Portalfig
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Posts posted by Portalfig
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Thank you all! It was very wonderful, played a ton of board games and hung out with my family all day. Definitely the best way to spend this day, even if I am no longer the Birthday Champion. B)
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Takuma did it - not only is he now 27 (by my dubious counting skills), but he also succeeded in becoming the new Birthday Champion!
Live footage from the crowning ceremony:
(The description on this picture is "Unsmiling geeky hipsters celebrating birthday" which is just too good)
Happy birthday, ya goof. I hope it is great and much fun! I'll get you next year. *shakes fist*
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Alright guys, here's the first one. Keep in mind that, like, all of this was written in mid-late 2014. I just went through and edited some wording a bit just now, and added the questions on the end.
For a long time the BZP Mafia community has been built around a game extremely different from other sources of the same essential game. These changes are both massive and minute, and understanding the state of the BZP Mafia game will be important for the next few essays I am writing here. Basically, here I am going to compare, contrast, and dissect how I see the BZP Mafia game, in order to get a better understanding of how to approach the rest of these topics. I need to lay some groundwork.First off: What constitutes a “Mafia Game”? In this essay, it is a game played with a fairly large group of players, wherein two or more sides try to eliminate each other over multiple rounds of Day/Night cycles. The differentiations between the three different kinds are even more simple. BZP Mafia contains any mafia games played here, on BZPower. Other Internet Mafia takes place somewhere else on the internet where the community is brought together for mafia (the forum used the most in this essay is entitled MafiaScum). Real Life games are ones that take place in meatspace.Now that we have the obvious definitions out of the way, let us begin. The first bit is a comparison between the IRL games and general Internet forum games. The two are played vastly different, and can easily be considered two separate forms of the game. I’ve personally hosted a bit of both, thus can tell the differences from firsthand experiences.IRL Mafia is much less strategic than Internet Mafia, as you likely well know. IRL Mafia is a party game of facial tells, of checking for vocal inflections and listening for movement. It is much less down to a science, and it happens over a much shorter period of time. After all, everybody is just sitting in a circle, so it can’t take place over four weeks or whatever. As well, IRL Mafia almost exclusively deals with just one’s self, and how they interpret the acts committed. There are not any channels for communicating to just a single person, everything must be heard by either the whole group or not at all.As such, the Mafia is put at an even bigger disadvantage, because they cannot communicate silently, thus giving the villagers near them a much better chance of finding the Mafia. The only real way to counteract this is by only putting one Mafian in the game, so they just have to point at those they wish to kill. Of course, that is not preferable for games with more than ~7 or 8 players.Internet Mafia, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. Internet Mafia has a new level of strategy, and is overall a more actual game. Whereas the IRL Mafia is a party game, that certainly depends on the group around you, Internet Mafia is like an intellectual game, where the mechanics of it are more prevalent. The way one takes the game past this point, then, is how we get BZP Mafia and Other Internet (Or OI) Mafia.OI takes a little bit of a hardcore approach to mafia, typically. Many of the math concepts that I’ve applied to my games in the past have hinged on the probabilities of winning that I found on MafiaScum back in the day. Indeed, their wiki shows what I tend to think of when I think of Mafia in other corners of the internet: intellectual, statistic, and probability-focused.(Disclaimer, I have not played any real Mafia anywhere else so I cannot speak with real authority in this area. This is just what I’ve found in my research.)However, Mafia here on BZP tends to take a kind of approach that marries the two extremes we’ve talked about here. It is a game where the fun and community tends to be first (like the IRL Mafia), but set in a game system that is designed for more intellectual play (as it is a form of Internet Mafia). Thus, we have a weird hybrid where game balance is needed just as much as good memes and silly fun.This is what any host, in my opinion, needs to keep in mind. We don’t play anything near optimal levels of Mafia, but we don’t want to be restrained to the limitations of real-life games of Mafia. We are kind of completely weird, and it’s kinda great.What do you guys think of this definition? Should something be added? What about my analysis of other, focused internet mafia communities?-
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I found fragments of the particular essay I meant (About hidden information in games), but not the whole thing yet - I think I never quite finished it. I'll see about fixing it up and posting it soon. I did find two others that I did complete, though. One on design trends in the Third Age (Up to XX I believe) and another one on defining what BZP Mafia even is. I think I'll post one of each of these for the next two days (Perhaps here and in my blog? Only here? *shrug*) and try and wrangle the other one into something useful in that time. That sounds pretty fun.
I will say, though, something I realized as I was doing cursory research to find the information I was using for the secrets essay: Once Iborw's current game finishes, we will have officially passed the first age in number of main series games, although probably not side games. That's pretty nutso, guys. We've come so far. *tear*
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Princely Affair is good. You should do that, because I want some mafia and i miss you guys. =P
@Taka on hidden info: I think I have an essay soemwhere about my views on hidden twists in games. I might try and find it. I wrote 3-4 essays about Mafia game design a couple of years ago that I think I never posted anywhere, lol
basic gist is that twists are okay if they are telegraphed and within design space. saying that something will change the game is good. Something changing the rules out of nowhere is bad.
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Happy birthday, Blade! Keep being super cool, yo. B)
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What is said may never cry
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Oh man guys
I just got caught up
Holy carp things are going down hardcore and it's so great
I can't wait until the next scene
Oh geez.
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Aw yeah
Time to get brewing
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Aw yeah
We did it boys
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Well, that was amusing. xD
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Hmmm. I'm going to vote ToaTimeLord as Toa because I saved his life last game and hopefully then he gives me super great Toa presents, like
uh
idk haha
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I definitely want in on this
Any spot!
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My only problem is, right now, I don't see why there is any reason to not roll, right? Cause if you fail you just get the same effect as if you just didn't roll. If you are going to give the players a choice, then perhaps some reason why failing a roll is worse that just taking the effect? Or, perhaps, some other way to make it worthwhile. Because, right now, it really just seems like a way that makes some people fail sometimes perhaps.
It basically just needs some way to make the Determination mechanic actually provide meaningful decisions for the players to make, even if it's just choosing whether or not to continue rolling.
Hmm. Resurrection-type role, perhaps. If you decide to make a Determination roll and you fail, you can't be resurrected - but if you decide to accept your fate, a resurrection role could bring you back.
That in and of itself helps a ton. Like, so terrible much.
Of course, when that role dies it then resets it back to the start, but it does help a lot. Especially if this role would also be able to revive the Anti-Town, somehow? Or, just to make sure that the Anti-Town also has a reason to choose. *shrug*
Although making the revival role a Nuetral role sounds kinda realllly interesting. They only win if all other parties die, but their only power is to make people come back to life.
Super cool and I love it
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My only problem is, right now, I don't see why there is any reason to not roll, right? Cause if you fail you just get the same effect as if you just didn't roll. If you are going to give the players a choice, then perhaps some reason why failing a roll is worse that just taking the effect? Or, perhaps, some other way to make it worthwhile. Because, right now, it really just seems like a way that makes some people fail sometimes perhaps.
It basically just needs some way to make the Determination mechanic actually provide meaningful decisions for the players to make, even if it's just choosing whether or not to continue rolling.
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Pulse.
You guys were reading pure, concentrated Pulse.
It's Delicious and Nutritious!
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Literally three people voted before you, voting three different people.
Two of them voted for ToaTimeLord, one of them voted for me.
Obviously, I wasn't going to vote for myself (although it would be amusing to kick my own head off again) and I stand a better chance of surviving if I vote for ToaTimeLord as well, rather than one of the other suspects.
Yeah, I tried to vote for Dallior earlier: Appearently it never went through. So I saw that three people voted before you, and thought that my own vote was one of them because screw reading Amirite?
So yeah. I dun messed up.
I vote for Dallior for real this time. Haha
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"Go with the flow?"Gonna go with the flow and vote ToaTimeLord.
Literally three people voted before you, voting three different people.
Is this a classic case of the "Mentioning the Bandwagon" effect? Did I find it out?
Am I good at this game yet??
Lolprollynot
E: WAIT GUYS I CAN'T READ LOL
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Voting FF. It's definitely not QP this time.
Because I totally know
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I agree wholeheartedly with Wind's statement in that
that was a thing of pure ecstasy
Well done
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Oh my gosh
I missed Mafia Libs?
Ergashfipskjl
Can somebody link me to where that happened? Cause I need that in my life, like, yesterday.
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Screw it.
Put me in, coach.
I'm ready
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Yeah, the VERSUS series of games seems to fit the mold of most of the ideas suggested here. The thing is, it also has player eliminations, which are similar to Mafia game deaths.
New Idea: Perhaps we could have a Trivia games contest, put the "Trivia" back in "Games and Trivia."
I like this idea.
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G&T Contest 2: Pacifism
This would be different, as it would force us to focus on non-combat/death games. Which, imho, would be pretty interesting. And basically the exact opposite of what the topic title is. =P
G&T Contest 2: Anti-Mafia
Whatever is going on, there certainly aren't any Mafioso around here.
Nope.
Not at all.
G&T Contest 2: Adventure is out there!
ADVENTURE, YEAH!
I don't know, haha
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BZP Mafia Discussion
in Games & Trivia
Posted
GEEEZ.
That's nuts.
(Sorry I haven't gotten the other essay up yet. It needed a little more doctoring than the last one. Also not sure I'll be able to get the secrets one done this break. I had references before to various games and I cannot for the life of me find the document in which I catalogued all that research. I might make just a longish rant about it, but we'll see. I've found myself with like 15 different projects for these few weeks home, haha)