Where can I find behind-the-scenes scum strategies?

[BROseidon]

The main objective as scum is to survive no matter the cost as long as you end game you win. Town have to survive and hunt scum. It's not not playing to your win objective. There's probably another reason I'm realizing yet.

the town win condition and the scum win condition are NOT the same thing.

denying this is denying that it's even possible to scumhunt.

most people don't know how to scum hunt anyway, so there probably wouldn't be any discernible difference in the long run. It would be interesting to run an experiment and check the average D1 scum lynch rate over 1000 games of scum not reading their role PM D1 (and town not knowing this) but due to the nature of said experiment, I doubt it will ever happen (I don't even know how such an experiment would be run). I imagine the results wouldn't be much different than average, though.

I'm not suggesting people can't be good at scum hunting, just that I don't think your average player would perform any differently trying to hunt for scum

You act as if scum's skill has nothing to do with this.

What you should say is, "on average, town's scum hunting abilities are not better than scum's ability to deceive town."

[zMuffinMan]

Oh and before you say "I did", you didn't.

Quote the whole post and refute point by point!

there is basically no difference between forgetting you're scum / who you're scum with and not reading your role PM in the first place (unless the former occurs late into the game but that is iffy)

they both defeat the purpose of hunting for scum based on interactions. which is, really, the only thing that separates town from scum (other than scum having an inherent desire to not be lynched, but most town players have a sense of self-importance anyway so this wouldn't be much of a tell)

it may technically be playing towards your win con, but at that point, the game you're playing is no longer really mafia

[Dwlee99]

I am pretty proud of the History Mafia II scum pt. I had 2 partners who were newer players and one was replaced by another newer player and they were pretty great and we worked well together and did lots of planning and stuff and starting halfway through, there are pretty charts. Game thread.

omg those charts we had no chance. O_o
Also, reading through a bit of it, what made me lynchable?

[Plotinus]

I thought you were lynchable because of the way KT was coached into fooling you. I was probably wrong about this, actually, because others were townreading you in LYLO, but I felt that I could make a case that your 20 page argument with KT was scum theatre because to everybody else but you guys, that argument was mostly noise that we didn't understand; it was important to you to get a read on him but everybody else was baffled.

And then you decided he was town and he decided you were town and you kissed and made up. Sometimes scum do that: have a big fight early on and then they stop fighting suddenly and become friends again. It wasn't true because you were town, but I felt it was a believable stance for me to take about that argument.

and then a lot of the town thought it was weird that the two of you were voting openly together. I'm not sure scum would be as blatant with the voting as you guys were but since townies were suspicious of that i could have pushed there.

Before the modkill, we didn't want to lynch you because of your support for KT's slot, and after the modkill it was hard to push you because we'd taken the "coach him into the kind of behaviour that i can townread with a straight face and then townread him for it" route, and I don't like pushing people who are behaving the same way as I am (you, spiffeh), so I would have had to taken a different route to push you (like I did with spiffeh).

It didn't come up, though.

[Majiffy]

Oh and before you say "I did", you didn't.

Quote the whole post and refute point by point!

there is basically no difference between forgetting you're scum / who you're scum with and not reading your role PM in the first place (unless the former occurs late into the game but that is iffy)

they both defeat the purpose of hunting for scum based on interactions. which is, really, the only thing that separates town from scum (other than scum having an inherent desire to not be lynched, but most town players have a sense of self-importance anyway so this wouldn't be much of a tell)

it may technically be playing towards your win con, but at that point, the game you're playing is no longer really mafia

So because it's an effective strategy you claim it's cheating.

Ok. Have fun with that.

[Garmr]

Even if your informed you can just ignore your team mates and pretend your town and hunt for invisible scum that works for me.

[pirate mollie]

Oh and before you say "I did", you didn't.

Quote the whole post and refute point by point!

there is basically no difference between forgetting you're scum / who you're scum with and not reading your role PM in the first place (unless the former occurs late into the game but that is iffy)

they both defeat the purpose of hunting for scum based on interactions. which is, really, the only thing that separates town from scum (other than scum having an inherent desire to not be lynched, but most town players have a sense of self-importance anyway so this wouldn't be much of a tell)

it may technically be playing towards your win con, but at that point, the game you're playing is no longer really mafia

So because it's an effective strategy you claim it's cheating.

Ok. Have fun with that.

that isn't what he is saying at all!

[hiplop]

Not reading role pm changes Mafia into like "deal or no deal: group edition"

[Majiffy]

Even if your informed you can just ignore your team mates and pretend your town and hunt for invisible scum that works for me.

That's what I said in my OP

[Majiffy]

that isn't what he is saying at all!

Well no one is interested in actually arguing against what I said and instead strawmaning it so

[Antihero]

"try to forget" isn't even in the same neighborhood as "never see it in the first place." that's not the part that's cheating. what's cheating is "don't look at who your partners are."

not looking at who your partners are IS similar to not even reading your role pm. scum isn't JUST about survivalism. part of being scum is KNOWING who your partners are and having to make calculations based on this knowledge.

[Antihero]

Even if your informed you can just ignore your team mates and pretend your town and hunt for invisible scum that works for me.

yes, and if you choose to employ this strategy, that gives town the fighting chance to pick up on this and catch you.

if you don't even know who your buddies are, you're not making ANY strategy so any hunt for associatives is going to be screwed since it's working from a bogus premise (that any reasonable person would accept).

[Garmr]

Even if your informed you can just ignore your team mates and pretend your town and hunt for invisible scum that works for me.

yes, and if you choose to employ this strategy, that gives town the fighting chance to pick up on this and catch you.

if you don't even know who your buddies are, you're not making ANY strategy so any hunt for associatives is going to be screwed since it's working from a bogus premise (that any reasonable person would accept).

by ignore I mean ignore the fact they are team mates and just vote them if they would normally look scummy to you. Becuase who needs scum partners that look scummy.

[Antihero]

that's another strategy. and something else you can get caught out on if anyone can pick up on your true motivation.

...and it comes from actually knowing who your partner is...

[Antihero]

let's be real, you're not going to be able to just will yourself to "forget." "try to forget your partners with X" is close to "leave as few associatives with X as possible," which is what scum should be doing anyway.

that's not the same thing as not even knowing who X is.

[Majiffy]

Eh I bus em all anyway

[Majiffy]

I'll address this fully when I'm not on my phone

[Majiffy]

"try to forget" isn't even in the same neighborhood as "never see it in the first place." that's not the part that's cheating. what's cheating is "don't look at who your partners are."

not looking at who your partners are IS similar to not even reading your role pm. scum isn't JUST about survivalism. part of being scum is KNOWING who your partners are and having to make calculations based on this knowledge.

You know who your partners are after the first night. Wouldn't that change in information be a scumhuntable presence?

And tbh scum really is JUST about survivalism. Scum wins if there is at least one scum alive at parity. So

Even if your informed you can just ignore your team mates and pretend your town and hunt for invisible scum that works for me.

yes, and if you choose to employ this strategy, that gives town the fighting chance to pick up on this and catch you.

if you don't even know who your buddies are, you're not making ANY strategy so any hunt for associatives is going to be screwed since it's working from a bogus premise (that any reasonable person would accept).

Then don't hunt for associatives. They're easily lain by savvy scum to fuck town anyway. VCA is a better strategy.

[N]

I'm not sure if people arguing with Majiffy about how to play mafia realise this, but Majiffy is banned from playing mafia.

[Cheetory6]

lol

[Majiffy]

I'm not sure if people arguing with Majiffy about how to play mafia realise this, but Majiffy is banned from playing mafia.

[zMuffinMan]

Oh and before you say "I did", you didn't.

Quote the whole post and refute point by point!

there is basically no difference between forgetting you're scum / who you're scum with and not reading your role PM in the first place (unless the former occurs late into the game but that is iffy)

they both defeat the purpose of hunting for scum based on interactions. which is, really, the only thing that separates town from scum (other than scum having an inherent desire to not be lynched, but most town players have a sense of self-importance anyway so this wouldn't be much of a tell)

it may technically be playing towards your win con, but at that point, the game you're playing is no longer really mafia

So because it's an effective strategy you claim it's cheating.

Ok. Have fun with that.

It's not cheating in the sense that it's not explicitly against the rules.

It's just you're no longer playing a game of mafia, really. At least no more than playing a game where everybody is town can be called mafia. Kudos to you for gaming the system, though in all honesty, you're probably just incredibly bad at mafia if you cannot interact with buddies in a non-obvious way when conscious of them

[Majiffy]

It isn't about being unable to, it's about optimal strategy.

[Antihero]

you're just saying stuff to be argumentative now

[Majiffy]