Including Oneself in Town Lists

[callforjudgement]

If I'm breaking a setup, I add mechanisms in the breaking strategy to hedge against me being scum (unless there are necessarily going to be some slots that can't be hedged and I'm widely townread). This is to encourage other people to adopt the strategy I suggest. It's not so much an "I could be scum" as "this strategy works even if I'm scum, thus you have no reason not to follow it even if you're suspicious of me and so not following it (without an explanation given well in advance) would be scummy".

If I'm giving reads, I omit myself entirely. Reading myself wouldn't be a useful exercise as I already know my alignment, and in most games, claiming my alignment is pointless because everyone knows I'd claim Town regardless of my actual alignment.

[callforjudgement]

Back when confirmations were normally done in-thread, at least one player claimed that you could figure out if someone was scum purely from the way they confirmed.

Given that many people used to type /confirm regardless of alignment, it's hard to see how that could work.

[callforjudgement]

Also in practice people are bad at identifying anime.

Clearly we're going to need a list of animetells, not-anime-tells, and things that are Not Anime Indicative.

I once saw someone arguing that all the town PMs had gone out sooner, therefore everyone who confirmed quickly was town.

I'm paranoid about something like this happening in a game I mod. That's why I've always sent out role PMs one at a time in playerlist order, even though my rules ban things like timestamp discussion and thus should theoretically make it safe to send out all the VT PMs at once.

[callforjudgement]

I take confirmations as a role PM reply partly for that reason, but for a bunch of other reasons too. Here's the full list:

• What's being discussed here: as long as your thread only lists the
  number
  of confirmed players, not the
  identity
  of confirmed players, it prevents any sort of confirmation tell happening (which I consider valuable mostly because it doesn't pressure scum into ending their pre-game discussion early, if they have something to say);
  
• As long as you don't acknowledge any confirmations until every role PM is sent out, it prevents any sort of information leaking from the timing of role PMs (whereas if someone /confirmed in thread before all role PMs were sent out, the players who got their role PM later would know that they'd got it later); this probably isn't a problem but because scum PMs take slightly longer than town PMs to send as you have to edit in the names of the buddies, there's a tiny possibility for an information leak;
  
• It helps to ensure that players have actually read their role PM and are aware of their role;
  
• If the game is doing anything even slightly nonstandard (e.g. nonstandard win conditions) you can ask players to repeat it back to you as part of the confirmation, and thus are aware of which players have misunderstood their role;
  
• It means you don't have to leave the thread unlocked while the game's still in confirmations (and thus has a chance of needing last-minute playerlist changes), which reduces the potential for abuse.