Brainstorming

[Lambda]

Things that might be fun to play:

• Nomic, aka Rules Lawyering: the Game
• Something in a Mafia-like format, but designed to be a very different kind of experience.
• ?????

Reactions/responses? Other suggestions?

[Kappa]

I'm intrigued by point two. What kind of a thing could that be?

[jalapeno_dude]

Mornington Crescent?

(I am scared of Nomic because it seems designed so precisely to appeal to my interests that I worry it would suck up absolutely all my time. The last Mafia game already came scarily close to that.)

[Lambda]

Vague not-necessarily-would-be-fun-to-play example sketch of a Mafia-format-but-not-Mafia game:

Each player is secretly given the names of two (alternatively: three) other players, each labeled as Love or Hate. You might have two Loves, two Hates, or one of each.

Each player is also secretly given a codeword, which is a moderately common word; something that wouldn't stand out as exotic in ordinary conversation, but isn't so common as to be easily overlooked by someone who's specifically looking for it. (Alternatively, maybe each player chooses their own codeword and privately informs the mods of it.)

If you mention your codeword in a game post, the next person who gets mentioned by name by any player (including by you later in the same post) is secretly marked for death, and the mods will announce at a random time between 24 and 48 hours later that the victim dies; the victim is eliminated from the game as of the mods' announcement.

The game ends after two weeks realtime. There is no night/day cycle. Nobody has a private communication channel.

You win if, at the end of the game, you and everyone you Love is alive, and everyone you Hate is dead. Otherwise you lose.

[DanielH]

That might be fun to play if you had to mention the target’s codeword instead of your own and there was a mechanism for learning codewords. Otherwise, everybody would die instantly.

[Lambda]

Also/alternatively, there probably needs to be a non-murdery reason to say people's names.

[BlueSkySprite]

Information that gets released upon people's deaths that could be useful to learning the codewords of your enemies?
Like, if you think someone has your Hateperson's code, and when they die some codewords they know are released, you would want them to die. But if you thought they had your Loveperson's code, you would want to avoid their death.

[DanielH]

That doesn’t explain how you’d get codewords in the first place.

[BlueSkySprite]

Codeword Finders who have to release a certain number of codewords every (amount of time), and have to somehow link them with their associated people without using their names, but have some sort of win condition related to hiding them as well as possible in surrounding text, and not being discovered to be codeword finders?

[Alicorn]

Put me down for fuck yes Mornington Crescent but probably not for playing games that like Mafia rely on limited information (doesn't mesh well with, uh, me).

An idea I had while trying to design a Short Stories Mafia mechanic that turned out to be thoroughly intractable was a game with fairies and true names, but it would rapidly stop looking like Mafia at all if you obeyed flavor. I'm not sure how to make it work as a non- or pseudo-Mafia.