about forum mafia round

[Judge Sam]

spies6.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=burg90999&action=display&thread=1574 (the thread)


Forum mafia round was the 2nd most event i was looking forward to before the game began. Not much design detail there other than thinking about the differences between spies and normal forum mafia. I thought it would be a cool idea to provide a bunch of new Spies players with a direct compare / contrast with Spies and what they are used to. It had been five episodes so it was enough time for them to have a hang of things (whereas if I did this after two rounds it wouldn't have an impact).


I also felt it would be cool to cut off PMs and AIM and limit it to one thread and see how you guys reacted after being in constant contact. There were tons of posts which was great but since it went by so quick we didn't really get a good feel. I wanted y'all to feel disconnected from the game and each other with this so I kept forum mafia round on a few extra days as well as to let me catch up with things.


Cause it took awhile to write out all those rules! But I love those rules lol. So much fun. Searching mafiascum for rules to parody was probably the most hilarious moment I had in making this game. Most of those rules are a near-direct cut and paste of REAL MAFIASCUM rules! I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a ruleset that started out with:

<0> I am the Mod thy God.

Just dripping with unbridled arrogance! What a freak.

I constructed the worst of the rules from four different mafiascum games that were going on at the same time this one was, at one point I had them favorited but I guess I deleted it.

So yeah constructing that forum mafia post was really fun. I tried to include everything from a stereotypical mafia post. First I needed a picture... how do you find a picture of 'forum mafia' that captures it exactly? Fortunately I got extremely lucky and within 2 minutes I found that perfect image! Boo, fucking, and furthermore hoo, indeed.


Moving on... I was pleased with myself for coming up with this alliterative sentence. Meanwhile, the machinations of malicious McNeal and his menagerie of meanies make the machine-manufacturers morose.


Get your punch cards ready cause here's the roster!


Fighting the Corporate Hegemony Tooth and Nail:

: Levi : Boris : Oswald, Oswald : William
: Gretchen : Roxy : Georgia : Kirsten
: Amelia : Rey : Tiberius : Pete : Jason
: Jenya : Thor : Khaled : Ariel : Mirela, Mirela


Fallen Comrades of the Revolución:

Iris, Spy, shooed away on Day 6
Ellis, Citizen, found dead in the factory on Night 6
Faith, Citizen, cast out by the workers on Day 5
Ed, Citizen, assaulted in the bathroom on Night 5
Donald, Spy, banished by the union on Day 4
Gabriela, Citizen, ambushed in the forest on Night 4
Yvette, Citizen, outcast by the proles on Day 3
Mei Yun, Citizen, trapped in the first dimension on Night 3
Paris, Traitor, exiled by Team Live on Day 2
Jaya, Spy, exiled by Team Live on Day 2
Robert, Citizen, fired and fired on Night 2
Almathea, Spy, shunned by Team More Numbers on Day 1
Callahan, Citizen, shunned by Team Numbers on Day 1
Jocelyn, Citizen, "computer" fried


I thought the punch card thing was neat, as well as including links for everything since they do that in mafia posts. took forever though!


Also I posted this in the alumni forum and DC and Vince and Xman and Sluticia helped me refine it which helped a lot thank y'all.


Commentary on rules!


I think it's funny when mod hosts use increasing amounts of bold, underline, color, italics etc etc so I tried to make that crazier and crazier as it went on also with more rule 35e and 35eee and junk too.

<4a> If your English teacher would call it plagiarism, it's not a paraphrase. (This elaborative rule added 4/27/2009 to clarify Rule 4.)

lol.

I think it's funny when mods require exact color, bolding, and ##format of votes talk about anal. No offense to mafia mods b/c it does take a lot of time but... compared to the way-too-much-work I do to host, holy crap I could run 15 regular games simultaneously lol.


The phrase "You may petition the host to add extra weeks." (to the lynch deadline) just sums up mafiascum so well it still makes me laugh.


hydras.

<20> Okay, that's enough formal-sounding rules and stuff. Good luck, have fun!

That actually was in the middle of a gigantic set of rules in a real mafiascum game.

Also I posted snippets from various crazy insane rulesets.


The deadline was three weeks from then but had you gone for more than like four days I would have set a close deadline then.


In the mafiascum game you could have voted no lynch. (imo, voting no lynch is dumb 95% of the time, and I wanted to give an opportunity to do something dumb if everyone wanted it.) There was actually a bit of thought behind what the 'real rules' of the round should be. I mean there's so many ways to play forum mafia right you can't really say it's one entity. Every site has drastically different rules. To standardize, I decided to go with mafiascum rules since that's most popular. So I took a bit of time to get all the nuances in there.


Okay boring! I should have spent this time summarizing what you guys wrote with your joking around because it was hilarious hahaha. Made me laugh each time I read a new post.


And wtf, I can't believe I saw like more than half the game on at 5:00 AM CDT lol. 14 of 19 of you have been online since 11:00 PM what the fuck! It is 5:00 AM CDT!

This was a fun round.

[Jaya]

Now I remember where the lawn faeries quote was. Duh. I loved this round. Way more fun than real forum mafia. I just wish it had gone on a little longer.

[Kirsten]

I found it especially funny because I was in the game Sam pulled the "boo, fucking, and furthermore hoo" post from . When I came to spies and saw that at the top of the page I was so freaking confused.

I thought Sam did a top notch job parodying forum mafia. He hit pretty much all the possible points he could, including his avatar and signature.

With that being said. Forum mafia is fun, and the vast majority of games bear no similarity to the ruleset's Sam pulled from, etc. I feel the need to defend the integrity of forum mafia.

[Mei Yun]

It was a tough parody to look at but most of it is true. Though I do think forum mafia is still fun despite the long rules post and its (odd?) culture, I still feel that it is a good experience for mafia playing.

[Ellis]

For me, it was the one big thing in the game that didn't "work". Spies isn't a forum-mafia game. Generally speaking I don't use the Burg much and never have, always preferring to work over AIM. If you look over Spies history and even over this game, the vast majority of the most successful citizen moves were primarily orchestrated over AIM. Just take Kirsten's Donald case. It was pretty much ignored when it was first posted in the Burg during episode three, but the very next episode we started campaigning by AIM instead and got Donald exiled. (Of course there have been some incredible balls-ups organized over AIM as well - Thor's exile comes to mind here - but it hardly defeats my point that it's primarily an AIM-centred game.)

So while I think that a lot of the flavour was hilarious and the execution was great, it was still great execution of a bad idea. By restricting the players to just forum play, you're taking away 95% of how most of them communicate with each other, and that's never going to work well. It just didn't fit this particular game.