I'm still interested in running French Revolution mafia (which would likely not be too role crazy, as in ~50% of the populace will be vanilla). I was waiting for Pokemon mafia to either run or be cancelled, though.
Yoshiken: How much mafia experience do you have? I think everybody when introduced to mafia has their own crazy go nuts roles game they'd like to run (including me!), but as Yakumo notes those are very, very, very easy to get unbalanced. Even if balanced, lots of roles can make mafia even swingier than it already is. Plus, lots of potential crazy roles are, frankly, unfun and mess up the ability of the players to recognize correct strategies. Or, to put it another way, a chess game where the knights and rooks have different powers is cool. A chess game where you don't get told that your pieces explode when you capture with them and you're actually supposed to checkmate your opponent's bishop rather than their king and there are 6 colors on the board which are each attuned to a specific piece and changes their moves in a way that isn't told until you move onto it? That's starting to not be chess anymore.
That said role-madness games are obviously potentially awesome, just that they tend to be fraught with landmines and people shrugging at the end saying "Well, that was random, I didn't feel like I had much control over what happened." I just looked back in the archives at the games Yakumo mentioned, and yikes! The Vampire game apparently had 3 vigilantes for the scum to deal with backed by other town roles. (2nd edit: Apologies of course if you knew this already. Also, found a good quote from LadyDoor on the risks of role madness games while trolling the archives: "It [the game] was almost entirely dependent on what happened during the night. And I was vanilla. I played no part in 90% of the game. What's worse, I didn't even know that enough to prevent myself from spending hours constructing posts that ultimately contributed ... I'm not even sure what it contributed." From Incompetent Mafia, which actually looks like an awesome idea... but could have used two more vanilla townies in the game.)
Actually, speaking of that, the French Revolution is probably the wrong setting for it, but I too have a "semi-role-madness for people who distrust role madness" game sitting around for tinkering (possibly Cthulu themed? Not sure.). Beats me what people's preferences are, but putting that out there in case preferences around here ran towards that.
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Also. Random comment, since this seems to be the closest to a general "mafia philosophy thread..." just want to say I'm shocked at the number of games where character claiming was optional. I've never ever seen that done before - obviously at party games, everyone just played themselves, and at the other Internet forum I played Mafia on, everyone's character in themed games was cleanly listed at the beginning. With lots of in-character bickering going on; sometimes even too much so (draw a villain, enjoy the likelihood of an early "why not" lynch if nothing else obvious presents itself). And obviously the actual Mafia roles being quite separate from the character roles, so that they wouldn't actually be useful as hints. Having who's playing who just... breaks the scene in my head, and I for one would strongly prefer games of the Mai-Hime type where everyone is cleanly a character from early on, and people write in at least short little side in-character bits. Makes for a better "insane story of people in setting X killing each other" rather than "the gang of forum posters killing... well, they're not entirely sure who, in character." (I've mostly been do-as-the-Romans-do in Simpsons Mafia - nobody else seems to have gotten into their character, and getting into my character would involve obscuring my writing and acting like a (bigger?) idiot, which would be a fantastically bad idea when no one else is.)
