Commonly Asked Questions on Mafia Theory

[BuJaber]

I have never played a mountainous before, I really want to, it sounds like a dream.

I cannot believe that town would do worse than random lynching.
When all nightkills are equal (PR-wise) there is no such thing as a townie trying to avoid NK or a townie trying to bait NK. There is one single purpose shared by all townies: to find and lynch scum. We are not robots playing the game. There are certain things that just sound off that you can pick up on. Scum are also always playing with a different objective. They have to be. I can come up with a number of different strategies, and for each of them, there will eventually be a difference between this strategy and what the player would/should be doing if they were town. It just seems unavoidable.

The only way scum would win is by doing so well in looking townie they become unlynchable. In which case random lynching actually improves EV for town. However before you get to that stage you'd probably end up killing their partners with pretty high accuracy. I haven't seen anyone become a deepwolf without somehow managing to distance themselves from their partners, usually involving bussing. Basically if town had been random lynching the last scum would never have deepwolfed in the first place.

So I think that when town win mountainous they are doing better than random lynching.
And when scum win mountainous town START off doing better than random lynching then their accuracy takes a nosedive.

[BuJaber]

Yes absolutely, I agree with that when players aren't equal in skill.

Eventually though wouldn't this become less of an issue?
To use your example, how would Ellibereth win as scum?
If such BoP exists, it makes sense that you'll end up having these same players lose as scum simply for not being killed.

Since this exists in all setups why shouldn't we assume it to be negligible and evaluate setups in their pure form as if all players were the same?

[BuJaber]

Since this exists in all setups why shouldn't we assume it to be negligible and evaluate setups in their pure form as if all players were the same?

setups are, in one sense, evaluated as if all players were the same – that's EV. the difference between EV and actual results is the difference between the theoretical world where all players are the same and lynches are random, and reality.

What I am struggling to grasp is why we only have these two choices for our base assumption.

Why can't we consider a middle-of-the-way scenario where players are not equal but they are not lynching randomly?

Are we saying that the deviations from random EV are caused by the variation in skill level itself?