Mafia Skills

[Dasquian]

I reckon the most important skill is being able to walk the fine line between looking lynchable (so not getting night-killed), and not actually getting lynched. That skill applies to town and scum alike, because scum want to stay alive as long as possible, and a townie who the scum underestimate or think they can get lynched til it's too late are always useful.

I think the most useful town skill is to be able to discern when someone's behaviour is genuine and when it's a cynical act... ie, to have good "gut feeling". The most useful scum skill is the converse - being able to appear entirely candid, so you don't appear on anyone's radar

[Dasquian]

Dasquin and Yanqush:

Your proposed skills seem to be more towards surviving rather than winning. And don't give me the "if your alive at the end, you've obviously won" argument. Being an expert at survival will only delay your loss via cop claim, or end-game kill.

Oh, I agree that surviving != winning, and I get as annoyed as the next guy for people who save their own skin at the expense of their team.

What I meant though is that, as a townie, it's useful to have the mad skillz to avoid getting lynched, while appearing to be lynchable enough not to be worth killing. Obviously, if you have a very useless role then you might want to selflessly play as bait and hope to get night-killed, but that's a dangerous game in its own right If you can walk that tight-rope though, perhaps the mafia will plan to get you lynched in the end-game and find that you were very much the wrong person to keep alive.

As mafia the "if you survive to the end you've won" ideal is a lot closer to the truth - obviously you're not as much at risk of being night-killed, but if you can avoid getting lynched without looking conspicuous for still being alive, then almost by definition you've won And in games with multiple mafia, the same arguments as above apply about not looking like an attractive kill-choice.

[Dasquian]

Good points shady

I guess I missed out an important point that I really shouldn't have - I'm assuming that in the end-game, you have some method to demonstrate your innocence to the town which you've kept under wraps.

So for example if you're a mason, you and your buddy should play like I describe, and hope to be around, unclaimed, in a three-person end-game. Yes, you could put your hands up and instantly be a confirmed-innocent, but that's actually doing the town a disservice. Even if you're a vanilla townie, if you did something you think validates you earlier in the game that has been overlooked, you shouldn't draw attention to it til later. If the mafia missed it too, maybe they thought they'd be able to get you lynched in the end-game and then you go ah-HA, why would I have done this?

So I think our ideas go hand in hand, but are important at different stages in the game. A confirmed innocent is a wonderful asset to the game but the earlier they appear, the more easily they can be picked off leaving the town with a difficult choice at the end. If those confirmeds-in-potentia wait til later to prove themselves, and make sure they stay alive in the mean time, then the mafia will probably kill a fair few people they actually had a better hope of getting lynched.

[Dasquian]

No, you misunderstand. What I'm saying is, we have this situation:

Player - suspicion level

Player 1 - High (is townie)
Player 2 - Medium (is mafia)
Player 3 - Low (is townie)
Player 4 - High (is mason)
Player 5 - High (is mason)

Penultimate day - town lynch player 1. Overnight, the mafia makes the most obvious choice and kills low-suspicion player 3, hoping to get one of players 4 or 5 lynched. Then the town wins.

That's a bit of an extreme and unusual example, but my point is that if you are able to turn around your suspicion to become undeniably low-suspicion when needed (say, if you're the remaining mason in a game which has only seen one mason dead), staying suspicious is a good move because you'll be that all-important Mr Low Suspicion in the end-game.

If everyone who could dispel suspicion did so as soon as possible, the mafia can pick and choose who gets to survive to end-game. You get one day to have fun being trusted by the town, before getting picked off.