Dormio, what IS the right way to go about getting people to join my game?
Make a theme that is interesting or supports some unusual mechanics. Post rules using the accepted formatting and throw in a few images or something fun to buy people's interest. Actually I am bored, here is an example of something I just scratched up for a vanilla game.
Cat and Mouse Mafia
Many years ago, before the dawn of man, cat and mouse did battle for the right of supremacy: who would acquire the coveted seat of dominion over humans? The casualties were immense. Whole lands were covered with the blood of the fallen. Where feline and rodent did battle, with their fearsome weapons of mass destruction, the land was soiled, never to grow life again. They fought unto the very brink of extinction, when finally, the mouse was banished to the darkest corners of the world, forever forbidden from the homes of men.
So it is spoken, amongst the cats and their kind.
The mice never surrendered, never gave up their eternal struggle. Though hopelessly outgunned, impossibly outclassed in both sheer size and strength, the mouse and their kind knew that terrible sacrifices were necessary for their ultimate victory. Far down beneath the humans wreck of society, underneath even the secret eldritch lairs of demon, dragon and Dormio, the mice have thrown up their glorious shrines to their unforgotten dead. Names scribed down and etched in stone, legends told to children and tales told to soldiers, of courage against impossible odds, and victory that might yet still be caught.
You are part of an advance party, seeking to learn when it is time for the mice to begin their counter attack. Already the seeds of victory have been planted. The cat, long seen as a symbol of wisdom, grace, and integrity, is now ridiculed on the internet as a greedy and lazy creature. The number one pet for humans, which was once cats, has now fallen to dogs. The time is ripe for cats to finally be eradicated from the world.
You've been placed in a student accomodation to spy on the humans and learn what you can from their education institutions. At first it was an easy deal, you and your fellow mousy comrades have lived a life of luxury, running rampant in a sharehouse owned by a bunch of poor students, growing fat on their discarded pizza boxes and tv dinners.
All that changed today.
This morning, your unit commander, Sky_Paladin, was found beheaded, eviscerated, dissected, and partially devoured in the middle of the kitchen floor. Blood stained paw-prints, and the ominous sound of tinkling bells give testament to his fate.
There are cats in the house.
Sky_Paladin - Vanilla towny.
You are a mouse. Your special abilities are eat cheese, sneak through impossible gaps, and see in the dark. This is represented in the game with the following special rules;
1 - You may vote with ## vote <player name>
2 - You may post in thread during the day phase.
Confirm in the game thread when you receive this message.
You win when the mice can live in peace. Good luck.
***
Rules stolen from Prims Untitled Story mafia.
.::RULES::.
- I'm the mod and my word is final. Don't do anything that you expect will annoy me, even if it's not in the rules. This includes looking for loopholes.
- No Outside Contact, keep the talking to the game thread unless your role allows otherwise.
- Don't directly intefere with the game if you're dead or not playing - if you're going to talk to other players or post in-thread I expect everything you say to have no game relevance whatsoever. Also, do not talk about the game to other players (dead or living) while deceased unless both of you have received a link to the graveyard quicktopic. The graveyard will contain a list of players who have access to it in the OP.
- Don't directly quote communications with the mod unless given permission. This includes your Role PM.
- Going 24 hours without a post nets you a prod. Going 48 hours without a post or receiving too many prods is likely to result in a modkill.
- Navy is reserved for mod actions and edits.
- Don't screenshot things.
- Don't edit your posts.
- Don't post after hammer.
- If you get yourself modkilled, you lose the game and your alignment may be subject to further punishment to circumvent any advantage your death could result in.
- Have good integrity. This includes not being a dick.
- Play to win.
- Breaking rules once will get you a warning or a modkill depending on the severity. Seriously, it's nothing you haven't seen before, but if somebody does get themselves modkilled, it will result in the player being removed immediately, phase ending, and no flip.
- The show must go on. If a player goes afk or gets modkilled, depending on the options, a vanilla towny may be promoted to the afk/modkilled persons role, or a dead player given a chance to re-enter. If the former seems likely, dead players who have shown an interest in having another go will not be given a graveyard link.
- Rules may arbitrarily changed or added to as necessary.
.::SET-UP INFORMATION::.
- Day 1 will last 48 hours; after that it's 72 hour days and 24 hour nights. Majority is required to lynch. If a majority is failed to be achieved, all players who failed to vote will die. If no player is eligible, the last player to vote will die.
- Flips will contain character name, alignment, role name, and a quote of the deceased's role with all factional abilities removed.
- LYLO and MYLO will be announced, but not whether they are potential or not.
- This set-up is explicitly not bastard and not experimental in any way. There is at least one Vanilla Townie.
- The following roles have been declared Super Lame and are guaranteed to not be in the set-up: anything that results in a lying flip, any role that requires a RNG for the mod to process, any role that does not work as described in the player's role PM, any Cop variant other than sane, any role that can result in a change in alignment.
- Players will know if their action fails or if they are redirected, but only if they have an ability that is affected.
- Action priority is: Sabotage/redirect type actions go first, information/protection actions second, killing actions go last.
- Players will only receive a notification of the success of their action if it is an action that returns information, otherwise they will just be told 'redirected' or 'action failed'.
Casualties
0 - Sky_Paladin; was too tasty for his own good.
Player list:
***
So in this setup I want to include a 'cheese' mechanic. Players need to be active or they will starve and die. I implemented this as an 'afk removal tool', if you don't vote or go afk too long you will get modkilled. In the real set up I would reword the 'go afk and get modkilled' to something like "You are a mouse and require cheese. Cheese raids are risky and therefore only contributing mice will be fed by the team. If you do not post (insert requirements here) within 48 hours you will get a warning. Failure to (meet requirement) after 72 hours results in a modkill.
edit to add: I would probably go a step further and let all players /givecheese in public to any player they wanted to keep alive. Players need at least on cheese per day phase to not starve and die. I'd work out how to handle this mechanic in greater detail e.g. how much cheese you have in the game etc.
The 'show must go on' rule is one that I've incorporated successfully in Megatokyo; if you have a player go afk and they are roled, kill them off without a flip and give their role to a vanilla towny. Caution must be used (e.g. don't give a scum role to a vanilla towny who has been cop checked) but generally it's very easy to get right. I've also sent a vanilla town who died night 1 back in to the game as a member of the scum team with no harm done.
If you want to do something like the graveyard controls the lynch, what is your objective? Can you test it? Can it be broken? Can scum win? Can town win?
If your graveyard controls the lynch, and town need to kill the scum to win, what's the reason for the graveyard at all?
Part of the reason that dead players can't talk is because their alignment is known. You don't know who to trust until their dead, and then their dead. What if you killed players without a flip?
Anyway I think that your mechanic can work but you need to 1 - why do you want to do it (is there a specific problem you feel needs to be addressed), and 'because it is fun' is not an answer; 2 - how can you implement it so that it is an interesting tool that players can use or be handicapped by, and not as something that breaks the setup.
Basically I guess you need to show more thought and effort for people to want to buy in to it. I already signed up though because I don't care about rules or mechanics, I just want to play.
Wow I wrote too much, time for bed.
edit:
I'd cheese something like this. And then maybe some roles that prevent players from giving cheese/gives extra cheese. Well I'd write up the draft and get a co-mod to look over it. You do have a co-mod, right, Oarfish?
Every player can ##givecheese to any other player during the day phase, but once given, it cannot be changed. You cannot eat your own cheese for you are a proud and altruistic soldier of mousekind, living on the mantra of 'should I die, please eat my body.' Every mouse needs one cheese per day or death.
edit edit edit; or I would just use the ##givecheese mechanic instead of voting. When all players except for one player have received cheese, the phase ends, and the uncheesed player dies. I'll playtest it and run it over on Megatokyo.
