrated wrong. I'm in Schazer's thingy, so maybe I'll find out! And as I said, it seems like an amusing activity. Just not much of what I'd call an actual game.

As I said earlier in the topic, Schazer's thing is going to be the last place to look for anything resembling a typical internet mafia game

I like how you just described it, because the last time I tried explaining a metagame to someone it ended up being a wall of text and also it was clearly utter nonsense after I went to bed and reread it the next day.

Metagaming is the REAL mafia

The metagame was also about an additional layer of reasoning being added as a person's motives: Namely, that people did things or said things or refused to say things or insinuated things sometimes, because that was what they did.

I was told (both on occasions where I was scum and on others where I was town) that my behaviour at the time was characteristic of my behaviour in the past when I had been scum. That's all well and good, I guess, but I don't think you can attribute past behaviour to more complicated and situational things like "she's trying to signal to people that she's secretly the cop/doctor/other useful role", because then it would go down this whole stupid rabbit hole of whether I was consciously replicating behaviour from a prior game, or whether it was a natural behavioural quirk. It's a layer I don't think the game can support in a textual medium. Maybe in a face-to-face setting, sure. Not when you've got all the time in the world to phrase your text replies.

That, I feel, mostly came about through games being played by the same group of people repeatedly, and all this history and backlog and acrimony just building up.

The MSPAF game was also overcomplicated by people lying about stuff even when they weren't scum. Sure, there are good situations for that, but it again just seriously overcomplicates crap.

I just suck at mafia.

Wait. People play Mafia to win? I thought it was mainly played for the role playing aspects or something.

I have never played Mafia, but clearly remember a Mafia thread on Gaia stating that if you sign up you gotta intend to try to win. I think maybe it just makes the game more exciting that way?

I'd say mafia is pretty fun, even if you aren't very good at it (I AM NOT GOOD AT IT). It's more about roleplaying your role the best you can (in the sillier games of mafia (and I guess even the not so silly?) where awesome mods are usually very descriptive in your roles), and even when you die, there's usually still fun to be had (#deadchat and whatnot).

You know it's a really good game if you can pretend you are DimJim and post Toy Story pornography all over the place.

Good times.