Advice for Newbies

[callforjudgement]

I think one piece of advice you don't see often enough is "Scum have a tendency to be pessimistic". It's taken me a while to properly appreciate this, and the implications.

Most obviously: if you're scum, and doing badly, don't panic and don't give up. You might have half the playerlist suspecting you, but people's memories for reads are short, and the capacity for town to do something stupid and let you off the hook is almost unlimited. Say it's late in the game and you're in a 3:2 ending; town are necessarily going to have a lot of information by now, because they've been hunting your scumteam for the whole game. Most likely, most of the townies are going to have a pretty good idea of who the scum are. Perhaps a fairly persuasive scumhunter has the entire team figured out, there's a power role inno on a townie, etc.. The important things to realise are that a)

this is normal

, games normally reach situations like this on the way to a scum win; and b) no matter how bad it looks, all you need to win from here is to convince one townie to make one mistake, at any point in the game. Who cares if almost everyone has you figured out; sow just one seed of doubt in just one player, and they may end up voting incorrectly and letting you do an extended quickhammer for the win, or second-guessing themselves in a 2:1 ending and picking the wrong way in a cross-vote.

Less obviously, it's worth noting that scum bus too much: another symptom of scum pessimism. They're scared that the weaker players on their team will be caught / have already been caught, and want to get ahead of the curve. Sometimes they're right – bussing is something that has to be done sometimes, in some games – but scum come to this conclusion more readily than they should and more often than they should. Most scum players could therefore improve their play by being more defensive of your partners than you normally would; sure, town

can

pick up on that, but the benefits you get from having more members alive often end up outweighing the disadvantages you get from being read more easily. Who cares if one or two townies have you figured out; you have a nightkill, after all.

Last, and something which took me a long time to appreciate, is to account for scum pessimism when forming reads as town. Say you have a townread on someone, notice something that's a little odd, and comment on it in-thread, but still fundamentally have a townread. Or you have a nullread on someone, and try to work through the possibilities in which the player could be scum. If the player is actually scum, they're quite likely to overreact to this, thinking that your read on them is much scummier than it actually is. This is something that it's possible to pick up on and use for your scumhunting, if you're aware of it. It's

also

something that it's possible to pick up on and misinterpret, if you aren't aware of it. Say there's a deadline decision coming up, and the choice is between two wagons (which later turn out to be 1 scum 1 town). You're a potential deciding vote, and wavering, talking through the options, when someone gets in ahead of you and switches wagon, making the choice clear and leading to a scum elimination. I used to think this was a strong towntell, but it isn't; a decent proportion of the time, it's scum

who have pessimistically misinterpreted you as planning to hammer their wagon

and are trying to get ahead of you. So it's best not to clear people "for deciding to eliminate scum early for no reason", especially if an uncommitted player has recently posted anything that could be misinterpreted as a scumread on the hammered player. Sometimes, from your point of view, it's all neutral and you're just thinking and you have no real opinion; but meanwhile, from the scum point of view they think their entire team is about to get caught and they need to take drastic measures like bussing in order to survive. You might think there's no reason, and in fact there

was

no valid reason. But you need to account for scum doing something for a mistaken reason, because they thought the situation was worse than it was.

[callforjudgement]

Oh, and a separate piece of advice, the "which reads you should trust most" hierarchy. This is something that I've worked out based on observation (of games I've been in and many I've been watching) of which reads tend to work the best. I've attempted to rationalise it, but it was mostly worked out through observation, so it may well be right for the wrong reasons.

For most people logic/slip/tell reads are easy to come by. They're not completely useless, but they're wrong much more often than you would expect. They are, however, usually the most convincing to other players. If you want to get someone eliminated (regardless of whether you're town or scum), these are what you use to persuade the rest of the playerlist (and if as town, you get a strong read on someone from some other source, look for logic reads and tells to help yourself make the case; that's pretty much what I'm doing when I'm adding the reasoning to this list). They're also great things to just "throw out there" to get people thinking and get discussion started and prevent the game stalling, even if they don't eventually end up going anywhere.

Gut reads are, in my experience, generally more reliable than logic/tell reads (this is despite the fact that I'm generally a very logical player!). (Exception: if you logic yourself into a read on someone and then become increasingly sure they're scum, this is not a gut read and shouldn't be trusted – you're probably tunnelling.) When there's any behaviour that becomes widely seen as scummy, scum who know what they're doing will change their behaviour to avoid it (in fact, so will town, so tells that worked once will tend to not exist at all a couple of years later). So you can have at most a couple of years of experience in figuring out players from tells, and have to re-learn this all the time. Meanwhile, figuring out people's motivations from behaviour subconsciously is something that's important your whole life, and has been important for humanity generally (and probably other species) for thousands of years. You won't always get gut reads on players (I rarely get them at all). When you do, though, throw tells out of the window, the gut read is more important.

Sometimes you will get conflicting gut reads on someone. In this case, the player in question is almost certainly town (your gut has a lot of incentive to be paranoid about people). (Conflicting

logic

reads don't give much information on someone's alignment, though.)

Most important, though, is reads obtained via night actions and setup speculation. For example, if a player's claim would make the setup unbalanced, they are almost certainly scum; and on the flipside of that, if a power role claim is required for the setup to be balanced, the claimer is almost certainly town. If a player is mechanically confirmed as town but you're

really sure

they're scum, look for potential ways in which the mechanical confirmation could be wrong, but if it's too hard to make it work, just disregard you're read; they're town. I've seen players effectively gamethrow in the past by cross-tunnelling all game and failing to realise that the setup wouldn't work unless both of them were town. The 2:1 ending in that game didn't work out well for town. If there are mechanical reasons to do something, these trump absolutely any other reasoning you might have about the game; just do it.

[callforjudgement]

Has anyone ever tried to brute force Mafia like that. Maybe smaller setups or toward the end of a larger one it'd be more typical.

I strongly recommend doing this in 3:2 endings. At that point, the number of possibilities is somewhat manageable (especially if there's a confirmed player). It isn't really worth it at any other time.

[callforjudgement]

If you're scum, act the same way you would as if you were town.

I disagree with this one, I think it's one of the most common misplays as scum.

One obvious fix is "act the same way that people

think

you act as town" (this is not always the same as your actual town behaviour).

It's also normally correct to modify your playstyle slightly in order to, e.g., help save buddies from elimination or avoid doing things that typically get you scumread (even if you would always do them as town). In particular, most townies want to scumhunt effectively (and some are even capable of doing so), whereas scum pretending to be town does not want to scumhunt effectively because you just end up getting caught by PoE.