Time 2 special interest. The thing with mafia is there arenāt really rules, itās more conventional wisdom. Most roles work the way they do because weāve all seen them a thousand times before, and we go with what feels right or intuitive in the moment. Thatās fine and has virtually no issues in most setups. Designing mashes, especially when you start trying to make new things, you can frequently run into issues. Even with vanilla roles you can run into some weird shit. Two roleblockers, two redirectors, two bus drivers are all pairs that do not have a natural or intuitive answer to the question āwhat happens if they cross target?ā There was a game where two bus drivers cross targeted, and our solution was (already decided pre-rand) to just make both actions fail, but the players themselves were confused why their actions failed when they realized they had later on. Thereās no RAI or RAW in that situation because you donāt ever put that kind of thing on a role card. āOh yeah and if this extremely unlikely thing were to happen, this is how it goesā is weird, and it bloats the text. And if you rand bus driver in a mash and have a disclaimer about how bus driver cross targeting is resolved, youāre gonna think thereās another bus driver.
Over the years Iāve made like a mental rulebook and built up abstractions in my mind because Iāve just written so many roles and want to avoid getting caught flat footed with something unexpected that results in something extremely unfun or broken. Itās not written down becauseā¦ no one would read it. No one is reading this and itās 2 paragraphs. So yeah, writing roles well is hard and you sort of canāt do it perfectly because there is no rulebook. I could go on but I would literally love to talk about this shit all day so Iām going to stop.
