Scummy playstyles, and if you have one, what should you do?

[Kagami]

Anyone who is 100% transparent is a significant boon to town regardless of their activity otherwise, barring extreme misplays (fake guilties and the like).

[Kagami]

and I agree that if people find you scummy, and you are not intentionally adopting a pro-scum playstyle, they are wrong and should re-evaluate their model.

[Ranmaru]

And I echo everyone saying the best way to look town is to scumhunt--transparency, engagement with the game, and wearing your heart on your sleeve help, too. (People playing TO look town wind up seeming scummy for their cautiousness.) But I think some intuitive combination of charisma/rhetorical ability/skill with words is necessary to avoid being lynched. For me, it's something that I didn't start with, but just

clicked

midway through my first game once I built confidence. Like Ether said, it's hard to teach, and that might be why there's a divide in this thread.

I'm also a compulsive questioner, and sometimes get suspected for it. Although I believe questions are a powerful scumhunting tool, there's also a strong scum motivation to play this way, because it lets you fake looking active as scum and set up suspicions on anyone instead of committing to dangerous stances. I think the best way to avoid this is 1) also combine questions with analysis and conclusions, and 2) ask yourself what the purpose of a question is before asking it. This way, you can go, "Yeah, I know you thought that was a silly question at the time, but if you noticed my hint here, you'd see it was actually a trap to see if she'd sheep this terrible wagon, etc." And if you realize the question won't give much information about the responder's alignment, then it might be worth keeping your mouth shut. Since my instinct is to poke at everything, I've had to restrain myself from asking some really forced and pointless questions after getting wagoned for it too many times.

Alrighty. I also empathisize with your last paragraph, as that was always my problem. Useless questions, and often I posted way too many times and I just flooded the thread. My problem is I'm scatterbrained. I have also had to restrain the questions to Important questions only, and I think I have gotten better at it. But yeah I'll try to remember what you said, about it being a good scumhunting tool but keep in mind that scum have a strong motivation to play that way.

[mastin2]

If you can't answer the question: "It looks scummy, but what's the scum motivation for doing it?" Then you shouldn't be pushing them for looking scummy.

Thus, why I will say things like, "scummy, sure, but not scum". (See also: my definition of scummy essentially being "looks bad" with no connotations of actually

being

bad.) All the time, I will see players that act in ways that are, frankly, scummy. But because I simply don't see them actually being scum, that puts me in the (rather awkward) position of defending them. (And I'm usually correct, too.)

[Aeronaut]

I used to have one

Then the fire nation attacked

[callforjudgement]

I think looking town as town, and scumhunting, are opposed to each other in some respects.

When I'm in trouble as town (often but not always due to replacing into a heavily suspected slot), I tend to try to be as open as possible about my thought processes (with a delay of a few posts, or maybe a day, so that I'll have some chance of being able to lay traps for people). (Of course, this means that when I'm in trouble as scum I have to try to replicate this behaviour, which is nontrivial; but I play to win the individual game, as required by site rules, which means picking a town playstyle that's hard to emulate as scum and then trying to follow it no matter what alignment I have so as not to produce a meta or trust tell). This makes it hard to scumhunt reliably as scum can spot the way you're thinking and adapt. It's a very good way of saving the slot, though.

When I'm not in trouble, I tend to ask questions a lot, but be less forthcoming about my conclusions. I'll explain them on request, but depending on the apparent motivation for the request, I may consider it scummy in its own right.

[fdas]

If your playstyle is considered scummy then it is obvious that the scumtell is not very good.

[Ether]

No scumtell is 100% accurate all the time and never ever gets false positives.

Just blaming the lynch mob is naïve. Just blaming the lynchee is naïve. But if you are the lynchee in question (or just a player who wants to be read as town more), your playstyle is the factor there that you can change.