I debated whether or not to post this because I think I'm going to post this and some scum behavior is going to change in subtle ways. But there are new people in the game and I'm just being a pussy.
How to read people in mafia:
- Meta
- Duress
- Motivation
There are lots of philosophies around how to make reads on people in mafia games. Here is mine.
The first thing that you’re doing is to
assign behavior to alignment. Let’s say we have a person, where when he’s town he always does action X, and when he’s scum he always does action Y. You know this because of the many games in the past where this pattern has held. He now performs action X. For that reason, I would consider that person town.
This is really the gold standard of reading people, a map of actions to alignment for each individual person. But you can’t use this if you don’t have such a map to begin with, and you can’t use it if the last game you’ve played with that person was 2 years ago so you don’t know how accurate your map is.
The second thing that you’re doing is
observing duress. People, with few exceptions, don’t like lying. It kind of sucks. People enjoy being liked and being truthful, and people who are lying are under duress. It’s much more comfortable for scum to chat in scumchat than in the thread, because they don’t have to lie. Find signs of duress. People exemplify it in different ways. Some people get defensive, others leave the thread, others get really aggressive. A lot of duress is displayed tonally.
The final thing you’re doing is
mapping actions to motivation. Town is trying to puzzle solve, and their posts should be viewed to that end. Scum is trying to not lynch scum. You can view actions performed in the game and guess at which motivation drives which actions. This is especially helpful after seeing flips.
How to use power roles:
Vig: shoot people who are going to get lynched anyway. Don’t shoot your scumreads unless you’re very sure. Shoot who town looks like they’re about to lynch
Doctor: protect PRs and TRs
Alignment cop: use cops on people you have no read on, who might also be useful to know the alignment of. so don’t use cops on people who are heavily SR’d. You’re looking for guilties on people who might coast for a long time
Rolecop: Instead of caring about your own reads like you would as an alignment cop, go for who you think is globally scumread. You’re essentially trying to keep ahead of the lynch train. If someone is getting lynched soon, you would expect them to claim as they get run up. Sometimes scum can claim something like town doctor or cop to at least flush out a counterclaim before you die. But you’re a rolecop. You’re fucking useless. So if the wagon starts getting pushed off, you can at the worst case come out with a counterclaim so that the real cop/dr can stay hidden. Ideally you don’t claim, and just try to influence the wagon.
Watcher/Trackers: You’re trying to get guilty results. You should watch people who are likely to be NK’d, you should track people who are likely to carry out NKs (scumreads, but usually the least suspected one of your scumreads). You’re trying to track people to dead people, and watch dead people get killed.
Item gifters: Give them to strong townreads who you don’t think are likely to die soon. If the scum strongman has been lynched, then give it to your strongest townread since that’s likely who the doctor will protect.
VTs: Provide cover for power roles. Ideally, all of the loudest and most townread people in the game should be VTs, and all of the PRs should be very middle of the road. Then scum has no idea who to kill.
