dont make me read the entire game just to figure out what this means out of curiosity
whatd you do
2 Likes
Or pushed that hard to just end the game d5
Softā¦
Lonelyā¦
Stranglesā¦
Just iso me and youāll see what I meanā¦
2 Likes
Basically
He annoyed me and he thought it was ai
You ended up flustered and didnāt speak for about 30 minutes at one point still responding to me.
I went to go eat
Literally the only reason I didnāt get you killed Day 3 was because of the stuff talking about you being sick or had a giant headache and I felt like a dick putting you over.
What I get for being nice.
You wouldnāt been able to probably
To many people on wazza/whysp/night
Wouldāve switched to Whysp at that point then.
So win/win but unfortunately I ran out of time.
Basically
Donāt go thinking me being annoyed at you is ai
I get annoyed a lot in games and I actually have a life to get to, sick or not
2 Likes
next game iām playing on an account called Atlas_Mum
4 Likes
No one will ever know itās you
2 Likes
and i will rand a role where i get to add someone from out of the game into a masonry with me
i will choose atlas and no one will believe me
2 Likes
im gonna make an alt named shrek gurl 13 and put a 
between all of my words and uhh
" Ok my lil ogrettes, letās get some things straight before we start the game! :
Okay so do not bother to adress me if you havenāt seen every Shrek film at least 4 times
Yes this includes Shrek the Halls, Shrek Forever After and Scared Shrekless
Do not bother to adress me If you canāt name all of Donkey and Elizabeth the dragonās babies
If you disobey any of these rules I will tunel you and make up fake info about you to get you killed you heathen "
3 Likes
i like how you edited this message to add a period
it displays a slightly different emotion
Btw
Iso is a much better person than I gave him credit for
Good job this game
1 Like
Mod Thoughts
What worked:
Timely vote counts and mod responses
Most of the roles
Role PM flavor and āflavorā assisted by the light novels
Activity of the game
What didnāt work:
Zoneās role
Kiirumaās omni-watcher
order of operations/NAR questions
hard to solve mechanics (?)
EoDs being inactive?
Manifesto:
In my mafia career, Iāve been obsessed with the āexperienceā a good game and good mod can invigorate a player in. I believe that memories and experiences are important with a game like Mafia, and I can count the number of seminal games across a variety of sites in my time playing mafia that were well-received by the community and extremely memorable. Before and during the design of this game, I was investigating the elements of what makes a mafia game āgreatā. Like, what separates a run of the mill game over something truly special and memorable? Part of that can be a high level of play, which as a mod I donāt have much control over (usually depends on the quality of the playerbase at the time) but I do have control over the mechanics and role design, as well as the flavor.
Railgun Mafia was created because I was pretty obsessed with this anime when the third season of it was released (2020) and I thought I could design a pretty good game based on the characters from the franchise. The anime definitely isnāt for everybody, but Iāve been a fan of the Index/Railgun series since I was a teenager, and the third season of Railgun in particular re-invigorated my interest in the series.
So, how did I do? I think in terms of everything I could realistically control, I am very happy with how Iāve modded this game and immersing players in the experience. I spent two weeks before the game started writing role PM and opening flavor. I really dislike writing flavor because Iām not great with creative writing (I would legitimately pay someone to write mafia game flavor for me) - so I was pretty happy to rip off some scenes from the Index light novel in order to add to the immersion. One of my pet peeves in mafia is when game mods go something like āFlavor coming laterā and never providing it, since in my opinion, it damages the immersion and experience of a mafia game and turns your game into a forgettable one.
Was really happy with my attentiveness as a mod this game, with regards to vote counts and mod questions. My general quota was providing a vote count every couple of hours or whenever a vote changed, and to answer mod questions ASAP. I think that if you are active as a mod, your players will reciprocate it and be active themselves, while if youāre sluggish as a mod, thereās less incentive to post as a player. Not sure how accurately that tracks, but I wanted this game to be all about the players, so I tried to do everything I could to make their game experience as fun/accommodating as possible.
The last thing that Iād like to touch on is that I thought the general role design was pretty good for the most part. Not super successful (as youāll see from my later comments) but this game perfectly exemplifies how I believe role-madness setups should be designed. IMO, good role madness setups should be designed in a way where every player gets a role, but each individual role is either narrow or weak. This reduces the inherent swing of these types of setups, and makes the endgame become more about behavioral analysis and analyzing the validity of claims, rather than it being āthis person is scum because [mechanical reason]ā.
As for my particular most favorite roles in the setup, I was a big fan of the Sister-in-Arms (Hippoās role) and Lukundoās role (Town Point Stalker) on the town side. I liked Hippoās role because I had a lot of fun with the role I replaced into in Ciconia Mafia (Aelin and Iās role) and I figured that providing someone else with that experience could be fun. (This role actually was designed before I randed the role in Ciconia btw, so it was a fun little coincidence). I thought that Arctic and Hippo used that role quite well, it was just a shame that their reads were pretty off for most of the game. As for Lukās role, that role took a lot of redesigning and reworking in order to get into the place where it ended up, and I thought it was a pretty good secondary investigative role. In particular, I think the design space of āmaking additional choices based on the initial investigative feedbackā you get is rather underexplored, and Iād be keen to make more roles that play into this space. Youāll notice that Isoldeās role (Mafia Informed Jailor) also plays into this space a little.
For the mafia side, I definitely liked Atlasās role (Mafia Emoji JoaT) and Whysperās role (Mafia Mind Controller). Atlasās role falls into a subset of roles that I like to call āquestā roles - roles that get stronger if you complete some sort of quest outside of your normal win condition. With Atlas, it was to make a bunch of people use the emojis he selected. These roles are cool IMO because they give the player who randed the role some sort of different thing to focus on and care about besides their win condition, and seeing how the player plays the role (as well as the potential ramifications if Atlas were to ever flip) is pretty cool.
As for Whysper, I thought that her role was a unique rolecop variant because getting your rolecop results at the start of Night as opposed to the end of Night is a big buff to the role. In addition, she was meant to be the mafiaās way to beat a potential massclaim, as she could take control of the vig and give mafia an extra kill. This was one of the roles I was most worried about in design as this role had the potential to cause the most swing or damage to the town. Luckily, she only gained control of Zoneās role, so the damage was minimized for the most part.
As for what didnāt work? There were a couple of gamestate developments I was a little unhappy about, mostly occurring at the end of Day 4. So letās talk about Zoneās role, the Ascetizier. As soon as he got his role, I realized I screwed up and should have made his role a Day ability that placed the Air Jet at the start of Night as opposed to this weird āyour role resolves before any other night actionsā which proved to be massively confusing not only for Zone, but for the rest of the playerbase as well - especially since Whysperās Mind Control took precedence over his ability. Around EoD4, there were a bunch of mod questions about how the order of operations/night action resolution worked in this setup and it was pretty tricky of me to answer to the best of my ability while not giving other players conflicting answers or outright confirming certain roles.
As a mod and designer of complicated setups, I really hate dealing with anything relating to night action resolution because itās complicated, annoying, inconsistent, and not fun for the players or the mod. But this game I really should have posted some public order of operations in order to not confuse the players and massaged all of the intricacies beforehand. The fact that end of Day 4 devolved into a bunch of mechanical nonsense I feel was kind of a failure on the setupās part considering that the first rule of the setup is āThere is no false information or bastard moddingā and watching the town get bogged down in mechanical discussion was really tough for me to watch.
Midway through Day 2 I think, I just sat down for a second and realized that Kiirumaās first ability (Maidās Daily Life) was basically an omni-watcher as if Helz/ATNoName was nightkilled at any point during the game, the person doing the nightkill would turn blue. That should be pretty obvious but I kind of had a brain fart when designing this role as it made Kiirumaās role much more powerful than I thought (in that there were probably two floating cop checks, him and Nightingaleās role) running around and it could have really damaged the mafia had the Helz/ATNoName slot been more active (or actually used their vig shots).
One final thing Iād like to discuss was that I think a lot of players in game expressed frustration at the mechanics of the game. Iām not sure if this is a failure on my part because I was hoping that the town would ditch mechanics and focus more on behavioral reads, but there was a lot of confusion regarding mechanics in this game and I think that was kind of unfun for players. It was really hard to piece together the setup given incomplete information and the fact that a couple of townies I think lied, which made the puzzle even harder to solve.
I have to ask - was the end of Day time bad for many players? I was thinking I probably should have added a poll for EoD times as opposed to just picking one that fit my schedule the best. As it stood, I feel like EoD kind of crept up on players and I feel like it wasnāt really a great time for a lot of the playerbase. Let me know if the EoD time was bad and Iāll keep it in mind for future games I host.
As for the play this game: When I randed the wolf team, I thought the town was slightly favored? Windward and Hippo choosing Arctic as his town mason-buddy had the potential to steamroll the wolves, and I thought it would be interesting to see how Helz/Luk/Windward would work together after Darling in the Franxx mafia from a year ago.
However, all of that kind of dissipated when I saw how Day 1 went with one of the worst EoDs I think Iāve ever seen on this site. The fact that not only Luk was executed when he claimed an investigative PR, as well as the two town wagons consisting of nothing but town (while the mafia were on vanity wagons) made me think that this game would be extremely difficult to solve, especially since none of the mafia were around during end of days. I also thought that the neighborhood was somewhat poorly utilized - town modgamed sort of that there had to be a wolf in the neighbor trio which wasnāt true.
In terms of night actions for the first couple of days, Iām a little surprised that night didnāt push a little harder to kill their bookie targets ā getting a cop check earlier in the game would have been pretty strong. Getting a wolf check on Isolde would IMO have broken the game wide open. Helz also was one of the few players who was scumreading Gorta but he vigged Eli randomly on N2, which I thought was a little odd. Again, a vig shot on any of the wolves would have changed the game immensely.
Day 3 was such a bizarre day as I thought the mafia could have very easily saved Whysper and forced a perfect mafia win but somehow they didnāt, and Whysper ended up barely going over because she was lurking. Wazza replacing in for the Jake slot also helped there, as I think Jake would have very easily gone over had he stayed in. The mafia made a rare mistake here, and I think town could have taken advantage of it since they at this point had two floating cop checks - the omniwatcher on Helz, and Nightās cop check. Sadly, Helz was never targeted at all this game and night used her cop check on Hippo, which, while I understand the reasoning (copping strong players is +EV) - IMO, a role that lets you chat with someone outside of the game is unlikely to be a wolf.
Day 4 was just a hodgepodge of mechanical discussion and I was a little unhappy with most of the mech discussion going on for most of that Day. I think if the town reread, looked at Whysper interactions, and probably just like made a list of what each player accomplished in every game day, they could have a chance of figuring out the wolves, but as it stood the town could not work together and even 5 minutes before the deadline the execution was in heavy doubt. I mean, the Day ended with 3/3/3 split wagons - if that isnāt a sign of a town that couldnāt come to an understanding, that was it. I was also confused as to why Zone was being wagonned when he claimed to have been redirected and the Mafia Mind Controller flipped N3. If anything I think I would have cleared Zone off of it probably?
And Day 5ā¦ I can only shake my head. In my/lylo, you never vote early. You get every single player into the game, you massclaim, and you reread to try and solve the game. The fact that the day ended not even a half hour into the thread opening was not great and reminded me a lot of the Ninjas and Guns game from the old site. Gorta in particular was struggling to find a claim as he couldnāt claim his paint action, so forcing the mafia to claim would have been a key to potentially solving this game.
Overall, I know that this was a risk when I accepted the playerbase that I got, but the town had trouble with working together, establishing an (accurate) towncore, and having townies look townie for the majority of the game. The wolves were able to allow the town to self-cannibalize themselves as opposed to making any risky plays as a result. If I had to offer some general advice for the townies in this game, I would rely less on mechanics and focus more on figuring out if the person youāre wagonning is actually a villager or not. Not really gonna blame any townies for getting this one wrong though, as this game was /really/ hard to figure out given how Day 1/2 ended and the wolves did an excellent job subtly contributing to the chaos while garnering many townreads.
Town MVP: Really hard to give one of these out given the overall lackluster town performance, but gonna give it to WindwardAway for absorbing two mafia nightkills with her gambit. Claiming Ascetic and not claiming her flavor ended up working out. HMs to nightingale (who had pretty solid reads for the most part, just didnāt push them and was mostly discredited by wolves and other townies), BradLand (for āsolvingā the game as he replaced in, but not really pushing his reads) and Hippo (for the last minute vote switch onto Whysper)
Mafia MVP: Gonna give this to both Gorta and Atlas for being largely unsuspected for the entire game. Atlas in particular did an excellent job subtly advancing wolf agenda while spamming the thread, and Gorta did a good job largely avoiding suspicion as well as coordinating night actions. Isolde also did a great job (more overtly, IMO) advancing wolf agenda while confusing the rest of the town.
And thatās mostly all Iāve got. Can expound on different parts of this game if you have a specific question; I love talking about mafia despite not having a whole lot of time to play the game these days. If you have any requests for me to critique your play, lemme know.
Thank you to Wazza, ATNoName, nightingale, and BradLand for replacing in, and thanks to osieorb18 and ZeDorkSlipeur (from MTGS) for reviewing this monstrosity of a game. Thank you to my co-host, Tsumugi/ChadMD, as well, for handling vote counts during the Saturday I was busy.
I designed this game around two years ago, osieorb was very active in continuing to review this game, this game got nuked because of the old forum dying, and then I had to rewrite everything from scraps - in case you were wondering how long the process is to run a game like this one is.
10 Likes