Protip: concealing the setup just means people put more time into the game before they recognize that the setup is unbalanced/breakable/flawed and that's just bullshit. If you don't think that's true, I broke MrShrike's game TWICE in two consecutive posts. Both times he had been offered constructive criticism prior to the start and he swore that it was a playable game.

Why is it a bullshit setup and a waste of time? I'm so glad you asked. Because the game is all about information and pitting an informed minority against an uninformed majority. When you take away that balance between player count and facts, you just have a series of partially-informed minorities. Sometimes they have different abilities, sure, but what it really boils down to is that there is just 1 dominant strategy that everyone should employ. And the strategy is simple: hide your abilities (if you have any) and appear vanilla town (even if no town exists, see Coq's 3 mafia strategy.) The game is no longer about gaining information from other players, its about gaining information about the fucking setup in order to be the first to exploit its obvious weaknesses. The more elaborate the setup itself gets, the more difficult it is figure out what's going on, and the more players (should and do) adhere to the 1 dominant strategy. Then it's all luck, and everything basically amounts to Random Vote Stage after Random Vote Stage.

Sorry, but I can't sit idly by and watch an otherwise fairly active mafia community waste a week or more playing a crap game. If you've never hosted a game, start with Vanilla, for the love of Christ. And even then, I don't trust anyone here (coq included) to devise a secret setup game all by himself. If you want to add some mystery to the setup, then post a list of possible setups and randomly determine which one is selected (meaning, 3 mafia/1 nurse/1 sheriff. 1 mafia/1 godfather/1 vigilante. 2 mafia/1 miller/1 sheriff/1 nurse.)

And WellAdjusted, this is nothing against you personally.