Has playing scum ever messed with your head?

[Raven Branwen]

viewtopic.php?f=83&t=83833


The overwhelming psychological stress of this game (despite having an absolute dream of a partner) and the reactions I’ve experienced post-game have put me at potential risk of a mental breakdown. Has this ever happened to anyone else?

[Bell]

Playing mafia is a stressor and carries a cognitive load. Adding the stress of the game to whatever is going on in life can compound your stress. If you’re having difficulty dealing with stress there are a lot of resources I, or anybody really, can direct you to if you’d like.

[mastina]

Playing mafia has messed with my head and brought me to a verge of a mental breakdown, yes...

...But literally every single time? It was as town.

Scum is anti-stressful; scum is anti-breakdown; being scum is a catharsis factor, a relief from the usual stress that is rolling town.

[the worst]

being scum is a catharsis factor

~90%+ agree
it's really upsetting when Drama happens regardless of alignment. but for all tangible alignment-related purposes scum is awesome

i have been a bit stressed out before by scumming tho

[Gypyx]

nice thread for your first post

[Vaxkiller]

I do get some...thing? Some anxiety of being "found" is there, but also some "excitement". Like I'm doing something bad, but it feels good.


Ummmm, this is just sounding weird now. Seriously tho, it's kinda how I feel.

Occasionally I feel particularly wicked, and I'll go in the garage and do my evil laugh.

[Guillotina]

Playing mafia has messed with my head and brought me to a verge of a mental breakdown, yes...

...But literally every single time? It was as town.

Scum is anti-stressful; scum is anti-breakdown; being scum is a catharsis factor, a relief from the usual stress that is rolling town.

This!

There is nothing more stressful than randing town and winning as town.

[Ranmaru]

No, since I am not really manipulative. I find EIMM to be more of a stressful thing since everyone is scum and there is more potential for anyone to cross your back whereas in mafia, if you are mafia then to me, you are auto-forgiven for any lies post-game. It's expected of scum. The only downside for me as scum is the extra work I have to do to keep up appearances. As town there is more passion for me to find mafia, as mafia, there is more frustration with me towards town for making me have to put in effort to seem town because I know that effort isn't genuine.

[Ythan]

No playing town messes with my head.

[Ythan]

As scum I know what to do and if I do get eliminated at least I didn't get miseliminated.

[Marashu]

Yeah, a site I played at like 5 years ago, I had a breakdown and stopped going altogether. I had a smaller breakdown a few months ago on this site. It's not just as scum, though; I get equally nervous as town (I'm a pretty anxious person in the first place). Playing as scum I find to be more stressful, but both wear me down.

[NorwegianboyEE]

I find myself being a lot calmer as scum, to the extent where i’d usually freak out if getting votes on me as town, but as scum i just don’t really care for some reason.
I also make a lot more jokes and fluff.

[NorwegianboyEE]

I do get some...thing? Some anxiety of being "found" is there, but also some "excitement". Like I'm doing something bad, but it feels good.

Absolutely, when i play well as scum and fool a lot of townies i get a real buzz and start laughing like a psychopath while sitting on the monitor.

[Gamma Emerald]

Playing mafia has messed with my head and brought me to a verge of a mental breakdown, yes...

...But literally every single time? It was as town.

Scum is anti-stressful; scum is anti-breakdown; being scum is a catharsis factor, a relief from the usual stress that is rolling town.

literally how

[mastina]

Playing mafia has messed with my head and brought me to a verge of a mental breakdown, yes...

...But literally every single time? It was as town.

Scum is anti-stressful; scum is anti-breakdown; being scum is a catharsis factor, a relief from the usual stress that is rolling town.

literally how

Oh it's quite simple.

As town you don't know what the hell's going on. You're uninformed. Every single interaction you see, you have to analyze. Is this scum? Is this town? There's constant, consistent, neverending paranoia. Are you being pocketed? Are you wrong? Is the player you're convinced is scum actually town? Is the player you're convinced is town actually scum? There is a constant neverending war in your head on literally every playerslot alive as you're wracked with the infinite possibilities and the number of variables you have no answers for. You're trying to figure out everything all at once, leaving you in a far more stressful environment.

That, not even going into interpersonal conflicts from games. There is a lot of drama to be had. And there are genuinely scum players who will fake that drama if they think it will give them an edge in the game, within reason. (Some things are beyond the realm of reasonable to fake, but other things like rage are absolutely fakeable.) And then there's always the question of, even if the drama is real, does it make the player in question actually be town? (To keep to the rage example, even if the rage is real, does the rage come from town or is it nai?) Do you press someone who has given drama because you think they are faking it, only to receive the backlash after it proves to not be?

Do you press someone who has given drama because even though you think they're not faking it, you think they're scum anyway? That the drama was nai and that they happen to be scum in spite of the drama, not because of it? And what if it's neither fake nor from scum? What if you press someone who was town, and genuine, in their drama-laden spiel?

If you value playing to win, you always need to question things like this. You never have a good answer. Emotions, tensions, can get high, and you can get emotional yourself. You can get fairly upset, you can get fairly heated, and these compound on previous issues especially with others. Say you're upset and somewhat heated; say a different slot has shown they are upset and angry; when you interact with that slot that is upset and angry when you are yourself upset and angry, which as town you need to do because you don't know their alignment, it can make things even MORE upset and angry on BOTH ends.

That's why townplay messes with your mind and can bring you to the verge of a mental breakdown. (I still prefer town as an alignment over scum but that's more to do with a variety of other factors.)

In contrast, as scum?
As scum you know the answers from the beginning. There's zero pressure on you. You can do whatever you want. You can interact with others however you want. It's much easier to just chill. It's much easier to vibe out with others. It's much easier to smooth things over. When things get heated, when there's drama, you don't need to push it, to pressure it, to make it worse due to not knowing the alignment of the players in question; because you know the alignment of the players in question, you know it to be genuine and thus can more easily back off, give them the space they need, let them cool down, and overall, tick them off less.

Heck, worst come to worst, in the postgame when they learn that anything you did which upset them came from scum, it usually becomes far less upsetting to them. (Can depend obviously depending on the nature of what was upsetting, but usually, "I was scum rather than town" as an explanation for an action can make that action a lot less frustrating.)

Instead of actively participating in the dumpster fire of the town, you can afford to be more of an observer in watching the town be a dumpster fire, and you have an easier time being a mediator in it of reducing tensions, smoothing things over, bridging the gap, within reason. (You still need to play to your wincon and your wincon requires town eliminated, but you have the pick of the litter on who to eliminate so can afford to target the players who will not be fuming from you targeting them, so to speak.)

Plus, there's another aspect of scumplay which makes it cathartic:
Embracing your role as a cartoonish supervillain. Being a cheeky scumfuck where you blatantly broadcast some aspects of your scumplay is actually quite fun. Pretending to be a puppetmaster pulling the strings is incredibly fun a role to play as you can see the results of your maneuvers, your manipulations, unfold with a big cheeky grin on your face.

There's also generally less salt involved when you're dead as scum. When you're dead as scum you can meme, you can comment on the game thread, talk to dead town, have conversations, and basically just have a good time with honest heart to heart. When you're dead as town, there's usually bad blood involved. You CAN still have good conversations, but there's also going to be plenty of frustrations, too, and you as dead town will often, if spoiled, have a holier-than-thou attitude where you're

convinced

that you wouldn't be making the mistakes the living town players are...even when, let's face it, you probably would be if you were alive and not informed.

All in all while I might prefer townplay, townplay is by far the role that messes with your head more.

[Ythan]

Yeah

[mastina]

Oh another factor is the control involved.
As town, you have very little control of the game. You can't control if you're nightkilled, you can't fully control the elimination (altho obviously you can do a lot to influence other players' votes), and you've got very little in the way of control over being eliminated. You're one vote in the majority of the faction. By and large, everything you do and say is only a small part of the whole, meaning you don't have much in the way of control over the results, which can mentally destroy you because you don't have much control over your fate. There's nothing more frustrating than being unable to stop things from happening to you that by all rights shouldn't.

As scum you have almost full control over the game. You have perfect control over who is nightkilled--so you know that if you fuck up, it's fully (well, mostly) your fault. If you make bad nightkills, you can go "oh well, better luck next time" and shrug it off. You know that any mistake you made was of your own doing, by and large. You might not be able to stop an elimination on you, but there's less need for you to have votes go in a specific location (statistically speaking, the town is more likely to vote out town than mafia because inherently, there are more town to vote out than there are mafia), and you have a reasonably high influence in avoiding your own elimination especially with the aid of scumbuddies.

Whereas a town player can't control 12/13 votes in a mini, a scum player effectively has control over 3/13 votes, meaning that they have more agency, more control, over their own fate. They by and large control what happens to them. So you know that whatever happens was on your terms. You can with the benefit of hindsight see every mistake in the decisions you made, and learn from them and get notable improvements in future games.

Something which is much less present for town.

[callforjudgement]

For what it's worth, I see the pressure the other way round from mastina: as town, you don't have that much influence over the game, so if you mess up or play badly you aren't hurting your faction's win condition that much. As scum, though, there's a lot of responsibility; you're carrying the whole game on your shoulders (and one sufficiently large mistake will outright lose the game). So we agree about the difference, but the same causes apparently have rather different effects on us.

I also find playing as scum messes with my head somewhat because I have to try to figure out what I would do as town, and how other players would perceive various actions that I take, and that sort of very indirect and hypothetical thinking gets confusing quite quickly. As town, I can normally just be myself and not think through things too deeply, because I'm not trying to mislead anyone and being natural helps me to be read more accurately.

I agree with the cartoonish supervillain thing, though, although that isn't necessarily restricted to playing scum. It happens more often as scum, but occasionally you end up with full control of the gamestate even as town and are able to puppetmaster your way to victory, and it's glorious.

[Gamma Emerald]

Yeah I think I’m in cfj’s boat here

[NorwegianboyEE]

I'm with Mastina, the stress factor as town is definitely real.
I can get quite pissy when scumread as town by someone i believe should be better at reading me. It's almost like an insult, "how do you think i'm not playing townie here??!" especially when i put in a lot of effort into the game.
Meanwhile if i'm scumread as scum i usually don't feel bad at all, i almost just want to congratulate the townies that caught me. (Though obviously i can't just do that.)

[Firebringer]

Playing town often angers me.
Playing scum often puts a smile on my face.

How can anyone not enjoy the delight of playing a game where ur goal is to just mess with ur opponents by throwing road blocks in their way in the most delightful manner

[Alisae]

bro as scum you get to kill people

[Alisae]

that fucker firebringer said that they're taking your lunch money? Just shoot em

[Alisae]

btw if you read my pts you'll notice that if I'm by myself and no one is around I'm a fucking mental case, especially if things are falling apart left right and center.
It's fine tho because it comes as part of playing the alignment and usually it happens because I'm engaged

[Alisae]

I also find playing as scum messes with my head somewhat because I have to try to figure out what I would do as town

guys I found the problem
bro no one even knows what your meta is. Stop trying to pretend to be town when you're not.