Seeing as many of the upcoming hosts might not be familiar with Mafia outside this forum, I've decided to write a short list of tips for newbie mods. Please keep in mind that this is not, and does not intend to be, an end-all-be-all guide to how you should design your game, it's merely meant to be some things for you to think about, hopefully to help you along the way. So feel free to disregard any advice you feel won't be right for your game.
Also, as I said, this is intended towards mods creating their first or one of their first games.
First, the golden rule of mafia design...
Design the game to be fun for your players, not for yourself - It's always tempting to put one or more crazy or random roles in a game, kick back, and watch the fallout. Having a Paranoid Gun Owner (kills anyone who targets them at night) and a Suicide Cult (cult leader recruits a member each night, if cult leader dies, everyone in the cult dies) might be hilarious for you, and the spectators, but it does not make for a good game for the players.
By extension, if you want to have an aspect of a role being secret to the holder of the role, make sure that keeping the aspect secret adds something of value to the game. As a general rule you could say that a player should know all aspects of their own role. There are obvious exceptions here - letting a non-sane cop know that he isn't sane kinda defeats the purpose - but it works as a general rule. As an example, if you have a Nervous Vig (loses vig power if he kills a townie), there is usually no added in not letting him know that he is nervous.
Consider the power level of your game - While it's fun both to create and play in high power games, I would generally advise new mods to start of with a somewhat low power game. The reasons are simple - it's easier to balance, less chance that the game is easily breakable, and there's less chance that there will be scenarios that you haven't considered the implication of.
Consider the size of your game - There are quite a few role that, while perfectly good roles, don't work that well in smaller games. These typically are somewhat swingy roles that simply become too swingy with fewer players in the game. Some of them can work, some of them should be avoided like the plague.
Let me give a couple of examples - in both we assume that the game is a fairly simple 12-man game with 3 mafia.
First, the neutral survivor. As a mod you have to assume that the neutral survivor will vote with the mafia at the first available chance to end the game - which means that the mafia de facto has four potential votes. This again means that after a mislynch and a nightkill on a townie, the town is at something akin to a LyLo situation at the beginning of day 2 (6 townies, 1 survivor, 3 mafia - another mislynch + nk would put it at 4-1-3, which would mean that the town no longer controls the lynch on their own). While it is entirely possible that the survivor won't come out in the open, or that the mafia won't trust him enough to come out in the open if he does, this is still a scenario the mod needs to consider and plan around.
Second, a paranoid or insane cop. Imagine that the cop gets a false-positive night 1, and is brought to claim day 2. Under this scenario, the way forward will usually be to lynch whoever the cop investigated, and once he or she flips town, the cop gets lynched the next day. This sets up two easy mislynches for the mafia, through no work of their own and no fault from the town, which will undeniably swing the game massively in their favour, if not win it outright.
Spread out the power - By spreading out the power amongst the side - in other words, to have many roles with some power, rather than a few very powerful roles - you reduce swingyness in your setup. As an added bonus, more people will have non-vanilla roles, which many find to be more fun.
Don't be afraid to go against convention... - Many mods, whether experienced or not, start of with putting a cop, a doc, and a vig in the town column. It's understandable, as these are perfectly good roles. However, they don't need to be (and in my opinion shouldn't be) in every game. Typically, what the game needs is what the roles represent - an investigative role, a protective role, and a killing role.
Personally I am fond of using roles that create a bit more tension, and take a bit more skill to use than the standard cookie cutter roles. As an example, I am very fond of using jailkeepers (protects and roleblocks their target) over doctors. This role creates tension in that the jailkeeper can't, or at least shouldn't, just go an use it on anyone without thinking. The jailkeeper will have to consider risk versus reward - she might stop an attempted nightkill, but she will always prevent her target from doing their thing that night. Imagine that the mafia roleblocker is dead, and the cop has claimed. What do you do? As a straight up doc, the answer is simple - protect the cop. As a jailkeeper you need to think it over a little more - if you protect the cop, he won't get to investigate anyone, but if you decide not to protect the cop (figuring that the mafia will shoot elsewhere, as they will probably think the cop is sure to be protected), there's the risk that he will die in the night.
As for the investigative role, why not consider a watcher (sees who else target their target that night), a tracker (sees who their target targets that night), or a gunsmith (finds out whether or not their target has a gun, will typically get a positive result on mafia, vigs, cops, and sometimes on SKs)? These are great investigative roles, that still leaves a skilled mafia player with a chance to argue their way out, even if they are caught.
However, remember that most of these variations are somewhat weaker than their normal cop/doc counterpart, and you should probably compensate the town by adding a bit of power somewhere else.
... but make sure you know why it is convention in the first place - There are however some conventions that are in place for good reasons. That's not to say that you should never go against them, but rather that you should really think through the implications before you do.
Some examples:
Mafia shouldn't have double voters - Refer to my example about the neutral survivor above. Giving a mafia multiple votes simply make him to powerful in the endgame, often pushing LyLo forward by a full day/night cycle.
Players shouldn't change alignment during the game - If a player's alignment changes, all reads anyone have on that player suddenly becomes invalid, possibly dangerous, but there is no way for any other players to know that their reads are suddenly off.
Edit:
Don't put all your eggs in one basket - You don't need to put every inventive role you can think of into your game - there will be more games in the future. Rather, you should try to identify what roles add something to your current setup, and save your other good ideas for a later one.
If anything is unclear, speak up. I would also appreciate any comments you might have.
I'll be back later, as in a couple of days probably, with a similar list of suggestions on what to do once you feel your setup is ready.
Post edited May 28, 2011 by Zchinque
