Hosting a RL mafia game tips

[Judge Sam]

I'm going to try and gather my optometry classmates over to my house for a mafia night. I wanted some tips on how to host the game and make it run smoothly. Anyone have experience hosting RL games before? If so tell me how it went!


I guess I want to know how best to hold their interest for 1-2 hours and make them game run smoothly. What are good time limits for rounds? For the whole thing? How many people would be a good # to keep everyone interested?


Do people enjoy the host telling like gruesome stories about each person being killed? How should I conduct voting to make it both fair and run quickly? What are common things that go wrong or things people do to mess it up and how can I avoid those?

Thank ya!

[Owen]

People I know of that have hosted real life series' are: Ben (Lilith) and Tri (Spies6Idler).

Tri has hosted some really good games, so he'd be great to get some advice from if you can stomach talking to him. His SN is probably the same as when he applied to Spies... and idled out (god, I love saying that).

Good luck with this, Sam.

Did I mention that Tri idled out?

[Jenny]

I haven't hosted any, but I've played in a couple. Not sure how much help it'll be but a few things I've noticed in general.

At least in the games I've played, there's an opening night where nothing happens except for the mafia finding out who each other are, which helps if you're doing a day start to the game.

Night phases are usually pretty fast. Unless you get someone really disagreeable, most roles already know who they're going to check/protect and the night hits don't take much longer to figure out either. As long as everyone can figure out to keep quiet during the night, it's hardly an issue.

As for how to announce the results, I guess it depends on your crowd. If you think your group will enjoy lengthly stories about how someone was taken out, great. If they'll be happy with "Morning came, and an anvil fell out of the sky and hit john on the head" then that works just as well. Honestly you'd know them better then we would and would have a better judge of what they'd prefer.

As for voting, I'd say either set a time limit of a few minutes until a vote, or just wait until there seems to be a general consensus. There's nothing wrong with having a longer day phase if there's a lot of actual discussion going on, although you should use your own judgement on when it starts to get silly.

[Samson]

Be careful to prepare well in advance how roles are selected, how voting goes. It can be a mess but once it gets going everyone enjoys it so much, in fact I have never seen a game go down so well EVER in my life.