I'm back!

@Brasas: tell me when the game starts. Then I can see whether I would have time to sub in in an emergency. Are hydras allowed?

...but if the posting frequency is really that high, then I probably don't have the time to follow any of the games, much less play in one. I never played on MU. I played one game on MS, that had a too high posting frequency initially, and then none at all because it somehow died.

[emphasis added]

You killed it, didn't you?

Not the game. Just all the players who annoyed me. Drones are such fun devices! *eg* ;-)

Woohoo. When is the next game? I want to play!!!!

So anyway, while we're waiting here is an idea:

I thought the Secret Hitler game would proceed quicker, but it dragged on for almost 2 months. There were times when discussion would just drag with same arguments back and forth. Similar thing actually happened in the last mafia game I played that Lift hosted (though it was my only mafia game; so I'm no judge on whether that game was particularly long or not). Also, walls of text would be posted and people busy in real life might not have easy time to follow everything...

So back when I played Resistance, from time to time we'd play a "silent" version. No one is allowed to talk, so you can only point at others and do basic gestures like thumbs up/down or shaking your finger. Of course you could still observer facial expressions, something not possible with a forum game. We didn't play it this way to speed things up (since Resistance played in person is pretty fast anyway), just for variety's sake.

So how about a similar idea for a game here. Basically you can only make bolded type post (like vote/unvote). Other than that, there is a list of 10 or so sentences, and all your posts must be made up of those sentences. Like

"I think X is townie"
"I think X is scum"
"I agree with X"
"I disagree with X"
"X is lying"
...etc
If roles are present, also "I claim X role". "I think Y has X role".

This way you can only analyze other players by how they voted and the simple statements they made. There are no walls of text, and you can follow up and make posts quicker.

(maybe even night chat be restricted this way...)

Would this work for Secret Hitler? Would it work for a general mafia game? Do you think such a game would be unbalanced for scum/townie? Or less fun in general? Or not fun at all? Is there such a thing present already?

Thoughts?

I don't think it would work for standard mafia. You can't give supporting reasons for why you think X is scum/town, and I'm not sure how you'd go about conveying things like "His wagon hopping is suspicious". Either your list of phrases is too long, or you can't really communicate.

Of course, that's just theory crafting on my part. Maybe you could host it and we give it a try. ;)

It might work for Secret Hitler, I guess, since there are multiple phases and everything.

Heh, welcome to forum Mafia... Ever since I first started playing (four years ago?) we've been looking for ways to make the games move quicker...

I'm not sure a silent version would necessarily work though, without supporting information to your votes or actions there's not an awful lot to go on and you're basically just voting randomly or based on gut feeling...

I don't think this would work for any sort of game that isn't real-life. There's not enough wild conjecture and flailing and such, this basically just boils the game down to its bare bones and removes a lot of what makes it fun in my opinion. I think the best way to make a game quicker would be to impose a stiffer time limit on voting, but then you run into the problem of real-life conflicting with being able to post.

I can't say for sure since you guys have more experience in the field than me, but I would say that the best way to make the game move quick would probably be a stiff time limit, after which the majority vote determines what happens. It encourages people to get a move on fast in terms of voting and advising others on what to vote.

I wanted to say that's kinda like mafiauniverse works (with the stiff day/night phase time limits and the impossibility of nolynch (unless a majority votes nolynch) since the one with the most votes gets lynched automatically when the time is up) ... and then I went there to check and saw there were "turbo games" ... 1 hour a games ... "Days are 18 minutes in length. Nights are 6 minutes in length." 450 posts ... O.O now that's fast (and not much more than short oneliners throughout the game and blinking gifs, much too bright that site, but well fast games are possible it seems...)

EDIT:
too bright for my taste I meant to say. also I find those avatar picture + stats stuff on the left quite distracting on that site (more so than here even (dunno why they are not using leaner stuff like discourse.org)) and thought to myself there should be games via messenger out there. Do you think that's happening? mafia on whatsapp or signal or whatever or even on slack/irc with a chatbot moderating? that's be nice for short games like that and would make it much easier to read the actual content without all that metadata blob (join date etc.) being displayed with each and every oneliner-post.

EDIT2: sorry for my rambling, I should be sleeping right now. I do like discourse though. If ever I would build a forum for playing mafia (or anything really) I'd use discourse ;)

I don't know much about the place you named, but I imagine it would be rather contingent on people being from similar timezones. Not to mention that it's easier to coordinate when there's a larger amount of users (we have maybe...what, 20 mafia regulars in this forum at max?).

I would also think that would work better in a chatroom format than a forum one, but I suppose a forum-based format makes it easier to look back through old posts or something? I dunno...in my opinion, if you're going to go for a game that short and can indeed pull it off, you might as well just use Discord and put a voicechat together with text chat for votes/results and do it the old-fashioned way.

OK. Who's up next to host some game? flubb? trent? Are they still around? Or adalia?

>sneak around to position #5
>wait for flubbucket to become busy with real life
>wait for everybody to give up hope on finding trentolf since he hasn't been seen in months
>send a hitman to take care of Adalia
>???
>Al Zeopone rules the administration

hmmm... yes I can see how a silent game on a forum, where you can't read facial expressions, wouldn't be feasible.

How about Secret Hitler variations:

_ Each time after going through every presidential candidate, the player order gets shuffled and randomized. Would help offset a bad draw for fascists, plus, to take an example from our last game, quickly going back to greek wouldn't have been a viable strategy, since we wouldn't know the order in which greek would appear next, so players late in the order wouldn't have been dismissed easily.

_ A non-open setup where the number of fascists is random (and not known to the players, except fascists of course). The number of liberal/fascist policies in the deck gets adjusted to balance.
(I'm wondering if a variation with just Hitler and 9 liberals, but with a large percentage of fascist policies in the deck is possible?)

Oh, I'm still on the hosting list...

Unfortunately I never got around to finishing either of my set ups (and may not have the time to devote to my no night cycle concept anyway) so I'm not sure I've got anything to host.

trent hasn't been around for quite a while I think and I'm not sure about flub either..

What did you do to them and where did you bury the bodies? ;-)
I never tried MU. I tried MS, but it wasn't a very successful attempt.