Night 1 kills

[Dasquian]

This question was raised on another forum which is quite new to mafia (ie, I introduced them to it ), and I found myself floundering a bit for a convcining answer.

The question was, since signing up for a mafia game and getting killed night 1 before you can do anything is a bit sucky, why allow that to happen, and not just have NPCs killed off or start with day (or other solutions involving randomly allocating roles to NPCs who'd be killed)?

My take was that dying on night 1 is all part of mafia, sucks when it happens, but it has to happen to someone. And that the night 1 kill choices are all part of the meta-game, finding out what roles are around, the number of killers, etc. I was curious to see what people made of the same question here, since there's a much greater wealth of accumulated knowledge and experience to tap from

[Dasquian]

Thanks guys, I agree with everything you're saying - I was just worried I was being massively closed-minded about how best to run mafia games, but I feel much happier sticking by my guns of starting the carnage from the word go now

Ta!

[Dasquian]

I guess the next question is: do you want to preserve the balance at the start of the game, or would it be more interesting for each game to get off from a random start? It's not good for the town to wake up and lose their cop and doctor, but it means that from the word go, that game's heading down a unique route - people are playing differently since there is no cop out there to be doing the groundwork, etc.

As long as any individual game can cope with any <x> roles getting bumped off at the start which, really, they should be able to, I'm not sure it's such a bad thing to shake things up by losing a few random roles. That's separate from losing random players of course, since you could assign <x> NPCs roles, and kill them off as the first night kills.