I've several times on this site seen players scumread other players for rolefishing. While I understand the rationale behind this, I think rolefishing is not inherently scummy and I would like to discuss the idea of "cooperative rolefishing".
Cooperative Rolefishing
is what I call a situation when a vanilla member of town correctly guesses the identity of a PR (or sometimes doesn't but just picks a target at random), and coaxes the person into a softclaim of PR. Once this is done, the vanilla can claim PR to protect the real PR, or heavily push guilty results in place of the PR.
A prime example of this is Avalon, where the best breaking strategy is for a vanilla townie to find Merlin, and then pretend to be Merlin to divert the Assassin.
But I've also done similar things in off-site mafia games: I asked a player "if you were a cop, who would be the two players you investigated as guilty?" (having already soft claiming cop myself). The player, who was a watcher who got 2 guilties, gave me the names and I led 2 successful eliminations.
I mean it's not always scummy, but it has to be done in the right situations, and in the right ways, and it also depends heavily on the setup.
In semi-opens/Low PR concentration games, like the Newbie queue, rolefishing is considered scummy simply because it's so easy to out the PR's without meaning to, and allowing scum access to this information.
In games where the PR concentration is higher, or the game is closed, this is less of an issue, because even if scum knows the PR's, they don't necessarily know the strength of said PR's, and can benefit more potentially from ignoring them.
As a note, it's not a bad thing to work out who your PR's are, in several newbie games I have worked out the PR('s), and attempted to work on trying to keep them in a situation where they aren't likely to be shot overnight, but letting that information deliberately out in a way everyone can see it, is inherently scum motivated, because scum benefit most from this information (and can benefit from having the information public, so the kill is obvious to everyone, and not just someone who is likely to have spotted it)
Returning win rate: 4/1, 80%
In the process of creating a game to mod, we will see what it holds.
Rolefishing tends to out power roles which leads to their elimination (See mafia nightkill) from games which tends to increase mafia win %. So yeah it's pretty scummy to rolefish. Inherently scummy? The only reason I'd disagree with that idea as an absolute is that a lot of players for whatever reason just don't seem to know any better.
In post 1, JasonWazza wrote:
Letting that information deliberately out in a way everyone can see it, is inherently scum motivated, because scum benefit most from this information (and can benefit from having the information public, so the kill is obvious to everyone, and not just someone who is likely to have spotted it)
That's a good point I haven't thought of, very enlightening.
In post 0, DragonEater70 wrote:
But I've also done similar things in off-site mafia games: I asked a player "if you were a cop, who would be the two players you investigated as guilty?" (having already soft claiming cop myself). The player, who was a watcher who got 2 guilties, gave me the names and I led 2 successful eliminations.
That’s kinda just hypocop?
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