Here you can share your personal tips for successful play, whether it be mafia or town, or even third party!

Lots of people have varying opinions on how you should go about playing, so butting heads will probably happen. Arguments aren't discouraged but please keep it under control. Please don't act as if your tips are definitive, because they most likely aren't.

Have fun!

Upon further consideration I have decided to remove these articles from MG for personal reasons.

I thank you for anyone who has read whatever advice I have tried to give.

pro tip don't hammer yourself as town at lylo

As town, be wary of the commonplace scum phrases: Congratulating the doc for preventing a kill, freak out when being in MyLo/LyLo, question sanity on a cop, calling bus-drived interference. The former two are attempts at town reaction, while the latter two are easy ways yo handwave over accusations.

"Mafia are opportunistic. As such, they will try to lynch people without looking opportunistic."
"The first person voting for a player who doesn't have a case on them so far is usually mafia."
"People who bandwagon on lynches are usually mafia."
"People who hammer are usually mafia."

This is hardly advice, you're just mapping out every possible situation in order to make yourself look sage and experienced at the game. The disclaimer at the end basically discredits everything you wrote. You certainly salute to banality.


Do you have an unpublished thought on this forum?


Amazing. Can you teach me how to vote? I'm having a really hard time grasping all of these novel concepts you're throwing at me.


That's cute, but nauseatingly pretentious at the same time.

A truthier truth has yet to be written.

I'm going to say some things you may disagree with, but eh, why not.

Towns should ideally do these things:


Scum should ideally do these things:


As you can see, scum's priority is to restrict as much information as possible while making themselves appear town. As town, you should be producing as much information as possible, discerning whether or not a person is appearing town or is actually town. Differences between the two can be noticed: for one, scum is likely to be much more cautious than town would in a given situation, as surviving is generally much more important in the hierarchy of scum things to do than town.
There is a large difference between anti-town and scum: anti-town, although bad, is generally ignorant rather than deliberate, in the sense that it's slightly excusable(does that make any sense). People who do anti-town things can have admirable motives, while scummy actions may not have the same light on them. The tricky part is in the difference.

Players who are confident and competent are surprisingly often scum, bussing. That same player as town misses things that their scum-self picks up on, that same town player lacks the same confidence because they don't know, that same player will be less effective at scumhunting as town than they are as scum. (Note that this is far from universal, and is incredibly player-specific. But in general, it's what I've observed: see Kyuubit, TOWK, Brik. As a counterexample, see me)

Games have been won and lost on PoE: in the games I've seen town victories, it was more a matter of who wasn't town than who was scum, and that was not just about role deduction. Look at the overall picture. Why is this person doing something, and how does this fit in their plan, if they have any?

If you want people to listen to you, I've noticed something. My random shouting in 14 did absolutely nothing, and my laissez-faire attitude in 17 wasn't exactly convincing either. I've found that TOWK, Brik and DJ hold a very good balance between the two spectrums, hence why they are so convincing as either alignment. Talk to the players rather than at them. Don't make judgements from a reserved point of view, and don't antagonize them either. After all, mafia is a team game. Always look for common ground, and ask everyone to explain their motives as mentioned before.

It's impossible to start a game immediately with content unless there is a mechanic in place that strongly favors there being content from the get-go. Thus, a method of generating content must be used. Some alternatives to the RVS have been tried. The RQS, for instance, being insanely popular in MG Mafia, ultimately favors scum more than town and doesn't get the game rolling any sooner. See 18 for a recent example.

I use the RVS because it's the method that has, by-and-large, proved the most effective at getting the results that the town want--content, soon, and useful content at that. Using it, a game could theoretically be out of the RVS before the end of page one (generally in smaller games) or two (in larger games). You might occasionally get an RVS that lasts longer thanks to some posting a ton of times in it, but even then, it typically ends in the same amount of time. (Generally within two real-life days, the Random Voting Stage has passed.) Not only is it easier to generate content soon in, but it's also something that can be fun. You can make jokes that don't otherwise fit into the game, you can have in-jokes that reference previously-played games, you can basically do your own thing for fun.

There's no universal method for finding scum. A key part of finding scum is recognizing scum thoughts. Their mindset, their motive, the intentions present in their post, are INCREDIBLY important to pick up on. A scummy player can be town whose words were scummy but intention was town. A townie player can be scum whose words looked good but were pushing a scum agenda. Mindset involves a lot of guesswork, and it's often wrong more than you get it right. But having meta knowledge helps, and also paying attention to those key interactions helps even more.

While I'm perfectly fine with you giving general advice on the game itself, I have a problem with the two pieces below:

When you start specifically mentioning names of players on this forum, and saying "This is how they are in certain situations, you're highly risking meta becoming even more involved in our games than it already is, and the way it already is is too much. Please refrain from doing this as I don't ever want to see "well Terra said you act this way in the Tips and Tricks section" in an actual game. Thankies

Well shoot, there goes my strategy.

That's fair enough. I'll refrain from doing this later on, though it'd be a bit harder to explain stuff.