SPYREX, PRINCE OF WHALES
I think you really touched on it when you said that 1 of the biggest obstacles that town faces is competing egos. I wld amend the wording of this to "competing agendas" cos you can have a town herd of egotistical players but still reach some sort of common conclusion and just bicker about how you got there in the first place or who did it first and still lynch scum.
do you think that the ability to work with other pple is an experience or mebbe confidence gap? or do you think it is something else? in the spirit of transparent processing I have some ideas but they are not super fleshed out. I was wondering about your insight on this tho.
sometimes I think mafia is the art of creative storytelling I swear.
I think being able to work with people is close to a skill that's required in Mafia; the skill that's actually required is
being able to influence others to do your will
. "Working with people" has this nice cooperative ring to it that doesn't really match what, say, the SCREAMING DEATH CLAN did. And, speaking as someone who made a huge effort to work with people in my last few games (i.e. work toward a common conclusion) and got repeatedly torched for it, going pure social harmony seems to fail much more often than it succeeds.
Regardless, the ability to influence others breaks down hard when everyone has their own ideas of who's scum and won't bend from them. My last game was like seven people who were like this, and the time before that I had to deal with someone who thought he had role information on me (he very much did not but he was a fscking dumbass), and the time before that it was like four Townies in a row who decided "welp Vi is scum because <incoherent Goofball nonsense> <beard
> <lol Cyan just picks someone and tunnels on them, looks like ur screwed m8> <whatever else>" and all the scum had to do was act kind of nonchalant and even outstandingly reasonable as they also voted me. I don't want to say it's impossible to influence these people, but it's beyond dozens of pages of my best efforts - whether the people I'm trying to influence are actively suspecting me or not.
Whining aside, what I'm getting at is that the ability to work with other people is partly a skill to learn on your part but entirely dependent on the other person being willing to work with you. It's not an experience or confidence gap except insofar as you have to have the experience to know that working together is necessary and they need to have the healthy
lack
of confidence in their own reads to alter them.
I acknowledge that this post makes it look like I'm completely blameless and that the problems are all other peoples' fault. That is, of course, not the case (maybe I could have found nicer words to call Goofball and Thor's posts illogical on a level I hadn't seen throughout my career, idk) but even after adjusting for that I'm having difficulty coming to any other conclusion.
Side note since I don't have anyplace else to put it: I've noticed that I have a habit of defending people I think are Town, or otherwise getting undeserved hate. Not just in Mafia games, either. I've been wrong so much more often than I've been correct on these calls that I'mma stoppan that.
Post-edit: gfd I need to do something else before I stew on this all day this is why I don't play Mafia
Everything you say and do matters. People will respond in ways you may never see. May those responses be what you intend.
and I know it's happened to me too