Tasky's Mafia Modding Manifesto

This "rules" are written mainly for my personal use, as I intend to mod some games in the future and would like to set some basic requirements everyone can expect my future games to fulfill. This is also done so that players do not have any information about the setup from the ruleset. Everyone is of course free to use this in it's entirety or only in parts, to adapt and/or to change it for their own games. If you do so, or if you have comments or suggestions, please let me know.

The Guidelines

Each rule has priority over all that follow:

1. Everything that happens must have a knowable cause.

2. The mod is not a player in the game.

3. The mod may not arbitrarily intervene in the game.

4. Any player must have a reasonable chance at winning and no player should have a too easy win.

5. The game must have an informed minority and an uninformed majority.

6. All possible role interactions must be thought through and fixed before the game. There must never be a situation where an arbitrary choice is required.

7. There is absolutely no restriction on what an individual role may do.

8. There may not be any secret mechanic in place. Any non-standard mechanic must be made public in it's entirety.

9. The mod shall not lie to the players. This includes but isn't limited to role PMs and mod-scenes.

10. Every role must work exactly as written in the role PM.

Everything that can possibly happen in the game is divided in two categories:

• Interactions of actions taken by players (Generated by roles).
• Game mechanics (Generated by rules).

Comments

• The mod is of course allowed to punish players who break the rules, this is not considered an "arbitrary intervention".
• This rules do not exclude Cults, (non-game-ending) Jesters, Lynchers, etc.
• This rules do exclude non-sane roles unless the player is aware of the fact they could be non-sane (this is presumed for cops but must be explicitly stated for other roles).
• Roles which resolve with a random component are allowed, as long as it is known in the role PM.
• If, e.g., there is a role in the game that can decide who to lynch, this seems to change the lynch mechanics; but since it's generated by a role (and written in his PM) it's not considered a mechanic and there is therefore no problem with it being secret.
• It is important to note that rule 7 is ranked higher than 9/10. This means that some roles might screw with other roles. Some examples: Cop and Framer target same townie => Mod "lies" to Cop and tells him [guilty].. A hypothetical role might turn another action into kills => A doc would kill his target (seemingly contradicting rule 10).
• Since this came up in a recent game of mine, I think it is important noting that this manifesto does not explicitly prohibit wrong flips upon death, as long as they are the effect of a players role.

This guidelines are to make sure there is absolutely nothing unfair in a game of mafia. Everyone who knows only all individual role PMs (together with all taken actions) and the public rules has to be able to decide what is going to happen (except of actions which require randomness). After the game has started, the mod must only be a referee or a judge, never must he be the one who makes or changes the rules.