How to win as Mafia: Calculated Inaction

[Lord Gurgi]

So you've started a game. You say your role is mafia? Well congratulations, you probably just won. But here's a guide to help you win more easily. Always keep in mind, that playing as mafia is a game of waiting. Wait long enough, and the town will kill itself.

1. You don't want to lynch the people you call scum. You want the town to lynch the people you call town. Towns tend to look at successful wagons for scum. If you're not on them, you'll do better.
   
   
2. Do not call the strongest members of the town scum, rather pick on weaker but more neutral figures. If you pick on people that are too easy, you will eventually run out of valid scumreads, and if you only pick on the strongest members of the town, it will likely turn on you. Attack the people that can't defend themselves. Newbies are a good choice.
   
   
3. Early on, post a lot, and frequently. Most people will subconsciously treat active players as town. Almost nobody will suspect you for this on its own.
   
   
4. Call out lurkers. They are easy to lynch, but don't try to lynch them until later in the game. Their wagon will provide good escape later if you need it. Be sure to make this a long-term campaign. If you notice the flow go against your allies or your scum-calls begin to push the lurkers.
   
   
5. Outline rough suspicion of your dumbest partner. Do not push their wagon, just list them as neutral-leaning-scum or something to that effect. Meanwhile, defend your other partner from significant attacks. This will separate your team in the minds of the town.
   
   
6. Defend the strongest players of the town. Pick one in particular to defend excessively. If you die, this will tie you to them and allow your team to lynch them quickly. As a note, generally, if you build a meta for defending people you will do well in all your games.
   
   
7. For lynch on the first day, push the second or third most popular lynch. Do not try to make your wagon fail, but hope that it does. After that, continue to push reads that are less likely to be lynched. If one of your reads becomes a major lynch though, lynch them. Do not back down.
   
   
8. If you notice someone acting scummy, and no one else has yet picked up on it, take the opportunity. If you lynch an unexpected person the next day reverts to earlier lynch prospects much of the time. Essentially the town loses a day.
   
   
9. Kill the stronger members of the town at night. Nobody analyses night kills anymore, and if they do just bury them under a mountain of WIFOM logic. It actually works.
   
   
10. Taper off your posting as you go. Do not suddenly disappear, just gradually reduce your rate of posting. Try to keep large but infrequent posts at first, but later shorter posts will do. You want to appear like you are losing interest in the game. You also want to have an excuse for dodging the nightkills. Living too long being too town will be problematic.
    
    
11. Do not fear people who are getting things right. Even if they are right about everything, there will be idiots that refuse to believe well reasoned and logical cases. Don't mistake being caught for being lynched. Stay calm, and it is critical that you do not suddenly change your reads. Don't underestimate the ability of a town to eat itself, or to change off of a correct wagon at the last second. Often you can survive a day or two after you should if you play calmly.
    
    
12. Claim vanilla. Do not try to gambit. Conservative is the best way to play scum. If you claim earlier than you need to, you will likely be believed in today's meta. Of course, extreme circumstances call for extreme measures, and in some cases claiming a power role may allow you to live longer than you deserve. But keep in mind 11) you are not always in as bad a position as you think.
    
    
13. Attack players that do not know how to defend themselves properly. Start with a case that is factual, but weak. When the player overreacts and digs themselves deeper and deeper, you will have a good wagon to sit on. If it sees lynch, you have lynched someone that everyone agrees deserved it, and if it doesn't you have a plausible distraction from the main lynches.
    
    
14. Don't underestimate the power of subtle praise. "That's a great point" and "I didn't notice that" or even "I'm sheeping X, who is obv-town" helps building false confidence in townies. This will make the townie think you are town, and if they turn out to be wrong they get the blame and their confidence is shaken. It is generally good to leave the responsibility for the town's lynches on the town.
    
    
15. The town tends to believe that it ought to win. They are wrong, but you can take advantage of this. If someone has been on many of the major wagons, you have just found a free lynch target. Similarly, if there is someone that seems to be causing the town not to succeed, they are a good target. Generally, the mafia should be encouraging the idea that the town is being conned by their leaders.

I am also taking suggestions for additional strategies that work.

[Lord Gurgi]

Thanks.

I feel some bitterness and/or frustration oozing from this post.

Well not really. It's just too easy to win as mafia. Unless you're playing against some really good players, you should win as mafia every time.

14.) If you can feed the fire without being obvious, feed it. Nothing kills a town as perfectly as a town-on-town fight that takes over everything.

While I agree, I don't think it should be in the guide because people can never do this properly. Even I can't. I prefer a hands-off approach. The town will kill itself if left alone long enough, better not to be connected.

All player guides immediately become outdated the minute they are posted. Town meta naturally will adjust to all possible scum advice.

I wish this were true. I used to believe it, I used to hate that it was the case. Now I wish it were true. I think that the pure volume of threads here that are filled with the pure gold of mafia theory, mafia ought to be losing more, not less. Play has gotten worse and I think that's precisely because player guides are not incorporated into play.

The way I see it, player guides function sort of like the telephone game. First you have the game itself giving experience to the guide writer. For our purposes this is perfect knowledge. Then some of this knowledge is lost in the writing because of imperfection and simplification on the part of the writer. When the reader takes in this information, he then misapplies it and misunderstands it to some degree. These misapplications lead to misconceptions on the correctness of the tell on the part of the reader as well as others who witness the tell. Essentially, the original knowledge is often completely lost and the interpretation of events becomes flawed.

This is actually a good, readable article, although it's pretty calculating even for me. I'm tempted to stuff it on the wiki.
The only thing I disagree with is 12). Vanilla claims only work if there's a chance your wagon will go away instead of going to a lynch, or if you make it prematurely. If you're really, really in trouble, you should claim a role.

Yes, I will agree with that. I will amend that. Excepting severe circumstances, conservative is the best way to play it. However, usually if your lynch is moving that speedily, you're caught. Then you should follow 11).

Actually I disagree with 9) too. In our present Normal climate scum tend to go up the creek if they miss hitting a power role with their NK more than once. This is, of course, up to judgment - leaving a Mason with bad reads alive in order to kill a Vanilla with good reads is not necessarily bad play.

I'm inclined to believe that power roles no longer have the reliability that they once did. Now we can debate this, but I think that relying on power roles will more often than not backfire on a town. I don't know what the rate of sanity is for cops and other investigative roles, but I can't imagine it is very high. Besides that, I wasn't specifically urging killing better players, but stronger members of the town. I say that meaning people unlikely to ever see lynch, power roles, and people who are simply good at the game.

The truth is that you can kill the players who would recognise that you're playing mafia well. The truth is if you're doing it right, they can't decide before you have the opportunity to kill them. Then you run rings around the remainder. I'm sure many of you have been killed early and watched the town lose with startling efficiency.

[Lord Gurgi]

I think there's a bit of a misconception about my intentions for the guide. The overall goal of this guide is to play a safe game, where you're basically guaranteed a victory by town stupidity. What wins games as the mafia is not cleverness but patience. Gambits, buses, and other tricks designed to keep you alive are really unnecessary risks. You don't need to do things that make it harder for you to win in order to win. The town will handle that for you, all you have to do is keep your head down until victory. The Mafia doesn't need to do anything special. The point is to keep your options open so that you always have a choice that doesn't make you look inconsistent or stand out, even as the game goes on.

Spoiler: Response to Charnel

13) know your enemy. Meta is more important as scum then as town.

I don't know that I agree, but I take your point.

Some people are followers. Make a catchy case and put the 3rd vote on someone and you’ll see them coming.

Actually this is what I'm trying to tell people not to do. If you're leading the town, sooner or later it will turn on you. The point is to get the town to lynch people you publicly have called town. Only occasionally do you want to lynch people you call scum. The issue is that the leader of the town lynching town too many times in a row will be unable to keep the town behind him. At least not reliably, anyway. You're not trying to control the town, you're trying to stay out of the town's way. You don't have to give a destructive alcoholic booze, you just have to make sure it's around.

Some people can’t have it that they are attacked. They make idiots of themselves when you unfairly attack them. If you make sure that you are logically sound, the town will disregard them later. Keep annoying such a player and it will be a cursing fest in which you look the good one.

I would change this slightly. If there are immature people on the town that can't defend themselves well, any sort of attack you make will end up being reinforced by his response. Find something weak (but correct) and just keep attacking them until they crack.

Some people get lynched. Simple as that, there are players who almost always get lynched in the first three days. Don’t push them early, town is going to shoot itself in the foot there anyway, also without your help.

That's more or less the gist of what I was saying with regard to any lynch. Best to be far away from a debacle.

Contrary to the above, there are people who never get lynched. Either be fast in discrediting them with some clever case, or don’t start with it and kill them N1. Once they are settled, there is no way an attack on them isn’t going to backfire

Nightkilling Ether can be prudent, yes. I think that the night one kill is your best play here. Keeps your hands clean since no one really looks at what the dead think anyway.

Then, meta is important in knowing what tells your town prefers. Point such tells out in others while avoiding them specifically yourself. If you know your town isn’t bothered by classic scumtells (wagonning and OMGUS for example), be as scummy with them as you like, as long as you are pointing out some hip motivational scumminess one someone else.

Yes, but I think that you're better off not risking this. It's not really necessary to wagon wildly, or engage in OMGUS to win. Play it safe and you'll win.

The sanity rate for Cops in Normal games is 100% barring Millers and Godfathers. Not that I can downrate Godfathers too much after txtMafia... Outside Normal games the sanity rate for Cops is... more or less the same actually, unless you're playing in an UncertainKitten game.

If this is true, I'm surprised. I haven't played in a mafia game with a sane cop in years. I don't play as much as I used to, but I thought this was still the case. It seems to me that mods feel that sane cops are too powerful, so the scum regularly have a roleblocker or a godfather to essentially nullify the cop. People aren't as subtle as they used to be about being a power role. Often they'll get themselves nearly lynched and have to claim because they're being too scummy trying not to get nightkilled. A power role will often neuter themselves in order to get more results, which are rarely worth it. I don't fear a power role as scum. I fear a vanilla town much more, because they actually try to find me.

Spoiler: Response to Parama

To be honest, I disagree with almost everything you are writing here. I think you're misunderstanding the style that this guide is promoting. I think also that many of your responses are programmed and not thinking responses. That is part of what this guide games on. People don't really read what players are doing and then ask themselves "What is the scum motivation for doing this in this circumstance, what is the town motivation for doing this in this circumstance?" Instead, the question asked is, "Is this action something scum does?" All mafia have to do in today's environment is stay reasonably active, be consistent on semi-popular wagons, and try to keep their partners alive. The town does the rest. The conception that the mafia is meant to trick the town is outdated.

You want to lynch the people the town calls scum who aren't scum and kill the people the town calls town who are town. It helps when the town's not letting the mafia speak for itself and is trying to push mislynches by itself.

The point I am making is that you don't want to be responsible for people being lynched, not all the time. You want to be behind the occasional lynch, but not every one, or people will figure out that you're misleading the town. You want to be on plausible alternative wagons a lot of the time, with the occasional strange splinter wagon to cover your trend. It doesn't matter if the town thinks someone is town, if they're contributing to the town continuing to lynch each other, you want them alive. The point is to kill strong members of the town, not necessarily the popular ones. Just because everyone agrees that someone is town does not mean they are right. If you defend that person and play your cards right, you've made a friend till lylo who will win the game for you.

Better option:
Find one weak player to call scum, one average player to call scum, and one strong player to call scum. Push hard on the strong one, but end up voting one of the other two by the end of the day.

Again, you don't want to be on successful wagons if you can avoid it. Or else you will run out of valid scumreads, as I said. You want to have more than one of your original scumreads alive in the late game. Then you can continue to reuse old points peppered with new information with minimal effort.

Tell people this and they'll spam a thread. Tell them to post only when they have something to say and they'll lurk. Tell them to post when they have to look like they have something to say, and they'll probably do a damn good job fooling townies.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at here. You want to be posting lots early. People don't want to lynch the active members of the town because they have had it drilled into them since their first newbie game that activity is objectively good. Later you can get away with less because town reads persist after they should. I mean, when would you ever tell people not to post when they think they ought to? Again, I'm not really sure what your point is.

I don't know what time period you're from, but Lynch all Lurkers is usually a bad strategy. You tell them to get active, and then when they post substance you look for the holes in it. They've stopped being lurkers by the time you have grounds for lynching them, but it's easier to lynch an inconsistent townie than a lurking townie.
Though if you can catch a bad townie active lurking...

If you're actually getting lurkers to be active by pressuring them, I'm surprised. Lurkers are easy to lynch because they don't change their ways. And if you spend time pushing their lynch and they do suddenly begin to post, you lynch them for posting only under pressure. I just don't agree with you here. Lurkers don't defend themselves, it can't get much easier. Perhaps you have a hard time because you don't have a meta for lynching lurkers. Sculpting your meta is part of playing a good mafia game and a good town game. I can defend people as both town and scum because that's my meta. Being able to do that helps me win as either alignment. Lurkers are also good to lynch as town.

It really seems like optimal D1 scum play is to bus a partner to death and have that partner set up several subtle links... to townies. I think you SHOULD push your worst partner as soon as possible. Townies don't expect that, and the abundance of "OMG WIFOM" claims seems to be lessening as time goes on. Defending a partner can end up looking like "speaking for them" which is seen as a strong scumlink because... well, it is! Don't defend anyone too hard unless you're claiming you confirm them as town; and don't ever try to confirm a partner as town. That's suicide.

No. Busing is a bad way to play that makes it harder for your team to win. You want to be able to lynch your partner if they do badly, but there's no reason to kill them from the outset. It's stupid to do that, really. Why should you be more willing to defend a townie than your own ally, just because they might get lynched? Well I suppose that would be bad if you've already killed your third ally. Being connected to part of your team is not bad. People are suspicious if you have no connection to a player because that's how bad scum tends to treat their allies. I just don't agree with you at all on this one. Busing your ally might get you a bit of towncred, but certainly not enough to be worth an ally. This is why you divide your team in the minds of the town. That way if the town happens to get some of you, they won't consider the rest of your group to be at all connected. I have played games where my partners have died, and I have been 'cleared' as a result, because the town thinks the idea is so ridiculous they don't even consider it. That's how you win games.

Disagree, find one strong player to push suspicion against and try to rally the other strong players behind you. I personally see excessive defending of another player as a scum to town link; scum just don't defend each other very much these days.

So first you say don't defend your partner because scum do that, and now you shouldn't defend town because scum do that and don't defend their allies. Please be consistent if you're going to mount criticism. The point of being friends with a strong townie is so that you're not left in a position where you have to lead the town. You don't want to be saddled with the burden of proficiency. That way you can cut ties to him and lynch him if you need to when he has lynched too many townies. You're playing for time as mafia.

If you keep pushing lynches other than the most popular, town's going to catch on eventually.

Not everyone can be on the most popular wagon every time. And as I pointed out before, if your wagons become popular push them to the ends of the earth. You don't want to be away from every wagon, just most wagons. You want to be consistent, but not mainstream. You want people to have vague good feelings about you, because those don't get contravened by facts.

Though aim for confirmed townies if they're at least halfway decent. I did win a game once by leaving an idiot confirmed townie alive until MyLo and endgamed them.

See my previous response about what constitutes a "strong member of the town".

I don't think everyone is capable of this. Partly because there's lots of people who find games more interesting as they go on.

Staying active works too. Then you continue to be town, but also run into the problem of being too town for too long. The point is not to suddenly disappear off the map and lose the good feelings people had about you.

I think scum dying D1 should claim a PR and wait for it to get counterclaimed. They're already dead anywho; town tends to lynch claimed vanillas quickly on earlier days.

Again, see my previous response with regards to exceptional circumstances for a claim.

15) Don't underestimate the power of subtle praise. Stuff like "That's a great point" and "Shit, I didn't notice that" or even "I'm sheeping X, who is obv-town" helps building false confidence in townies, then when it results in a mislynch their confidence is shaken and they'll tend to start WIFOMing their reads.

[/quote][/quote]Yes.

[Lord Gurgi]

The thing is, that most of this guide is common sense. I don't think anyone has yet been surprised by what I'm writing. So why does it work? Because people are programmed to think a certain way by newbie games and by mafia theory as it is. I don't expect to see significant troubles as a result of this guide, since people don't really process this way of playing as indicative of being mafia. Besides, the proper way to play town is only slightly different than the proper way to play mafia.

[Lord Gurgi]

Actually the proper way to play town is to play in ways that makes the mafia obvious, which means pretty much not like this at all.

I can see why people think you're arrogant. You're also wrong. The point of playing mafia in this way is to blend in with the town. Town is remarkably harder, and if you want to have any impact on the game at all, you won't try to stick out as town either. Patrick will tell you all about the problem of always being seen as town. The town motivation to protect themselves from lynch and from nightkills is no different than the mafia motivation to protect themselves from lynch and from accusations of dodging nightkills. The only differences are that the town is trying to find out the alignment of other players. They are still trying to protect people of their own alignment, and still trying to lynch people of other alignments. There is a reason why the correct term for alignments is the informed minority and the uninformed majority. Because that is all that distinguishes them from one another. Information and size.

I'm planning to post a similar guide on how to play town. Expect many points to be to look out for exactly what this guide tells you to do.

[Lord Gurgi]

A corollary to mafia being able to kill who they want because no one analyses night kills any more is that once a player is dead, no one even considers their point of view. Being dead effectively ends your ability to move the town along the right track.

[Lord Gurgi]

no one analyses night kills any more

"Any more"?

Once upon a time, when the animals of the GreyLabyrinth played with the DragonPhoenix and everyone was happy, the town would look into why murders happened and then they caught the murderers. Now with the mith ruling over the mafiascum with an iron fist, and the people slaving in the threads, the murders are no longer investigated. Now the criminals win and the innocent animals die.

[Lord Gurgi]

3. The way I see it, that is why I suggest posting a lot early on. By the time reads cement just before the first lynch everyone has you in their mind as an active player. I think it's harder to recover from a lurker mindset than it is easy to continue an active mindset.

5. I doubt it. You can't lynch everyone. If your stupid partner starts to take a dive you can stay semi-reluctant or at least prefer another lynch. This is a part of play that I have a real hard time with. I don't like to lynch my partners ever. Objectively, it's probably better to lynch them, but I hate to do it.

10. This has worked for years, and the real lurkers will always be more of a problem than the semi lurkers. If one of these strategies stops working for a little bit adjust and go back to it in a few months.

12. Power claims tend to unravel or be counterclaimed, which is why I recommend vanilla claims in general. It's safer. Again though, all this is mitigated by extreme circumstances. So I agree with you if you only need to survive a little bit longer.

15. Yep. But all the same, this is late in the game when you can afford to get your name attached to a mislynch.

[Lord Gurgi]

The only flaw to being obvtown whenever you're town is that people might think you're scummy if they don't think you're obvtown immediately.

Which is entirely a meta problem and I'm not going to play any game of mafia worse in order to maybe get a scum win somewhere.

Act up a little. Question some assumptions in the thread. Make some waves. Don't do what's expected. That's good town play.

If the mafia is the informed minority, they have more information to fuel their predictions. Act unpredictably.

The other flaw to being obvtown is getting a bullet in your brain. I tend not to rate being obviously town very highly. I prefer to be effective town, which in today's meta requires being alive. I don't advocate playing anything other than optimally in every game. I hope you don't think that's what I'm saying. I'm saying that because people won't heed your advice after you are dead, you need to be alive to be a good townie. Sure it's good to question assumptions, usually your own. I don't disagree with that, but I think that making a conscious effort to be unpredictable leads to gambits and unnecessary risks. Certainly you shouldn't be playing to a form, but I feel that the number of players that are both good and play to be intentionally unpredictable can be counted on one hand.

To be honest, I know a lot less about how to play well as town, because it's harder and you have to adapt to an infinite variety of mafia play. Fundamentally everything the town does should be based upon the circumstances, upon every piece of information that you gather all taken into account somehow. That's hard to put into words. Good town keeps the town active and on track. Fosters healthy discussion, and doesn't descend into ad hominem discussion. Good town answers questions, but doesn't push too far into irrelevant topics. They know to reevaluate their reads and legitimately consider the opinions that other players have. The worst thing that townies can do is do the opposite of these things, and I think that's why they tend to lose a lot. Tunnel vision, ad hominem, monopolies on truth, refusal to answer questions, and driving for pages at irrelevancies are what plague the town and make it so that all the scum have to do is not lynch themselves.

[Lord Gurgi]

Sure. But I doubt if you'll ever experience that in practice. I've been obvtown as scum.

[Lord Gurgi]

Being alive means you can gain more information to make better decisions. Other people won't do that as reliable as you will.

[Lord Gurgi]

I'm not playing at 70%, I'm playing through different channels. In games where I believe the town will do just fine without me I play to be town, in games where I believe I'm one of a handful of competent players it's stupid to not try to survive. With the scum able to kill with impunity, the cut off for enough good players to carry the town keeps going up. I've played games (more than one) where the player list has had a bunch of idiots, me, Yos, and maybe one or two other people who I would feel comfortable leaving the town to. Guess who dies night one.

The problem with Empking's argument is that on the average you will have two days to lynch all the mafia. There are usually three mafia.

[Lord Gurgi]

Amrun, the point I was making with this list is that it is far too easy to win as mafia. Not that it's fun. I applaud you taking an active role as scum, it's exhilarating to be leading the town in a crusade that could fall around you at any time. Unfortunately when there's no need to play in the way that is fun, there's a problem with the game. That's what I was trying to say. I hope that by posting things like these, people will start to actually consider looking out for the people that do this.

[Lord Gurgi]

Does this mean that we have to start paying attention to Yosarian2 when he says we have to lynch the lurkers?~

I always listen to everything Yos says.

[Lord Gurgi]

So this has been in rotation for a month and a half, is town winning every game yet? Or are people ready to admit that meta doesn't adjust as robustly as theory says it does?

[Lord Gurgi]

That never happens in practise. Talk to TheFonz.

[Lord Gurgi]

Well that's also because most lurkers aren't scum. I mean, you don't cut off your nose because it has a pimple to bring the rest of the face into line.

[Lord Gurgi]

That was the point I was trying to subtly put across. Glad you got it. Lynching groups of people isn't effective because the averages aren't in your favour.

[Lord Gurgi]

No, because you need to kill all the scum, not some of the scum. You'll probably catch a scum from lynching lurkers but you'll have nothing to work with once you're out of lurkers, unless you plan to lynch everyone who opposed lynching lurkers. Also you'll have lost by then.

[Lord Gurgi]

Why do people assume that once towns lynch lurkers the game will become easier for the town? I mean, the active scum will just laugh at you as you hand them the game. Or the scum will start pushing for lurker lynches themselves. Going after objective elements of the town will always backfire.

[Lord Gurgi]

There's an element of the game that isn't just about 'finding the scumz' though. Enjoyment of the game, pace, replacement hell... all of these things are ALSO affected by chasing/killing lurkers. Just because it's not 100% (protip: no tell is) doesn't mean it's not useful to put pressure on lurkers.

I think that 'finding the scumz' would go a long way towards enhancing enjoyment of the game. But, even then, putting pressure short of lynching lurkers will never be very effective, and usually adds very little to the town. If you're pressuring lurkers as a major objective for the town, you are not getting any valuable information except whether the person in question is a diehard lurker. If you're not pressuring lurkers as a major objective for the town, they will continue to lurk and you will at least gain something out of your other activities. The real thing to do is for mods to start putting lurker vigilantes into their games.

[Lord Gurgi]

I suppose that depends on the type of lurker. I mean, when I talk about calculated inaction I am not speaking of lurking your way to victory. The idea is to forever be that guy that seemed town early in the game but hasn't done much recently. But I take your point. I am not too sure what the solution is to this dilemma. Ideally there would be some non-lynch method that the town can use to eliminate lurkers. A lurker-vigilante or an additional lurker only lynch, etc. I feel like if the town is forced to split their time between pressuring lurkers and actually scumhunting, they'll spend even more time working against themselves than normal. As I've said earlier, when I'm scum lurker lynches are the greatest thing. They're a worry free place to park your vote. On the other hand, expecting the mod to fix certain playstyles isn't a great solution either. Then again, I'm increasingly suspicious of how much lurking should be recognised as a playstyle. I mean, I wouldn't let the kid that sits in the corner in Super Smash continue to play just because that's how he wants to play. Play the game or don't right?

When it gets down to it, lynching lurkers is less efficient than other activities for the purposes of getting information, likely to be abused by scum, and is just as likely as random lynches to catch scum.