Second Anniversary Fanfic Mafia
By now world has spread throughout the Pokémon fanfic multiverse: somewhere out there is a strange dimension that calls people to it, people from all across the worlds, only to toy with them in some strange, murderous game. The only information anyone's been able to gather about the place comes from the stories of a few scattered survivors, those who were somehow able to return to their own worlds after their ordeal. Not all have been so lucky. Now another crop of stranded characters awaken under a featureless sky, the world around them flat and white and empty. Which of them will one day leave, and which of them are doomed to remain, trapped forever in this strange dimension?
It's time for another round of fanfic mafia! The premise is simple: you choose a fanfic character (your own or someone else's) 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 the members of their own 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. Players discuss who they think the mafia are, based on other users' 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. The innocent players cannot communicate during the night phase, but some of them may have a special ability that they can use during the night instead.
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. You can also take a look at last year's game to get a sense of how things will work! More information about the game structure and roles involved will be provided once sign-ups have closed, as the exact nature of the game will depend on the number of people participating, but you should expect some flavor of "role madness" game, where nearly every player has some special ability, and a mix of standard roles (e.g. doctor, bulletproof) and custom ones created for this specific game. 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! 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. In order to prevent confusion, please surround any out-of-character text in your posts with [[double square brackets]] to distinguish your words from your character's.
- Please remember that all 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 in the story they came from! On the flip side, even very heroic characters may end up playing the bad guys here. Although the format of this mafia is very similar to the games I've held here in the past, nothing from the past setup is guaranteed to reappear this year. The specific roles present will be different, all roles and alignments are assigned independent of what happened in the previous game (e.g. a player having been innocent last time has no bearing on whether they will be innocent in this game), and some game mechanics may differ from previous incarnations. In general, be wary about making assumptions about the game based on what happened in previous years.
- In this game, each phase will last for 48 hours and begin at midnight UTC. However, a new rule will apply this game where if the player to be voted off at the end of the day phase was someone who had zero votes an hour before the end of the phase, the day phase will automatically be extended by six hours. This is intended to prevent feel-bad scenarios where someone doesn't even realize they're under suspicion and completely miss the chance to defend themselves or come back to the thread twenty minutes before the end of the phase and suddenly find themselves needing to somehow turn things around on an extremely tight schedule.
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. If you'd like to use another person's character please get their permission first. Your character can be 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. Please also include a link to the story they appear in if it's been published!
Sign-ups are open until midnight UTC on Friday, April 30th. The game is expected to begin around May 2nd--depending on the number of players, it may take me a few days to get everything set up.
