Frankly, I wouldn't want to see something like "futuristic mafia", with basic roles, standard mafia rules, with no source material to look up and with flavor that in no way affects the day discussion in the "theme games" forum; if I sign up for a game in a themed forum, I would be kind of disapointed to see a regular mafia game like that with just a tiny amount of flavor that has no effect on game play in any way to be considered a "theme" game.
Also from the mafiawiki:
A game like Futuristic mafia requires no source material, is not an experimental game, is not based on a movie or book, and nothing really needs to be explained beforehand, and I don't think it would fit in the theme game forum. I would tend to think that people who sign up becuase they would rather play theme then normal games probably would not really enjoy that type of "normal with a trace of flavor" game.Theme game wrote: A game based on a movie, book, or some other source material. It's also an administrative category on MafiaScum, which includes both Theme Games and Experimental Games.
Norinel's rule of thumb for distinguishing whether or not a game falls into the administrative category is if anything has to be explained in advance besides the standard rules, it's themed. This isn't a perfect definition, as what has to be explained in advance is everything that is outside of the definition of Normal Game, so it sort of reduces to "A Theme Game is a game that does not follow the definition of a Normal Game." Lots of people like its simplicity, though.
So basically, IMHO, if you decide to strictly enforce those rules, you would basically be completly eliminating mildly flavored games like that, which wouldn't have a place anywhere in the forum any more. If that's what you want to do, then fine, but I don't see any harm in mild flavor that dosn't effect the game being in normal games.
Personally, I'd suggest that a better definition of normal games would be "any game with normal rules, with an uninformed majority and one or two informed minorities, and where no outside research or knowlege should be needed to fake or evaluate role-claims". I think games with a mild flavor that dosn't effect the game at all should be normal games, and the rule about "normal roles always" is currently so vauge as to be mostly meaningless, and should probably just be dropped unless you want to define it more specificially.