First Anniversary Fanfic Mafia
Strange disappearances plague the worlds of Pokémon fanfic. Beloved characters, places, and even stories within the stories, the legends of each individual world, have vanished so completely that few remember they ever were. Some of those who were whisked away have returned to their stories, speaking of a world-spanning council from that attempted to uncover the force behind these disappearances. But though they were able to root out the evil at work among themselves and escape to their homes, they couldn't discover the root cause of the problem--and there were many heroes who didn't return home at all. Now a new group of characters awakens in a strange, featureless place, with only the vaguest idea of the trial in store for them...
Fanfic mafia returns for a second year! The premise is simple: you choose a fanfic character (your own or one belonging to someone else) and are randomly assigned to one of two teams. You'll either become part of the mafia, working to take control of the game by eliminating your opponents, or you'll become one of the innocent, working to discover and jail the members of the mafia before they can bring the group under their sway.
If you haven't played mafia before, it works like this:
1. Players are assigned to either mafia or innocent factions. The mafia know who belongs on their team, and they may freely communicate with each other outside of the game thread. The innocents do not know the alignments of any of the other players, and they can interact only by posting in the game thread at designated times.
2. The game proceeds in a series of "day" phases and "night" phases.
During the day, all players are "awake" and able to post in the game thread. All players discuss who they think the mafia are, based on other players' posts or what they believe may have happened at night. Ultimately this leads to players voting on which person should be sent to jail. If the jailed player turns out to have been a member of the mafia, the innocents are one step closer to winning--but if they guess wrong, they'll only help the mafia in their quest to eliminate the innocents.
At night, the mafia choose one player to make disappear. They're free to talk with each other, plan, and strategize, but the innocent players cannot communicate. However, some innocent players may have a special ability that they can use during the night. What kind of ability a player might have will be determined by the character they choose to use in the game.
3. The game continues until either the mafia make up the majority of remaining players (meaning that they can control all day-votes) or the innocents successfully jail all of the mafia.
If you'd like more details, check out this beginner's guide to Mafia, which discusses how the game is played and some of the common terminology and player roles that are often used. This game will use primarily common roles (possibly including some variant(s) of cop, doctor, vigilante, roleblocker, mason, bus driver, or tracker), with the potential for one or two unique roles to be included. Please feel free to ask any questions you might have either here in the thread or by private message!
There are some additional things you'll want to keep in mind for this game:
- This is an RP-optional mafia using fanfic characters! If you would enjoy pretending to be your character, reasoning and reacting to the situation in the same way that they would, then please feel free to post in character as much as you'd like! However, to indicate that you're posting in-character, please surround any in-character text in double square brackets, [[like this]]. You are also welcome to include as much out-of-character straight strategizing and discussion in your posts as you'd like. If you'd prefer to play without RPing at all, that's totally fine! Your character choice will be used to flavor your role but have no other impact on the game.
Relatedly, roles and alignments will be assigned at random to players. This means that you shouldn't assume that anyone is a member of the mafia simply because their character is a villain! On the flip side, even very heroic characters may end up playing the bad guys here.
- This game continues the story begun last year. If you'd like to check out the old thread, you can view it here; however, this is not necessary. You should be able to jump in here and enjoy yourself even if you've never played a game of Mafia before, and certainly if you didn't play last year's. For those of you who played last year: do not make assumptions about the roles in this game, the alignment of any player, etc. based on what went on in last year's Mafia. In order to keep things fresh and prevent repeat players from having an advantage, I am changing up the roles being used, and all alignments are always randomly assigned. This doesn't mean that any role used in the previous game won't also appear in this one, but neither does the fact that a role was used previously mean it's more likely to show up in this game. In general, you should make no assumptions about what's going on based on what happened in last year's game.
- In this game, each phase will last for 48 hours.
Right now we're in the sign-up phase. If you'd like to play, post in this thread with the character you want to use. This can be one of your own fanfic characters, or a character from someone else's story, but if you'd like to use another person's character please get their permission first. They can be characters related to any franchise, Pokémon or otherwise! Also, feel free to use the same character you did last year if you like, even if they ended up getting disappeared/jailed in the previous game. Please include some basic information about your character: name, species, appearance, basic personality traits, and anything else you'd like your fellow players to know.
Sign-ups are open until midnight UTC on Saturday, May 2nd. I'll get everything set up, and then the game will begin Sunday, May 3rd.
