First off, thanks to everyone for playing! I had fun, and I hope you did too.
Game design for this game was fairly heavily thematic. In Paranoia, while everyone is ostensibly hunting traitors, the unfortunate truth is that everyone is in fact a traitor themselves. The cleanest way to replicate this in mafia was to make everybody scum.
How, then, to build a game where everyone's scum? The answer for me to take a a fairly standard mafia setup (multiball) and take it to its logical conclusion. As such, the game was divided into four scum teams, as follows:
1. The Commies: (Secret Chat)
Kermit (Communications Officer/Tracker)
Sh4de (Loyalty Officer/Alignment Cop+Double Bulletproof)
2. The Mutants: (Secret Chat)
Fenris (Happiness Officer/Doctor)
Jimmydalad (Equipment Officer/Weird homebrew thing)
3. The Deluminati: (Secret Chat)
Vyse (Team Leader/Double Voter)
dmboogie (Loyalty Officer/Role Cop)
4. The Moles: (Secret Chat)
Cactus (Communications Officer/Watcher)
Irina Ivanov (Hygiene Officer/Roleblocker)
Dead Chat
Every player was one-shot bulletproof, except for Sh4de, who was compensated for an extra useless role with an extra shot of protection. Each team was built to have a different level of information pointing to the setup available, and different routes to success (the elimination of everyone else), which I can vaguely summarize.
The Commies got a lllooootttt of information. The real use of Sh4de's role is that it's an immediate clue that the game is multiball (though doesn't quite say how multiball). Trackers and watcher offer opportunities to suss out alignments/groupings because generallys peaking teammates have little reason to target each other.
The Mutants got a lot of power in terms of actually affecting who lived/died--Jimmy's role gave a conditional second kill if he could guess who was going to kill someone else overnight, and Fenris' offered protection. Both, however, came with caveats; Jimmy's was useless if his target didn't shoot or got meddled with (roleblocked, say), while Fenris was gated behind being unable to protect any player twice in a row, meaning that to get Jimmy immune every other night, they'd have to throw protections at people not on the team. Also, the doctor role completely lost value should Jimmy die. My intent here was that this faction would have the least information to piece together the setup, but I messed up here in retrospect; elements of both roles signal pretty strongly that there's a lot of wacky killing going on.
The Deluminati got comparatively little to guess the setup (intended to be second to Mutants, in practice probably the least stuff) but a lot of tools to cause absolute truckloads of trouble if they did/in the lategame; Vyse's role let him double-vote if ever the number of players was even, creating an auto-win should only two players remain (where anyone else would be stuck in a no-votes-possible-night-action-guessing-game). Boogie got actually decent info from his investigations compared to basically everyone else.
The Moles got stuff to dictate the flow of the game. Watcher + Roleblocker left the roleblocker theoretically able to guarantee hitting targets with night actions, and watcher could potentially figure a lot out by watching their ally.This faction was relatively straightforward and free of pitfalls/weird double-edged quirks.
All factions got perma-chat.
Several roles were handed out specifically to slow the game down; roleblocker and doctor existed to mess up kill attempts, as did a two-shot bulletproof.
Information withholding was deliberate, because figuring out what was going on was pretty important to wrangling an advantage. If everyone was ignorant or if everyone knew the score, the game was fairly wide open. If, however, one faction figured things out quicker (which the Mutants did almost immediately) that could be leveraged to pretty major advantage.
A number of weird quirks were either for fluff or to obfuscate mechanics (which is in keeping with fluff). Treason had no penalty except getting grumbled at for treason, but I wanted something in play that would leave players unsure. Vyse's role got outed at the start partially for fluff reasons (the team leader badge in Paranoia looks like this) and partially to add some complication/challenge/opportunity to the role that potentially benefited most heavily from surviving until Endgame.
This was one of about three game setups I had in mind. I'd actually love to run the others someday and think they could work even (or especially) with folks having a clearer idea of how screwy stuff can get--one's geared for ~16-20 players and another for ~4.
I had a very long day OOC and my eye's kinda messed up from all the smoke so I'm just gonna slap post and add other stuff (PMs, chat links, actions) later. Again, thanks for playing.
