I'm not sure I have much to add to what others have said! We love having new players around here and I'm really proud of the group of hosts and players we have on this site. As it is mafia, stuff gets heated as it inevitably does, but we from our start have instituted the Mod on Duty function (which is very similar to a mediator, but can also function just as a person to vent to) to help mitigate anything from escalating too big in the thread.
Many of us are good friends here. I started playing mafia back on Lostpedia and affiliated sites over 5 years ago now, loved the game, loved many of the other players, and so I introduced it to a bunch of my friends at ProgArchives where I had been a member for some time, and many of them hadn't played previously and grew to love it too. I created this community at a time when some of the LP-based player base started losing interest in mafia due to various reasons, and mafia was not happening at ProgArchives because it died off after I stopped hosting games (it wasn't a good site for mafia hosting from a functionality-level, that's for sure). As a result, the beginning of this site was a bit of a culture clash/melding between the two communities, one group which had an established mafia community across a few different sites (Lostpedia, Hedville, The Piano, RevolutionMafia) and had played for years, and another which had only played the two games I hosted a couple of years prior (ProgArchives), but since then I feel it's come to form a unique blend of the two cultures that I'm really happy with. I also recruited heavily from literally every part of my RL friend pool (high school, college, work, etc.), so many of my best friends play mafia here as well, and I know others of us have recruited similarly, so the player base isn't restricted to the two original groups, not by a long shot. Especially now with Roxy bumping into Thingyman on another mafia site and we've started building solid bridges between our site and other mafia communities, we've been introduced to many new mafia people with different perspectives this year... and I, for one, have loved it! I really can't express how excited I am to be a host for this first official crossover game!
The people are what keep me from investing so much of what free time I do have in this site and it wouldn't be what it is without them.
I feel like as a site we're also pretty open to new ways of looking at mafia games, although as Roxy and others noted, there are some norms here that I will be actively trying to break one by one over my coming games.
Everything you can want to know about the game setup should be in the Gameplay and Rules section on the first page (it will be included in the main game thread as well), but if you look it over and have any questions, definitely let me and Sloonei know, and feel free to always ask folks in the thread too, depending on what the question is. No one will be bothered by engaged players wanting to know more about how we do things around here, that's for sure.
