Starmen.Net

wow mafia sure has changed, i barely recognize it! gettin’ misty eyed over here…

For real though, potential hosts, here’s a couple tips.

Game balance! In ideal situations, the mafia and town should be able to pull off perfect wins on the same day. It’s sort of a fast and dirty rule not accounting for crazy odd-defying situations, but it’s a good rule of thumb. As an example, in a game of seven players with five vanilla town and two vanilla mafia, a perfect game for wither side would be the game is over at the end of Day 2. For the town, that’s two successful eliminations. For the mafia, that’s two successful mis-elims and two clean night kills. The roles you add will skew this either in favour of the town or mafia and will need some additional thought, but at this point I think you get the idea. That said, don’t be afraid to throw some really fun roles in there that allow for people to get creative. Makes for good times and good stories, trust me.
Continuing with the game balance, and addressing my man Ultimate-Gamer’s concern, you will make your life world’s easier if you give your night actions an order of operations during the planning stages of the game. I will take the hard-line stance that this is probably the most important thing you could do if you want to avoid shenanigans later. This is deciding that the role-block happens first, the detection happens second, the protection happens third, and the mafia kill happens last. Seriously. Make an order of ops list that includes every role you have. Do not deviate. Enjoy all that extra time you have because you were smart and planned this out weeks in advance.

Rule breaking? Man I with there was something approaching a simple way of dealing with that, little things like editing posts or wholesale quoting host PMs are easy but… The best I’ve got for everything else is precious little takes place in a vacuum; your players very rarely act on whim… probably. been years on my end so i ain’t sure the caliber of players y’all got but i’m happy to assume y’all are quick witted, attractive individuals who aren’t rebels without a cause. If someone’s breaking rules, it is just as important to puzzle out the why they are breaking the rule as it is to punish said rule breaking. Do they live with another player and talk about the game casually in real life? Is there an oddly worded phrase in their role they decided to interpret themselves and their interpretation differs from what you came up with? Have they locked eyes with another player and decided “screw this game, I just want you dead”? I could go on for days and every situation needs a different solution or counter measure. Don’t be afraid to talk to your players person to person in these situations. Set the game aside, figure out what’s what, and go from there. I mean, take action and dole out punishments, absolutely, just remember to address the cause of your player’s action as well as the actions your player took. also co-hosts are lookin’ a touch compulsory, so bounce alla these situations off them, two heads bein’ better than one ‘n’ all that.

I don’t have too much advice for writing flavour, especially since good lord y’all are writing epics now, but I will say you should 100% have fun with it; I will always argue that half a page of amazing is better than five pages of okay. also if yeh ain’t having fun writing it odds are excellent it’ll come out in the writing and yer players will jump to the part that tells ‘em the important game-changin’ bit an’ carry on.

Actually, have fun with it is just going to be my advice for hosting as a whole. Let’s be serious, you aren’t gonna get rich and/or internet famous hosting Mafia games on this lovely corner of the internet, so do it for the love of the game! Like U_G said, hosting is a ton of fun. From all the detective work the town puts in, to the crazy bluffs the mafia will try to pull, to that little independent player who just refuses to accept that they have the odds stacked against them, I can’t think of any mafia related experience more rewarding than knowing what’s up at all times and watching this all unfold. Put in the effort and it won’t go to waste.

-Removed-

• The mafia to town ratio

There are a few different thought processes on what this ratio should be, a lot of people settle for somewhere between a 1:2.5 to 1:3 ratio of mafia to town members. This works most of the time, but there are other methods that are worth discussing! One method I’m rather fond of is the Perfect Win method, where you calculate on what days the town and mafia would win on if they both had perfect games (no members of the faction die, all elims (eliminations) are beneficial for that side, all nightkills are successful or successfully blocked) and from there try to make the days both sides win the same.
Okay that description might be a little confusing, let’s run through an example.
Say you’ve got a game going of 8 townies and 3 mafiats. In this scenario, the first possible day the town can pull off a perfect win is Day 3, which is three successful eliminations. For the Mafia, they can pull off a perfect game in Day 3 as well, with three successful mis-elims and two clean nightkills.
Hopefully that makes sense! The idea here is to fiddle with the numbers until both sides have the same day they win on. I will say that this is only balanced in a vacuum, you will have to add or subtract members of either side depending on what roles you have in play. That said, this is a good place to start with your ratio!
There is another method that’s pretty similar to the one I just mentioned. This one involves counting the number of mis-elims the town has before they lose. With this one you’re looking to have a number similar to the number of mafiats you’ve got; too few and your mafia are at a huge advantage, while too many and your mafia will have to work in overdrive to even stand a chance.

• Adding roles to both sides

The single more important thing I want you all to take away from this is the following: If the Town and Mafia are both completely vanilla, the Mafia will win more often than not. The reason for this is concrete information they can trust, in this case it is who they can work together without any shadow of doubt.

This is why roles exist! Aside from making the night phase more interesting, they help balance out the inherently unbalanced nature of a vanilla game of mafia. There are a few ways of going about this, but the method I personally favour is this: once you know what your central mechanic is going to be (like in CoM, it was role switching or ARK, it was sparing with a serial killer on the loose) you should first build the town with all the roles you want it to have, then build the mafia that has to tools to deal with what the town has. That might sound a little confusing right now, but here’s let’s walk through it!

Let’s say we’ve got a 7 player game, that’s five town and two mafia. We want to keep this game fairly tame, so we know we don’t want to mess with the core mechanics. From there, we build the town. Since we know a game of vanilla town vs vanilla mafia is inherently mafia slanted, we’ll include a doctor who can block night kills, and a detective who can sniff out who the town can and can’t trust. The other three town members will be vanilla to not mess with the balance more than is needed.
Now we can build our mafia! What you are looking to do when you are giving the mafia the tools they need to deal with the town is not give the mafia a hard-counter to everything the town has, but giving them some multi-purpose tools that could deal with pretty much any situation. For example, if our two mafiats were a godfather (the hard-counter to the detective), and a strongman (the hard-counter to the doctor), we are veering back into a mafia slant for the set-up, as the potential for the town’s roles to be effective when they truly need to be has been diminished greatly. The detective will only be useful in finding the strongman and might accidentally clear the godfather as town, while the doctor won’t be able to actually protect crucial townies if the mafia decides “nah, that guy needs to be dead NOW.” Instead, the much more balanced option is for the mafia to have one vanilla mafiat, and one roleblocker (I refuse to call the role hooker because reasons). This will allow the mafia to deal with the detective and doctor while not allowing them to lock both down in a single night. Thus, both town roles have retained most of their potential to be useful while still giving the mafia a way of dealing with them.

That should give you an idea of what you’re looking for when building towns and mafias, so let’s talk different types of roles!

1. The straight positive roles: These are your investigative and protecting roles, basically any role that there is next to no negative utility for using. These are your cops, doctors, watchers, trackers… Anything like that. You’ll want to limit the number of these on each side since they add a huge benefit for the side they’re on.
2. The double-edged sword roles: These are the roles that have as much potential to help as they do to hurt the side the roles is on. These are your town roleblockers, vigilantes, nurses, anything that could hurt the town is used on a town role or vice versa.You use these when you want to slightly up the power one side has without going crazy about it.
3. The negative utility roles: While they count as one side or the other, their existence is not beneficial for the side they are on. These are the miller type roles, or any sort of “landmine” role like virgin or princess. You add these roles when you want to bring down a side’s power without affecting the number of townies to mafiats. As a side note, these sorts of roles aren’t particularly fun to play as, so I’d suggest adding them as a last resort.
4. Independent roles: So long as they aren’t a third faction like a cult, indie roles are very useful for balancing! For all the neat things they do, indie roles fall into one of three catagories: Those actively harmful to both sides (like serial killers), those actively harmful to one side (like condemners), and those actively harmful to neither side (survivors!). In what may seem a little counter intuitive, roles that actively hurt both sides benefit the town slightly more (roles that harm both sides have the power to actively harm the mafia, which can take a bit of pressure off the town like Tofu did in ARK), roles that are harmful for one side are good for the side they aren’t hurting, and roles that are true neutral are slightly better for the mafia (lacking the power to actively hurt the mafia while still being allowed to side with them is what does this). Be mindful whenever you indies to your game, as you do have to make it possible for the player playing the role to win their own condition. Otherwise it’s just really mean of you!

There is something else that should be mentioned before wrapping up this bit on roles, and that’s about role synergy. Whenever two roles work together to be way more effective than either could possibly be alone, that’s role synergy coming into play. This tends to happen more with the mafia than with the town due to the mafia knowing what tools they’ve got to work with, but it can happen on both sides. Role synergy is a thing you’ll want to keep an eye out for when balancing, as it can really break the game for either side. An example of this would be a rolecop and a janitor working together in the mafia. The rolecop can vet out who is a power role in the town, and then the janitor can take them out while providing a fairly powerful fakeclaim for the mafia. The town would be basically none the wiser, since it would make sense that the fakeclaim would exist in the the game, depending on who they clean up.

• Balancing!

If you’ve taken the other steps into account, this shouldn’t be amazingly hard, but give it a go anyhow. What you should do with your roster is look at it, and try and break the game for either side with it as best as you can. Grab a couple people and everyone get in on the fun! Play out a couple mock games with the set-up with a couple other people by playing the “what if” game. Again, since co-hosts are a touch mandatory here, you will have someone you can work with, two heads being better than one, all that. What’s more, we at HIGH GRAND MAFIA COUNCIL will probably go through something like this ourselves when we look over your application. No pressure or anything, we’re actually all very nice! Probably!

Anyhow, I think that covers most of the bases, if any of you have any further questions about what I’ve presented, feel free to ask in the Help Desk Topic or even just by PMing me! I love helping with this sort of stuff, so don’t be shy!

Includes.

“Perfect” means that anything that can possibly happen to help one side or the other win, does. If there are things that can be deadly, assume that they will, for the purpose of figuring out how fast perfect victories can happen.

The idea is that you want to make sure the potential wildcard stuff doesn’t inherently favor one side over the other. If the stars align and the town gets incredibly un/lucky, that’s just how it goes, but you want to make sure that the game at least starts on an even playing field.

It’s definitely hard to analyze all the possibilities, but that’s part of the challenge of designing a balanced mafia game.

If you’re looking at a possible perfect game for the mafia, assume all protective roles either successfully block mafia deaths or otherwise fail to protect townies. Maybe the Doc guesses wrong, or gets roleblocked.

Likewise, if you’re looking at a possible perfect game for the town, assume all protective roles either successfully block town deaths or otherwise fail to protect the mafia.

PM?

There are a lot of tools to talk with the cohost you choose. Right now, Discord is a pretty useful tool, but you can use any other chat tools, like kik, whatsapp or even e-mails or facebook (if you have an account, of course).
Even you can use Private messages here to talk with your partner, so options for that are unlimited

Yeah your cohost HAS to at least be a member of starmen.net. But you can absolutely submit your application anytime! Doesn’t matter if you’re currently playing or not.

Well honestly we don’t give just ANYONE the keys to the Narrator account. It’s a legitimate Moderator account, and the actions of those who host under the name reflect the actions of everyone who’s ever hosted.

So if we don’t know them, or their character, there’s a good chance we won’t trust them with the account.

I mean yeah, you can absolutely apply as soon as you join, but I would suggest that you Have them join and play a few games first.

I hope you understand. We’re always looking for passionate GMs such as yourself, we just Jane to be choosy about who we pick.

Sorry for the late response!

No. You can ask individual members and if they so choose to they might review it but the council only reviews applications for starmen mafia games.

Hello, I would like to submit a mafia game with XedicZyvis.

Oh sorry lol. (xedic, why did you put ME in charge of communications?)