Tips For Modding IRL Mafia

Type: Modding Author: callforjudgement

History

Original Publication: July 12th, 2017 by callforjudgement
Uploaded and Edited: April 4th, 2018 by Mathdino

Original Post

Memory

Memory is the most important skill for modding IRL Mafia games that doesn't come up much in forum mafia. If a player takes a night action, you have to remember that and do the resolution in your head; if you spend time writing the night actions down, you'll hold up the game. Forgetting actions can also rather ruin the game; it doesn't hurt to have a couple dead players help you out with the action resolution.

The way I normally run IRL mafia games is as split role/alignment, where the role and alignment cards are separate, and most actions are done publicly as day actions. That reduces the memory burden significantly and also helps keep things fresh and reduce setup speculation; the games are so much faster than regular game that it doesn't matter if some of them randomly come out a bit imbalanced.

Setup Design

Note that playing IRL is very townsided compared to forum Mafia; on a forum, scum can carefully read through their posts before posting to make sure they aren't doing something stupid, but scum in an in-person game don't have that option. It's also often possible to read people as scum from cues like body language. So you need to take this tendency into account in setup design, giving town a little less power than you would on a forum.

Voting and Nightkills

Make sure you have a clear system for voting and using night actions. It doesn't really matter what, but players need to know when someone will be eliminated, how to give night actions, etc.. (Note also that scum will be communicating with hand signals overnight, as they can't speak without giving away their identity; you need to make sure you don't confuse that with an action.)

My favourite method for doing this is to have people point at the person they want to vote for / use an action on, or upwards to no-elimination/no-action; an elimination happens when more than half of the players are pointing at a specific player for a given length of time. (You can dramatically count down from 5 or whatever.) One benefit from this is that in addition to the current gamestate always being clear, having a ton of people pointing at you is pretty uncomfortable in its own right, meaning that the physical behaviour of the game matches the mental behaviour; it can be something of a spectacle.

Note that you should enforce a rule that all scum must agree on the kill, or the kill fails.

Nights

I assume that you know how night actions are normally done in IRL Mafia, but just in case; everyone starts by closing their eyes, then you ask each role in turn to open their eyes, and choose a target by pointing. The scum open their eyes simultaneously, allowing them to communicate.

Note that you don't personally need to know who has which role beforehand; you'll be able to figure it out before night 1 and it isn't relevant before then (get players to reveal their cards when they're eliminated/killed, i.e. they flip themselves rather than you flipping them). If you have a very complex or closed setup, you may have to ask each *player* in turn to open their eyes instead, but I'd recommend against that because it takes ages and makes it much harder to remember what's going on.

If any roles are supposed to have information that isn't on the card (such as the identity of the rest of their scumteam for scum, which is nearly always needed), you'll have to have an "open your eyes" phase night 0 as well just to get the information across.

First-Timers

If you're playing with people who haven't played before, your first "newbie game" should be entirely vanilla (unlike on a forum); just use one scum faction (mafia / werewolves according to preference) and town, nothing else. Typically, you'd use 3 scum unless the group were small (≤ 10 players); scum will probably win, but that doesn't really matter because nobody's likely to care about balance in a tutorial game (and it's always possible that the scum massively screw up or town gets lucky).

You can start introducing roles to mix things up after a bit, if the players want more interest from the base game. Note that the players will quickly notice a problem if you're playing vanilla games with an even number of players; the easiest way to fix this is to skip the Night 1 kill, to get yourself back onto odds.