La Famiglia: First Draft

[Rob MacDougall]

First of all, this looks like great! I'd love to play this.

We could have players track money (perhaps making one's wealth a required reputation); there's also the issue of gaining rank in the family to become a boss of some sort yourself one day. That'll be easy to do, but how to model greed...? I don't want players to track individuals dollars and cents, but that would begin to present a solution. Argh...

Maybe you don't want to track dollars and cents so much as cash flow? The Mob is sort of a pyramid scheme after all; at each level you have guys below you who are required to pass X amount of money to you every week, and guys above you who want their Y every week. A mob guy at any level but the very top of the pyramid can be quite high up and still scrambling to make his quota. There's probably a way you could model this much more abstractly than a strict accounting of gold and copper pieces. And that ever present cash crunch is going to generate a lot of risk taking and story-generating activity.

Rob MacD

[Bankuei]

Hi Jake,

this game looks great.  I just wanted to say that I agree with Ralph, that really one of the most important bits of mafia movies is the concept of increasing pressure/intensity, and that the idea you might want to keep in mind is one of "When you swim with the sharks, you are never safe"

Another point is that the sources of this constant buildup of pressure, suspicion and fear usually are : The family itself, other families, and of course, the cops. The latter two are pretty obvious in terms of  their roles in the conflict, but I'd like to go a little deeper into the internal conflicts.

Internally, as a family, if you are at the top, you always have someone gunning for you.  If you're at the bottom, you're hoping to not get caught in a power play or be sent on a disposable mission, or even being suspected of being a threat.  Second, anyone in the family, higher or lower, could suffer from some sort of personal flaw, such as an addiction, ego, whatever, that can lead to a downfall of the whole family.  When Don Pruccoli's favored nephew has a drug addiction, how long can it be before he makes a critical mistake and screws it up for everyone?

So if you can find a way to apply pressure using external and internal threats to keep upping the ante, you should have some very interesting play.

Second, while I can see naked wealth and ambition having its place in the scheme of the game, I can't see it as a the only motivator for all of the players and still staying true to the mob movies.  Most mob movies aren't about the money, but rather the "SA's" of the individuals involved, and how they got there.    

You should definitely consider some of the cliches of the mob genre, like the one guy who just wants to go legit, the henchman who owes his son's life to the Don, etc.  This is the stuff that makes the game interesting.  If becoming the Don is the only means of success, well, I think you'll find that the tactics and sort of play that will result won't be nearly as interesting as the mob movies.   You might even want to go as far as making it so that each player has to choose a different win scenario:

•Retire out of the game
•Go legit
•Live to your granddaughter born
•Get revenge for your brother's death
•Become the Don

This becomes real interesting if you make all of the players as part of the
same family....

Chris

[simon]

Just to add another source of conflict: there is the family, other family and then YOUR family. Your wife, your kids, etc. At least here in Italy, some of the more well known outbreaks of violence and mafia-life how emerged because of conflicts between the family (cosa nostra) and the family (parenti). Maybe you could make reputation work on a sliding scale: higher in the world of the mob, lower with yer wife and kids. Its just a thought, but the tension of being in a dude-nasty world like that of the mafia and wanting a normal life where you don't have to be looking o'er your shoulder, plotting cnotinually etc. could garnish some strong role playing opportunities. Another thing might be to consider more fully the typesof criminal activities that organised mafia-style crime syndicates (again, I'm talking more about Italy) actually get up to. The vast majority is incredibly dull and mundane (racketeering being the most obvious example) but often stretches right into government circles, and local governments are even more susceptible to corruption. More exotically, mafia families have been involved in arms smuggling, kidnapping, running municipal organisations such as the local water company, terrorist training, enforcing religious heterodoxy and other things. The type of crime being done will affect the style of play.

Umm. Not sure if I've offered anything constructive here: just some jumbled thoughts I'd been having.