This game is a sequel to another one I hosted a few months ago on Naruto Forums. It was an idea I suddenly had one day and I hosted a quick game with 12 players just to see if it could work. The result was a really fun game imo, but it had some balance problems that kept it from being perfect.
Link: http://www.narutoforums.com/showthread.php?t=1035049
MP suggested I should try it here again, and I think I'm gonna do it. Hopefully this time around I'll have more time to balance it, and will also be able to do it with more players. I think it should be a Speed Game, since it's kind of a weird setup for a big game.
To sum it up: this setup inverts how lynches work. Instead of trying to lynch mafia, civilians are trying to lynch civilians. And mafiosos are trying to lynch mafiosos (while pretending they want to lynch civilians). Mafia wins when every member of the team is dead. Town wins when the number of town players is equal to, or lower than the number of mafia players.
In the game I hosted most roles were generic with no abilities (I was trying to keep it simple to avoid problems), and there were a few civilian roles that mirrored classic ones (cop, doctor and vigilante). The translation of those roles is what caused some of the unbalance, since they clearly weren't made for inverse mafia (for example, a role that confirms mafia players can be incredibly broken in this setup, since it guarantees that player will never be voted and thus not get lynched, specially in my forum were revealing night info is usually allowed), so I had to fix them. I probably should have tried to make more original roles, but that's what I intend to do this time around.
As for the mafia roles, I went with roles that could steal votes from town players. Pretty simple, and it added a cool element to the game, but I may have made the mafia team overpowered in the end. I intend to make the mafia roles more different from each other this time around, with only one role capable of stealing votes, and the others having different abilities.
Another issue was figuring out what to do with the night kills, since they are obviously bad for mafia. I made them optional for mafia, so at least they could kill the power roles if they needed to, but I think that execution was somewhat sloppy, with mafia players having trouble to understand what they were supposed to do. I could make night kills mandatory in the next game, but I'd have to pay attention on the town/mafia rate since I'd probably have to increase it to give mafia a good fighting chance. Otherwise, I could replace the night kills for some permanent roleblock. Still not sure about that.
Here are the roles I used in the first game. Note that I went with an Escape from Hell theme, where every player starts dead and trapped in hell and they are trying to escape and come back to life, while mafiosos are demons who are disguised as humans, and will capture the human souls on Earth if they managed to escape. The theme will probably be different this time, though.
Thoughts? ideas? Suggestions? I'm all ears.