Guide to modding mafia games.
Modding mafia games, is surprisingly fun but also surprisingly difficult to not give any vital information away. There are 2 stages I’ll talk you through, first the setup, then the game play.
The first thing you need to have under consideration is the theme. If you are going to base your game on a film or book then I would recommend you choose something that you would estimate that at least two thirds of your players would know who the good and bad guys are instinctively. Good examples would be Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games and perhaps comics like a Marvel/D.C hybrid. I don’t read comics but I’d understand that Spiderman is a good guy and Loki is a bad guy. Or you can make up your own story but make it clear which characters are good and which are bad. Other successful games have been on myth or history. Perhaps one of the main problems with history is that people are from all over the world so while I might be an expert on the Battle of Hastings 1066, someone in New Zealand might not have a clue about it, so choose something that affected the world. I just watched Revenge of the Sith so I am going to quickly show you how to make a classic mafia game in this theme. So, it’s Sith VS Jedi and Sith are bad and include General Grievous, Mace Windu and Sheev Palpatine and on the good side is the Jedi Council with a third party of Anakin Skywalker who wins if the end game occurs without Padmé Amidala dying. If she does die, Anakin turns into Lord Vader and gets to kill people at night. If you’re basing a game around a twist then I recommend you use normal roles.
The second thing is game structure. On Wikipedia it recommends that about a third of the people rounded up have to be opposed to the village’s side. Don’t think this is unfair, we’ve never had a mafia win yet. There is lots of good ideas for characters here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game) . Then you have to consider whether people are going to know what characters are in this game. Like in my game I told you explicitly the player roles, in others you have to guess. Things that players must be told are…
1. The number of sides there are
2. The number of players on each side
3. Each sides win condition
I put the last one on their because in the past we’ve had a few strange win conditions for the 3rd party which no-one knew about until the game finished at the third party won.
Also consider the game dynamic, for example, if the doctor saved someone, is the doctor going to be notified, the killer, the person rescued, everyone or nobody, who will be told if someone is saved? You have to be consistent throughout the whole game. This is the same with the clown, inspector and all roles, you need to choose who gets notified and where. Also you got to consider whether you’re going to have a game story. They can be fun, but you have to be REALLY CAREFUL THAT YOU DON’T GIVE PEOPLE AWAY like I did so I had to rapidly play along with Jimi’s carpenter story who attempt to rectify for my mistake.
So this is before we even get into the game. Now you make a request on this forum, we schedule a time in for the game, when the time comes create a signup forum, people will hopefully join and fill your game. Then night zero will start. During the first night, it will take a while because people will be confused about their actions, especially newbies so try your best to endeavour to help them. Eventually they’ll get the hang of it.
During the game the game you have to be careful at all times not to reveal anything, sometimes it is better to not talk at all, but everyone can get overwhelmed when they wake up in the morning with 15 messages and a page and a half of forum to read through. Sometimes the easiest mistakes can occur in a chat of two people that trust each other to reveal the role of the other person in the chat. However nearly every mod and especially new mods will make mistakes but as long as you keep things consistent, the players should be grasping at straws.
