Townie false role-claiming

[Telamon]

In an online game I played at one point, I was a vanilla townie (no special role), which is something I find dull. To mix things up a bit I decided to forget that and pretend that I was a special robot secret character and proceeded to have a lot of fun with that posting robot noises and whatnot. One of the powers I claimed I had was a 50% chance of surviving a mafia kill.

Now with the group of people I normally play with, this kind of craziness is status quo. No one questioned the veracity of my role-claim and I lived to the end of the game.

This got me wondering though... Is it ever to the town's advantage for a townie to claim to have a power/role that he doesn't? Especially if a vanilla townie claims he is bulletproof when he is not? Wouldn't that just give the mafia better odds to kill the remaining special townie roles?

I can only think of one altruistic case where it might benefit the town. A vanilla townie claims some minor role, precipitating the mafia to kill him during the night. This would make the townie special roles more safe if the mafia is gunning for a plain old guy.

However, this is only good if you play with role-reveal.


Ok. I feel like I've rambled enough. But I'd like to hear people's opinions/experiences about vanilla townies making false role-claims.

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Some of the following may possibly be relevant to the discussion:

At school, we usually play mafia with 10-12 people, face to face. We find the game too easy when roles/alignment are revealed after death, so there's none of that. We compensate a little for this by giving the town an extra info-gaining role or two (but usually no cops because having the game revolve around who the cop is is lame).