The Syndicate

I'm by no means an expert on game design/balance/strategy so I won't weigh in on that side of the equation, but from the POV of a player who plays purely for funzies, I like this premise because it reduces the drag of being a vanilla civvie (which can be an alienating experience, and which can contribute to waning enthusiasm/low participation), allows the players to be thinking very broadly about how a variety of powers could be fruitfully employed rather than focusing only on their power (and thus makes the game an educational experience and therefore of benefit to the entire community, since smarter and more thoughtful players make for better games and better realization of a hosts ideas/hard work), and reduces the risk of an awesome role/power being under utilized by an absentee player (though hopefully the new PScore mechanism is going to help make that less of an issue over time).

I think you'd obvioisly need to be thinking carefully about what types of powers you would include, since civvie powers need to acruelly be useful to civs/contribute in some small way to helping them figure out who the mafia are (for example, a traditional follow/track power becomes practically useless in this type of set-up for both civ's and baddies, while a gossip-type role might become much MORE useful/interesting than normal, since it allows many players to openly express their opinion rather than just one...but of course the possibility of a gossip/journalist/info-publishing type role being co-opted frequently by the baddies adds an extra element of uncertainty and doubt, which might allow you as a host to be more liberal with the kind of info that is released/published by these types of roles).....like I said, I'm no design/strategy wonk, but I think is really do like this concept, especially if the civs and baddies share the same pool of powers. I think you'd need to think very carefully about how many powers you'd want to have in the game...maybe a reduced number of abilities, but more powerful ones (since they'll be floating between both teams)? Maybe not everyone has a power every night? I dunno.

But I like it!