Do mafia members need an obvious link?

[Lostprophet]

What I mean is, in a potential set-up where there are no clear "bad guy" roles, would it be utterly unfair to the town to give the mafia roles no clear link to each other?

Hope that makes sense.

[inHimshallibe]

I think it's totally fair. Mafia should be found out on their play, IMO. Animafia (ran by yours truly) is an example where the mafia definitely did not have a clear link - a Woodpecker and a Platypus?!?!?!

[Mgm]

You don't necessarily need to link the roles, but the roles themselves need a good reason to be in the mafia to begin with. I usually link the kill power the scum use to their role somehow.

[Mr. Flay]

I'm with MGM - hook your roles up to some sort of consensual reality and the rest will follow (I assume you're talking about a non-Mafia/Werewolf game, since those are easy to justify...)

[Phoebus]

And mind you, good reasons to be evil can also be a blatant disregard for rules, or something similarly deviant, which can turn the most unlikely of people into mafia for game purposes.

[Yosarian2]

Well, if you're going to try to make a game that has plot/storyline/flavor, and you have a group of bad people working together to kill everyone else, I would think there should be some logical plotline reason why. Does not mean it has to be obveous, though.

[Puzzle]

Depends on the whole setup : if there is a restricted number of possible claims, then the Mafia should be allowed to claim truely, which means no obvious link that the town can discover.
Else, it doesn't really matter, it's up to personal preferences.

[Rainbow Brite]

depends on whether the game as a whole has underlying flavour. if the game as a whole "makes sense", the mafia should too.

[Mgm]

For example, I had a Fruit and Vegetable Mafia game on the Grey Labyrinth a while back. The one mafia was linked because its members were green (but so were other players) and the other was linked because they were both round.

Both turned mafia because they were mistreated. No one liked to eat Brocolli and Brussel Sprouts, so they formed the green mafia and decided to bin other fruit and veg at night.

The others a pea and a grape IIRC were also tired of mistreatment and decided to juice a fellow player every night (I almost had to write a scene about orange juice).

There was no real connection between the mafia members apart from the flavor I gave them, but the rest of the town could only find out by speculating about the kill methods.

[Stewie]

What I mean is, in a potential set-up where there are no clear "bad guy" roles, would it be utterly unfair to the town to give the mafia roles no clear link to each other?

Hope that makes sense.

I think that the evil roles, as well as the town roles, have to make no sense whatsoever. If they have a link, or an obvious reason to be evil, it would be too powerful to the town. I usually try to do things in a way the town would not expect... and often fail. My best role, I think, was in my first game modding, where the "Stewie" role was a vigilante (people would normally assume it would be a Serial Killer). It makes little sense. All you have to do is create a stupid reason why the player has the role it has. For example, there's a simpsons mini which has flanders as scum. I can't recall the reasons, but it was obviously a good choice. On the other hand, Mr. Burns was scum too, and I found that too predictable. Also, the links within the scum groups where strong. I like the reasons why a role is scum and the connections between scum roles to be weak, or completly fabricated by the mod, to stop town from second guessing you instead of just playing the game.

[Seol]

What I mean is, in a potential set-up where there are no clear "bad guy" roles, would it be utterly unfair to the town to give the mafia roles no clear link to each other?

Hope that makes sense.

I think that the evil roles, as well as the town roles, have to make no sense whatsoever. If they have a link, or an obvious reason to be evil, it would be too powerful to the town. I usually try to do things in a way the town would not expect... and often fail. My best role, I think, was in my first game modding, where the "Stewie" role was a vigilante (people would normally assume it would be a Serial Killer). It makes little sense. All you have to do is create a stupid reason why the player has the role it has. For example, there's a simpsons mini which has flanders as scum. I can't recall the reasons, but it was obviously a good choice. On the other hand, Mr. Burns was scum too, and I found that too predictable. Also, the links within the scum groups where strong. I like the reasons why a role is scum and the connections between scum roles to be weak, or completly fabricated by the mod, to stop town from second guessing you instead of just playing the game.

If Mr Burns is obviously scum, why would that player claim Mr Burns?

A good setup should force the scum to lie... but have suitable lies available for them.

[PolarBoy]

If the best move is to be as absoltutely unfatihful to the source material as possible, what's the point of having the source material in the first place?

I think (and when I say think bear in mind that this is not a conviction born out by my actions) that it may be a bad idea in general to use known source material for a game, and this is an example why. It's the celebrity X paradox that comes from the players already knowing how the story ends and who all the good guys are. One way to get around this is to scrub out any direct references. To change the names to protect the guilty, so to speak. Naturally that means going beyond just changing names to altering other details until the characters are barely recognizable. The obvious problem with this (One that I tend to ignore rather than solve) is how much source material will not survive such a transition. After the flavor is gone there is no unique structure left to make a game out of.

Of course this kind of thing mostly only bothers me. I tend to overthink the whole idea of mafia themes. I understand that often the idea is not to reforge the game of mafia in the image of some great narrative or set of relationships, but rather to give homage to some book or movie that you enjoyed, meanwhile "geeking out" with other fans of the source material. With that in mind you could ignore most of this post.

It's not like I had a conclusion anyway.

[Yosarian2]

If the best move is to be as absoltutely unfatihful to the source material as possible, what's the point of having the source material in the first place?

I think (and when I say think bear in mind that this is not a conviction born out by my actions) that it may be a bad idea in general to use known source material for a game, and this is an example why. It's the celebrity X paradox that comes from the players already knowing how the story ends and who all the good guys are. One way to get around this is to scrub out any direct references. To change the names to protect the guilty, so to speak. Naturally that means going beyond just changing names to altering other details until the characters are barely recognizable. The obvious problem with this (One that I tend to ignore rather than solve) is how much source material will not survive such a transition. After the flavor is gone there is no unique structure left to make a game out of.

Of course this kind of thing mostly only bothers me. I tend to overthink the whole idea of mafia themes. I understand that often the idea is not to reforge the game of mafia in the image of some great narrative or set of relationships, but rather to give homage to some book or movie that you enjoyed, meanwhile "geeking out" with other fans of the source material. With that in mind you could ignore most of this post.

It's not like I had a conclusion anyway.

Or you could just use other mechanics, such as safe claims , "sniper" roles, improbable roles, ect, to make sure that nameclaiming, and especally a mass nameclaim isn't a very good pro-town stratagy. If you have a well-designed game where a mass claiming won't break the game, then there's not really any problem in giving the scum scummy sounding role names.

Of course, giving scum names that don't sound scummy is one way to help weaken stratagies based around role-claiming, but it's not the only way.