Quote from: Drohem;538076I

Also, because there is a 99.5% chance that there will be character conflict as some people just aren't cut out for that sort of gaming.

character conflict is the heart of this style game IMO.what makes a mafia rpg sessin different from alot of others is the possibility that the guy sitting next to you could have orders to take you out (or might try to do it on his own out of simple ambition).

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;538078character conflict is the heart of this style game IMO.what makes a mafia rpg sessin different from alot of others is the possibility that the guy sitting next to you could have orders to take you out (or might try to do it on his own out of simple ambition).

Oh, I agree, but I think that it is also a barrier for a lot of people because they're just not comfortable with that type of gaming.

Quote from: Drohem;538083Oh, I agree, but I think that it is also a barrier for a lot of people because they're just not comfortable with that type of gaming.

Absolutely. And the Gm needs to really keep an eye out for problems. If people are having fun backstabbing one another its great but if folks are starting to take it too personally it can wreck the game. For the most part my players have always handled this well. I pretty much explained the nature of the campaign and said I would have all dice rolls out in the open so everyone felt things were handled fairly (this really helped actually).

The interest in the genre itself is extremely high, the movies, tv shows and novels never never get old, so it us not the idea of the Mafia/OC itself that is unattractive.

The idea of acting as a criminal isn't unattractive or that genre wouldn't be one of the hottest in video games and webgames.  Shooting someone in the back of the head isn't a problem either because a ton of those games are PvP.

So translating to the tabletop, what happens?  Some ideas.
1. The PvP element at the table is much more personal, someone who can cap the avatars of strangers all day long may not have the stones to look another human in the eye and roll the dice.
2.  The tabletop role-playing environment offers much deeper immersion, so you have much less distance between player and character then you do in non-tabletop games, which makes doing Mafia things less enjoyable on the tabletop.
3. Very narrow focus.  I can take any game and reskin it as Mafia (possibly adding some specific mechanics to do so) but I can't take a Mafia game and do a whole lot of non-OC stuff with it, particularly if it is designed specifically to support OC play.  OC=Organized Crime.

Another question: Are specific mechanics for determining rank, position, honor, blood relations necessary or even desirable?  Or in other words, is Vampire the best Mafia game if you take out the fangs?

Quote from: CRKrueger;538104Another question: Are specific mechanics for determining rank, position, honor, blood relations necessary or even desirable?  Or in other words, is Vampire the best Mafia game if you take out the fangs?

i think rules or guidelines help. It really depends on how well the gm can manage these things without a fair system in place. I do like some kind of honor rating to help determine how a pc can get away with without the bosses deciding to whack him, but the gm also needs the power to overide this in cases where the answer is obvious (or where he feels comfortable simply deciding if tony takes out christoher for hitting the blow again). Guidelines help deal with stuff like advancement. Stuff like how much a guy earns and how valuable he is to the organization are certainly factors. Also, ranks in the mob mean something so it helps for the gm to know what a player should expect when he becomes a soldier or capo.

In my own game I have two methods for dealing with rackets. The first is a rather basic table taken from the crime network book but the other is a much more elaborate microsoft xcel racket management format one of my players put together (basically considers overhead costs, manpower costs, risks of something going wrong, etc and calculates the chances of making money or running into a problem).

Quote from: CRKrueger;538104Another question: Are specific mechanics for determining rank, position, honor, blood relations necessary or even desirable?  Or in other words, is Vampire the best Mafia game if you take out the fangs?

I think Vampire would be very effective, if you reinterpret everything with a mafia lense. For example the backgrounds of Status and Fame, where Status would basically represent your theoretical place in the hierarchy of the mob, whereas Fame could mean you're famous amongst gangsters for some reason or another, like "Oh, you're the guy who did the Widenburrow hit a few years back? Wonder you're still alive to talk about it, chap..."

You'd probably have some fixing/tweaking to do, rules-wise, in some places (I'm thinking about this as I type about backgrounds - a Status could evolve rapidly up or down, for instance, so making these kinds of background ratings strictly a function of XP seems counter-intuitive), but I'd say the rules frame is 90% there.

Another genre involving players as criminals is Cyberpunk and several of those games have Reputation and Professionalism rating mechanics in place that I think you may be able to hack and reskin.

Quote from: CRKrueger;538122Another genre involving players as criminals is Cyberpunk and several of those games have Reputation and Professionalism rating mechanics in place that I think you may be able to hack and reskin.

Yes, probably. Could work. Shadowrun comes to mind with the basic premise of the game. Substitute shadowrunners for mafia blokes doing hits and all sorts of shoddy business for the big fish and that could work.

The big advantage of Vampire in this is that the framework, the structure to build the by Night is basically all there: you just substitute the Masquerade for the mafia world and you're almost there. You use the coteries as groups or closely related individuals, clans as you know.. clans or families with dons and capos and shit, and really the structure is ready to use.

Quote from: Benoist;538130Yes, probably. Could work. Shadowrun comes to mind with the basic premise of the game. Substitute shadowrunners for mafia blokes doing hits and all sorts of shoddy business for the big fish and that could work.

The big advantage of Vampire in this is that the framework, the structure to build the by Night is basically all there: you just substitute the Masquerade for the mafia world and you're almost there. You use the coteries as groups or closely related individuals, clans as you know.. clans or families with dons and capos and shit, and really the structure is ready to use.

Yeah that really surprised me when you brought it up, it's exactly the same fucking thing, the stodgy elders who hold tradition first, the young outcast turks who want power, the Masquerade=Omerta, even Elysium where hits aren't allowed, it's uncanny.

Precis had Mean Streets, which was basically usable as a mafia RPG.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Benoist;538116I think Vampire would be very effective, if you reinterpret everything with a mafia lense. For example the backgrounds of Status and Fame, where Status would basically represent your theoretical place in the hierarchy of the mob, whereas Fame could mean you're famous amongst gangsters for some reason or another, like "Oh, you're the guy who did the Widenburrow hit a few years back? Wonder you're still alive to talk about it, chap..."

You'd probably have some fixing/tweaking to do, rules-wise, in some places (I'm thinking about this as I type about backgrounds - a Status could evolve rapidly up or down, for instance, so making these kinds of background ratings strictly a function of XP seems counter-intuitive), but I'd say the rules frame is 90% there.

You could also combine it with Zynga's Mafia Wars, so that for instance instead of going amongst your Herd to reap Vitae, you could get cash from your associated whores and drug dealers.

JG

Ben's call out on the oWoD mechanics is a good one.

I did a oWoD conversion for a cop game. A standard police procedural and it worked really well.

The combat is lethal enough to be avoided. PCs can be badarse jsut based on stats and skills.

I agree that the lack of a 'supernatural' edge was a weakness so I had the PCs investigating a serial killer that took down people he thought were witches to kind of get at that CoC investigation edge.

Burger Games put out a great free mafia RPG years ago called Mobsters. It had rules for running rackets, mob wars, a campaign setting (1920's New Orleans), and lots of other good stuff. I believe it's still available on their website.

Doesn't REIGN have rules for "groups" that you could use for mafia clans?

There is a mafia rpg called Crime Network by Bedrock games.  Excellent game