Hi all.
I'll be your friendly neighborhood IC for this game. When you see my text in maroon and italicized, you may rest assured that I am not lying to you and that I am, to the best of my ability, giving you genuine advice. As Mafia has its roots in social gaming, with healthy dashes of individual psychology, keep in mind that you can and occasionally should discount my advice depending on the circumstances. I have never met two people who play Mafia in exactly the same way, though you will often find players falling into various recurrent tropes (sometimes referred to as "tells") that can give you hints to their alignment.
That being said, I'll try to give advice whenever something of note appears. I would also recommend taking a look at mafia theory articles on the Mafiascum wiki. Many of them are outdated and, due to the way the game shifts in different environments, may not always be applicable in every situation. Still, they have been immensely useful to me and I hope they will serve you as well.
The most important thing to note is that you are playing to figure out other players' alignments. You aren't just trying to out-argue them, for if that were the case, the same players would always win as town or mafia. It is useful to be paranoid, but it is even more useful to find people you can trust. Scumhunting, the term for using various methods to capture mafia (scum), is the main aim of the game for town. This is in contrast to the mafia, who are expected to be scumhunting, but, because they know who are town and who are mafia, they have to fabricate their cases. The intricacies that allow a person to distinguish this is the gist of the game. One of my favorite adages which, to my knowledge, is not quite outdated yet, is that most occasions involving tunneling (a sort of single-minded, deep, but not especially broad questioning of another player) are generally between two town players during early parts of the game. A very successful scum tactic, especially among newbie games, is to egg on an argument without investing much in it, and when the player who loses is lynched, to push a wagon the next day on the person who was tunneling them. Keep an eye out for this, but remember, scum are also reading this and will most likely try to turn this technique to their advantage.
Now, with that initial bit of advice out of the way, let's move onto the current situation. Right now we are in a low-information stage of the game called RVS/RQS (respectively, random voting stage or random questioning stage) which is an early part of the game that gets things rolling. Note that I said "low-information." This is important because our two teams have different motivations. Scum want to keep town in the dark, because an ignorant town is a dead town, while town should try to get as much information as possible. Keep an eye on players who don't seem to understand the game state and try to see the difference between them and players who seem to understand the game state and are trying to keep it in low-information stages. The latter are more likely to be scum. This also has implications if you are town. Most directly, it means that it is a pro-town move to comment on events regarding the flow of the game as well as things you see affecting the lines of questioning people are drawing during RQS. The more you concentrate on making the game actually about the game, the faster we exit RQS and the more effectively we will be able to scumhunt.
More to come as we play! Good luck everyone.
Supercharazad: Not really. I find that overcooked plans are suboptimal. I'll probably move toward more effective plans later on in the game. What made you choose me as your RVS target?
TheDarkStar: How do you expect this sprint game to differ from a normal game of mafia in terms of play, rather than just mechanics, which we all are aware of?
Deus Asmoth: What insights do you plan on applying in this game based on your experiences in others?
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Topic: BM Sprint 3: Thick as Thieves - Game Over - Town Victory (Read 25552 times)