Be Excellent To Each Other

Wld u lk 2 ply a gme?

Basic formula

We tell people all they have is a mobile phone. Posts are limited to 160 characters, posts per game day are limited to 20 and names of posters will be falsified.

The scenario

The last thing you remember is the sudden panic, the struggle, the rag reeking of chemicals clamped over your mouth and nose. Then... nothing. Until you wake up here. "Here" is a 10ft square cell; a cage, hanging in darkness. You can't see a floor beneath you, it's hidden in shadow. There is a dim light in the top of your cage, a tiny camp bed along one wall, a bucket in one corner, and a small pile of dried foodstuffs and bottled water in the opposite corner. The walls of the cage are made of up inch-thick steel bars, cold to the touch, and a few inches beyond the steel are mounted thick plexiglass sheets. The plastic is scuffed and stained with dirt and a dark brown substance. Air comes through a small vent in the ceiling. As your eyes adjust to the gloom, you begin to notice other cages hung around the space, shadowy figures in them moving around. You are not alone.

A loud beep. You start, heart hammering, and look under the bed to find a brand-new Nokia smartphone with a full charge. "1 SMS received" says the screen. Mouth suddenly dry, you click through to read the text. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?

The phone has two numbers in the phonebook. One for the credit check, "TWENTY SMS MESSAGES REMAINING, NO CALLTIME REMAINING" reports the computer. The other is simply labelled GROUP CHAT.

Design goals

This is half MafiaScum varient and half RPG. In traditional MafiaScum, the players can talk and talk endlessly; here, we use tight constraints on player communication (by capping each post to 160 characters and capping the number of posts each player can make per day) to attempt to build an atmosphere of claustrophobia on the players. In addition, the players will be told nothing at all about the roles in the game; they will know nothing, nor will they know who they are talking to, as all names in the game will be switched for codewords.

As written, the game rules were designed for around 10-12 players. Unfortunately I didn't tell Grim... that and before I noticed he had 20+ players signed up to play. This probably made the pseudonyms rather unmanageable for players; avatars would help a lot.

Voting Rules

Unlike normal MafiaScum, there is no "nolynch" option. At the end of each day the two people with the most votes -- even if it's just a single vote each -- die. The game ends only when there is a day with no votes. It's up to the players to figure out that the only way to win is not to play.

(Pundy totally called that within about ten minutes of the game starting: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5040&p=336518#p336518 )

Roles & Win Conditions

* Altruistic innocent: you are just a frightened, ordinary guy or gal, but you're not going to let this monster push you around. You want to help people get out of here. You win if more than half the Innocents survive the game.
* Selfish innocent: you know how this goes. When you're being chased by a bear, you don't need to outrun the bear: you just need to run faster than the people you're with. You win if you survive.
* Protege: the Administrator can't set all this up by himself. He has recruited assistants -- yourself, XXX, XXX, etc. You weren't expecting to wake up in the traps yourselves, but you know what is going on: this is a test of your willpower and your wit. Your master is giving you a chance to shine, to prove yourself his successor, and you must use all your cunning to ensure you escape alive. You win if you survive.
* Selfish protege: the Administrator can't set all this up by himself. He has recruited assistants -- yourself, XXX, XXX, etc. You weren't expecting to wake up in the traps yourselves, but you know what is going on: this is a test of your willpower and your wit. Your master is giving you a chance to shine, to prove yourself his true successor at the expense of the others, and you must use all your cunning to ensure you escape alive and all the other proteges do not.
* Hacker: sure, you're frightened, but there's things you can do here. You know how computers work and this smartphone has discovered a secured WiFi network. It's password protected, but you can work around that; beyond that you find a control network for the trap boxes you are all stuck in. It'll take a while to break the codes, but once per night you can trigger the trap for any person you choose, killing them. You win if over half of the Innocents survive.
* Phreaker: sure, you're frightened, but there's things you can do here. Once per night you can hack into the prepay phone network and give one player of your choice twice as much SMS credit.
* Undercover cop: sure, you're frightened, but there's things you can do here. Presumably the madman who trapped you in here doesn't know you have buddies on the outside. As a night action, you can choose any player to investigate; you'll be told that player's win condition and role details.
* Administrator: the shadowy figure running the game.

Note that compared to a normal game, the "mafia" element are hugely nerfed. They cannot communicate outside the game and have no night action. They can only rely on subterfuge and backing each other up in the game -- much closer to the in-person Mafia game.

Note also that, in practice, the Protege and Selfish Innocent elements of the game are basically the same. This is deliberate; the game structure is designed to pervert the usual MafiaScum rulesets.

ANOTHER NOTE: after Day One, the Hacker role was revised. Win Condition was changed to "survive" (which Malc didn't notice, and continued to play to a "save people" condition; hence his role claim and sacrifice on day five) and his night action became an anytime action. However, when using his phone to hack a cage, he couldn't post and the hack action took anything up to several hours from when he decided who to target to complete.