Merits of Mass Claim...

[Yosarian2]

A good game should punish mass claims, but the problem is, there are too many games where it's still a strong pro-town play that people tend to just always do it.

A really good game should make there be enough disadvantages to claiming that even the standard "Oh, three people are voting for me? Ok, I'll claim" stuff becomes less of a no-brainer.

[Yosarian2]

Yeah, manipulation roles help. GG's with abilities where it's bad for them to claim (say, a person who can't be targeted on even nights) help. Improbable roles help. Some vanillia townies help. Confuisng flavor in general is a good way to frustrate a mass claim. "Sniper" type roles REALLY punish claiming (like the "union assasin" role I had in Civil War mafia where I had to figure out who the confederate president was and kill him in a game of 50 people; any role where a person can/ has to nightkill a specific role punishes the town in the event of a mass claim). There's any number of evil ways to make claiming uncesserally very unprofitiable to the town.

[Yosarian2]

And even if a game does have a doc and a cop, any cop claiming day 1 is in trouble if there's a mafia and a SK.

[Yosarian2]

Oh, and of course, in a theme mafia with a fairly limited number of characters, perhaps the best tool a mod can use to prevent the game from being broken is to give the scum safe claims.

[Yosarian2]

Well, there are two issues here - mass nameclaim, and mass roleclaim.

Mass roleclaim should, in all but endgame scenarios, result in the quick and efficient eradication of all power roles.

I agree. If that's not the case (for example, if the town has 2 docs that can protect each other, and the scum has no way of getting through doc protection), then the mod should probably change that.

Mass nameclaim should never be a problem. If you have a source with a limited number of "gimme" characters, and more than about a third of the town consists of these characters, then your source is probably too narrow. Safe claims help. Not having alignment easily determinable from rolename, based on the source helps (see Harry Potter). The best approach, though, is to take a source with at least three times as many plasusible characters as there are players in the game, and then

don't

just cream off the 20 most obvious ones.

Very true. Sniper roles help as well. Basically, any kind of claim should be dangerous, and should generally be as likely to confuse the town as it is to help it, or else the town inevitably has an unfair advantage in theme games.

Even if there's not a mass roleclaim, you've still got the "Oh, he's claiming Luke Skywalker and we're playing Star Wars mafia, and he has not been counterclaimed; he must be telling the truth" factor, which tends to unbalance games in favor of the town and encourage inane "mindless-bandwagon-to-a-claim" stratagies. Safe claims help with that as well; if half the time, the most obveous characters in a movie or book are actually not in the game and are mafia safe claims instead, then that kind of name claiming stops being an "automatically confirmed" kind of thing.

[Yosarian2]

On the subject of fakeclaims (including fakenameclaims), isn't half of the skill in being Mafia in a Theme game coming up with a good claim?

Meh...depends. In some themes, there's just no good way to do that; for example, in my MAD mafia games, I felt I had to give the scum safeclaims, since there are such a limited number of nations in the world that have nuclear weapons.

If there's a very limited number of likely claims, safeclaims are probably needed. That being said, I do agree with you that it's nice when thy're not needed, makes it more interesting to try to figure stuff out from the roles.


This thread is funny, from 2006, because I feel like we've pretty much solved this problem now; I don't know when the last time I've seen a game here with the "can be broken with an early massclaim" flaw.