What makes a good town player?

[Alyssa The Lamb]

this is a very hard question because the most general answer to this question is "being strong at enough of the different possible skills that go into a mafia game."

The biggest thing I consider a staple in strong townplay is the ability to understand how likely your reads, or whatever you're looking to figure out in the game, are to be correct. This is a very good skill to have mainly because it helps keep you in check when you're probably wrong and builds your confidence when you are probably right; this takes a lot of practice and double checking your tracks to make sure your foundation is solid, but that's the type of player I'm always the most afraid of when I'm scum since they're the hardest type of player to predict and/or manipulate.

Flexibility is the other main thing, which kind of ties in to the first. If you can function in a lot of different types of games without being neutralized, then you are simply more consistently strong from game across game. If you can respond to the gamestate and fill in niches that town is missing, then you will help more towns be cohesive and functional. If you can take curveballs and twist them to your advantage to help you get a better read on the game, then you are more likely to see through the scumteam's manipulation. Etc.

Reading the game itself and how you fit into it is ultimately what it comes down to, you can't fit into the same slot every single game and expect it to work consistently, there's far too many variables in play across game after game for that to be viable. Each player only has the personality for so many roles, but it's generally finding which approach for a specific game gives you the highest odds of being able to win the game that will provide a strong boost to your winning chances.

My nightkills tend to be the following, roughly in order of preference depending on what choices there are:
1. High momentum swing (in gamestates where most of the power is in one slot, assuming there isn't another compelling reason to keep them alive)
2. High cohesion swing (slots that will drastically cut town's ability to work together after their death)
3. High potential damage players (slots I expect to cause the most damage to my team over time, generally the night before I believe they will start becoming a threat)
4. High read strength players (players that have strong reads in the moment)
5. Low information kills (kills that give town very little extra to work with)

[Alyssa The Lamb]

ego is integral part of a strong town, you don't call sheeps strong town players, do you?

ego in this case means egotistical

keeping ego in check is part of being a strong town

[Alyssa The Lamb]

ez

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Np buddy

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Nah

All it takes is reframing their narrative and manipulating flips that supports that narrative or finding a way to destroy their credibility to lower their threat level

The slots that will give them more of a voice are the slots I'm more afraid of

[Alyssa The Lamb]

A baseline competence with reads is a good thing, it just gets increasingly diminished returns after a point

[Alyssa The Lamb]

so how do i get n1'd as town

Presence

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Try blocking town lynches instead of pushing scum lynches, that's a strategy I've had success with when people don't listen to my scumreads

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Whether it's egotistical or not depends on the delivery

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Its based on the delivery because you can either convince the main people driving the lynch that they're wrong or hard veto it by being really loud

Its not egotistical if you're giving the opposing side an opportunity to convince you

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Congrats alisae :3

I'm proud of you bb

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Spice is all you need

[Alyssa The Lamb]

i think there may be a disconnect in what you guys are talking about

there's a level of ego associated with considering yourself superior for sure. but being *seen* as egotistical is another decision which people need to make when they consider how to conduct themselves.

mafia is a game of socialising/people but far more importantly it's a game of optics

[Alyssa The Lamb]

i think it's more important to just like look town enough to take yourself out of the lynchpool and to be able to identify other townies and work with them than to like be able to find scum

This tends to give better results than most other strategies in more games I've found

[Alyssa The Lamb]

It works both ways, gobble.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Yes it does.

Focusing on looking for and finding town will far more often create gamestate that are healthier for solving and/or that scum will need to stretch to counter.

Bias is more prevalent and likely to result in a stubborn incorrect read on scumreads on top of that.

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I think in a vacuum being wrong in “finding town” is worse for the game state than being wrong in “finding scum.”

Introducing egos, emotions, and other human elements into the mix probably has the opposite result though.

yup, emotions are the biggest reason this is true

this wasn't really the case back when I started playing since people handled the game very differently, but it's more true now since the game can get very volatile very quickly with a wrong scumread while a wrong townread just means you need to be a bit more proactive in double checking whether your townblock is accurate or not

[Alyssa The Lamb]

townhunting > scumhunting

as a town, you know how a town would act. you don't know how scum would act.

the nature of the game is to make you jump on anything that you see as scummy. town do inherently scummy things because they are uninformed.

now, if you look for scum in a game where 75% of the playerlist is town and, most importantly, UNINFORMED - therefore, they are doing a lot more scummy shit - you are at a disadvantage.

imo it's generally easier to lock people as town since there's almost always points where somebody will subconsciously indicate that they aren't informed in some way; these are a lot more absolute than identifying points where somebody is informed since you don't actually know what exactly their extra information is

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I think in a vacuum being wrong in “finding town” is worse for the game state than being wrong in “finding scum.”

Introducing egos, emotions, and other human elements into the mix probably has the opposite result though.

yup, emotions are the biggest reason this is true

this wasn't really the case back when I started playing since people handled the game very differently, but it's more true now since the game can get very volatile very quickly with a wrong scumread while a wrong townread just means you need to be a bit more proactive in double checking whether your townblock is accurate or not

See, that's the issue, I don't like half-assed reads that I have to doubt and double check

As for your argument for better gamestate - it's not better, more pleasant, sure, everyone feels better, when they are townread rather than scumread, but it has it's own drawbacks, you have go back on your reads

idk what this is even arguing

I can't tell if you're arguing against reassessing reads or if you're saying that incorrect reads in general are half-assed reads

[Alyssa The Lamb]

ut it has it's own drawbacks, you have go back on your reads

this tells me the former???

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I'm saying that this approach is terrible - for it to work, you have convince other people that your townreads are solid, while they are not. You're not making much progress, you not clearing slots. Problem becomes obvious, when you die and people don't bother to go back and just go on with these reads

I'm really confused because it sounds like you're assuming townreads can't be solid because... I'm not sure why?

and if people aren't going off your reads after you die, then that's a failure of reshaping the playerlist's perception of the game, not the fact that they're townreads

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Try blocking town lynches instead of pushing scum lynches, that's a strategy I've had success with when people don't listen to my scumreads

[Alyssa The Lamb]

really is just as simple as breaking the momentum on the opposing lynch candidates a lot of the time

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Charisma at its fundamental level is just playing to your audience

The way to get better charisma is to work on deciphering what approach is going to work for the specific situation and/or players involved

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Tbf a lot of my hunting is based on eliminating slots from contention and seeing what pops into my head from the rest

I generally pick up on enough stuff that I don't necessarily realize at the time, so it's a lot more productive for me to run through and test my theories and/or check for as many possibilities as I can because I'll eventually hit the right answer (and probably drag the rest of the town to it also in the meantime)

This is somewhat why my methods look really bizarre and hard to parse logically, my process is generally hidden because I link things subconsciously rather than a conscious set of logical steps

But yes forming a townblock often helps my solving considerably even if I end up having scum within them

[Alyssa The Lamb]

I'm curious Elli, how would I be able to contact you offsite? I'm interested in discussing the alternate means you're speaking of

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Nagito is my spirit animal

[Alyssa The Lamb]

That's ok just eat me to become big and strong alisae

[Alyssa The Lamb]

i think "force of personality" is exactly what i would call the trait that correlates with getting the lynches you want. very good term.

This is also my experience

[Alyssa The Lamb]

my initial Blake experiment basically proved that force of will is like 98% of what you need if your only goal is to get the lynches you want

it has severe drawbacks when you rely on it, but it IS effective in that sense

[Alyssa The Lamb]

FL is charismatic but not very good at getting himself listened to

his idiosyncrasies also do get him lynched at times

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Boon is a beautiful, beautiful man

This is funny from the context of hydraing with this man many times

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Directly relying upon charisma isn't charisma

Its like the show, don't tell principle

[Alyssa The Lamb]

Directly relying upon charisma isn't charisma

Its like the show, don't tell principle

Isn't that what FL do?

He does both, I don't know anybody who even pays attention to him when he does his self meta.