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Mafia Philosophy

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I agree with Buoy there. It's always nice to survive to endgame as town and all, but it's much more important to keep the fact that it's a team game in mind. Staying on the side and not getting involved just because you don't want someone to put pressure on you or doing your best to clear yourself instead of scumhunting is what the mafia is supposed to do, not the town. Quiet townies are not really helpful to their side, unless they're trying to lay low because they're an important power role like cop or doctor. (But even then it's always better to get involved in the game.)
 
*cracks knuckles*

and if they insist on it not being them without any good evidence

Why is it up to the defendant to prove themselves 'not-guilty', because of a vote where people are admitting themselves is only for "information"? The phrase 'innocent until proved guilty' exists for a reason - you wouldn't just go around saying "That random guy murdered my wife, give him the death penalty" without anything to back it up in real life, and you'd be considered a fool if you tried.

Yes, I agree vote patterns can be used to find suspicious people. However, the main thing is that they're not the only things that can be used. Speech patterns, buddying, whether they're actually actively scumhunting or just doing "Yup", "Uh-huh", "I agree" and not contributing. Also, if you're only voting for "information", then okay, vote and have everything that goes on, but then you can still no lynch, and that information will still be there. The information when the victim is dead will only put pressure on the town to use it well - however, if the person is alive, it puts pressure on the mafia.

Let's assume Player A is the cop, and was part of a bandwagon to get information. Situations:

1) Player A is lynched. The town is worse off, and the mafia rejoice. All they can do is look to see who voted, but even then, the fact is was a Day 1 lynch means no-one can really be incriminated for it since no-one, not even the mafia, would've known he was a cop. < THAT IS THE KEY POINT.

2) The town unvote and no lynch instead. Now, if a lot of the mafia voted, they'll be hesitant to kill Player A. Why? He's a 'suspicious' person, why kill him when the town will vote instead? So they leave Player A alone (in the most logical scenario). Now let's say they discover he's the cop from a Night 1 action. The town tries to lynch Player A, but then someone saves it with their Day action. NOW, if the mafia kill Player A, it could be incriminating for themselves because it's not a Day 1 lynch.

My point? You can only really get 'information' from people lynched after people have information to base their lynches off. Real, solid, factual information.

This probably just sounds muddled and disorganised, but I'm rushing typing it, so meh.
 
PichuBoy my scenario had the person want the day 1 lynch. It would be a completely different scenario if they didn't.

Generally if you want a day 1 lynch, you really can't be surprised or angry if it's you. People should be prepared to face the consequences of their own strategy.
 
I'm a team-first kind of a gal as well. I used to care a lot about personal victories, but I rarely ever survive till endgame too. There's a reason why my personal endgame victory % is so small but my endgame faction victory is pretty even - a little over 50%.

Mafia games are a team effort, and I think people that concentrate their efforts towards helping their teammates wind up the most successful.
 
Generally if you want a day 1 lynch, you really can't be surprised or angry if it's you. People should be prepared to face the consequences of their own strategy.

That basically comes back to lynching someone for the heck of it, though.
 
I don't really give two shits about personal wins in mafia games (unless, of course, my win condition is to survive to endgame). I don't understand the mindset of personal survival over the good of the team. Few things give me more enjoyment than seeing my team emerge victorious after having done everything I could to help - whether I'm dead or alive at that point is inconsequential.
 
Massclaiming isn't terrible for the mafia - see Hetalia Mafia. I managed to gain a confirmed innocent's tentative trust and the mafia won without losing a single member.
 
I don't really like mass claims, personally, because I feel like it makes the game too easy for the town and too hard for the mafia, since they have to prepare a fake role claim, or at least a fake name claim and that's not always easy. Plus if they don't claim a role that is sure to be town, chances are that they will be lynched anyway because the other roles are much more believable. And that's without mentioning how it puts the fate of the town into the hands of only one person (or a handful) instead of letting everyone participate.
 
My biggest reason for disliking massclaims isn't even the disadvantage they inherently force upon the mafia, it's that they're just so...boring. A lot of the secretive nature is gone from the game after a mass-claim to a confirmed townie. I realize I've only played a handful of games here, but those are just my thoughts.

Oh, and I don't have any philosophy. That's above my play level. I have found that I'm overly distrusting though. Which is probably another reason why I dislike massclaims.
 
My issue with massclaims is that you have one person (or very few people) in charge of evaluating the claims and dictating, according to their views, which claims are most suspicious. It's giving far too much power to one person, and power that may be misguided, as other people looking at the same information could come to very different conclusions.

That's what I wanted to demonstrate with Hetalia mafia... The very early massclaim, handled primarily by just one person (though shared in some capacity with their mason partner), resulted in misplaced trust by that one person's judgments, and ultimately spelled out a devastating loss for the town.
 
I don't really believe in winning on a personal level. This is meant to be a team thing and I've never seen a mafia game won by a single person. Yeah, it's awesome when you're one of the last alive on the winning team, but it really comes down to whether you did something. Compare The Christmas Mafia 2011 to The War Room Mafia 1. I consider myself a winner of both games, despite the fact I survived the first, but died in the second. The thing is, in TWR Mafia 1 I was teamed up with a couple other people. We collectively pulled of a strategy that allowed us to win, at the cost of my life. I was willing to take a bullet for the team if it meant that we would win. And we did. So I now consider winning to be, "did you do something to bring your team to victory?"

On the topic of Day 1 lynches, I usually stay away from them. Too often I see valuable and useful roles killed off because people randomly start going for the "spray and pray" approach. Now, if someone can convince me in-game that killing on Day 1 is useful and can provide an acceptable target, I'll usually follow along. But I'm not usually one to point the first finger. I want to have some little thing to work off of first.

With massclaiming and name claiming... I have problems with massclaiming. Mainly, it doesn't work too well. Especially since the people that do claim to one person put their faith in that one person. It is so easy for that person to die with that information unshared, or for that person to be mafia. I never go along with massclaimings. Usually they're a bunch of lies.

Name claiming is another matter. I allowed nameclaiming in all three of my Falconwing games because until the last game no one had the information available to weed out fake names. You could literally call yourself anything and get away with it. Sourcandy's role in the third game was to catch people doing a mass name claiming and call them out on it if they lied about their name. That is... not how she used that role.
 
I avoid random Day 1 bandwagons a lot of the time. It usually ends up giving the Mafia a headstart and allows them to kill another townie at night therefore having 2 townies down by Day 2. While I agree votes are a way of getting info, On Day 1 it's really just a random lynch most of the time.

I usually hate mass claims a lot too. I usually host games with themes that are well known ( ex Hunger Games) where it's way too easy. It usually makes it too easy for mafia to win and I like both sides to have an equal chance at winning.

You mean it makes thing easier for the town.

Though, has a situation ever occurred where the town claimed to a mafioso or at least the confirmed townie got converted? Would really suck for the town then instead of the mafia...

Honestly, I feel mass claiming is not in the spirit of the game, since mafia games are about weeding out who's suspicious through their actions and overall behavior, not about whether their claims seem "townie" or not. It gives way too much of an unfair advantage to a side, and the game just essentially becomes "follow the leader".
 
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PichuBoy my scenario had the person want the day 1 lynch. It would be a completely different scenario if they didn't.

Generally if you want a day 1 lynch, you really can't be surprised or angry if it's you. People should be prepared to face the consequences of their own strategy.

That's irrelevant to the scenarios I posted. Whether someone wants a Day 1 lynch or not, it's still not a good idea. I could easily say "Player A is a cop who wants to random lynch", and they still both play out exactly the same way.

The only time you should ever lynch someone Day 1 is if you can be sure they're mafia. Usually, that translates as "Have they scumslipped?". The only other time I'll be tempted to lynch is if they're HIGHLY suspicious (e.g. doing things no town in their right mind would do), but even then, there's no harm in keeping them alive for the time being, and so I probably wouldn't lynch them.

Also, on the subject of massclaiming - the whole point is to be able to weed out the mafia. If someone has been 100% confirmed as a town member, then as the town, you should claim at least your role. It's not like the mafia suddenly have to start scrambling around for a good roleclaim - if that's the case, they deserve to be lynched. Every mafia member should have a fake name-/role-claim prepared as soon as they start, and if they don't prepare, then they face the consequences.

The best thing to do if you have all the roleclaims is first to try and work out pairs of roles that would be broken if they both existed on the same side, or at all. You can then safely bet that one of them is anti-town. Then, roles that are similar, or identical - again, that's usually the case of one town role and one mafia role. By that point, you probably have a pretty secure amount of trustworthy people, and THEN you start weeding out suspicious people WITH these trustworthy people. But don't rely on claims alone, go back through the days and scumhunt.
 
Though, has a situation ever occurred where the town claimed to a mafioso or at least the confirmed townie got converted? Would really suck for the town then instead of the mafia...

In FMAB mafia, the confirmed townie/claim collector got converted and sure enough, townies with particularly nifty roles started dying off. It also happened in Disney Princesses mafia, although we won right after we converted Paperhorse (her reaction was awesome).


I don't like massclaims because, besides giving the town a major advantage, I think it unfairly places the burden of finding mafia on a couple of townies. The rest of the town (or a large portion of it) will then wait for the confirmed townie to tell them who to lynch/who to target with their action and, once they have been told, will follow without question. Also, with how popular massclaiming is, it gets old really fast.

As for nameclaims, I hate it when they are allowed in a game (unless it's a theme where the name of the role does not in any way indicate alignment). If you're mafia, you often have to claim a minor character (which raises eyebrows) or claim one of the major characters and risk getting counterclaimed.

I don't mind lynching on day 1, as long as there is something behind it. It could be something small, but anything besides "You don't like blueberries. U TOTES MAFIA." Maybe this is horribly bloodthirsty of me, but no lynches = snoozefest.
 
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Though, has a situation ever occurred where the town claimed to a mafioso or at least the confirmed townie got converted? Would really suck for the town then instead of the mafia...

In the Hetalia Mafia, all the claims got into the hands of the on-death converter due to the fact that he faked a PM that proved his fakeclaim, that being a 1x tracker, which convinced the mason that he was innocent.

...AXIS POWERS HAVE TAKEN OVER THIS THREAD!
 
I don't mind name claims depending on the situation. There are games where I shouldn't have allowed it, like Supernatural Mafia, but I don't see the harm of letting people name claim in the Havendale series where I'm the only one who knows the characters or in a game like Hydra Mafia, where the characters are neither from a specific universe nor representative of the alignment. Usually I see them on the same level as mass claims, though, in that they make games boring and give an unfair advantage to the town.
 
In FMAB mafia, the confirmed townie/claim collector got converted and sure enough, townies with particularly nifty roles started dying off. It also happened in Disney Princesses mafia, although we won right after we converted Paperhorse (her reaction was awesome).

In the Hetalia Mafia, all the claims got into the hands of the on-death converter due to the fact that he faked a PM that proved his fakeclaim, that being a 1x tracker, which convinced the mason that he was innocent.

This pretty much proves claims aren't the least bit reliable in any way...
 
Here's a question. What is everyone's overall playstyle like? Are you an instigator? Do you like to be everyone's friend? Are you a more forward person, or do you hide in the back.

Me, I find my style to be flexible. I'll alternate between being friendly and nice to a more aggressive tone depending on the feel of the game. When I play as mafia (and sometimes as town XD) I tend to sink into the style of being manipulative. I will gather the info and allies that I can, pit them against each other, and watch the slaughter happen. I'll team up with others and we'll use our abilities in tandem. I'll lie and deceive and pretend to be your best friend before putting a knife in your back, if I have reason to.

Call me weird, but I find this to be so much fun.
 
Here's a question. What is everyone's overall playstyle like? Are you an instigator? Do you like to be everyone's friend? Are you a more forward person, or do you hide in the back.

Me, I find my style to be flexible. I'll alternate between being friendly and nice to a more aggressive tone depending on the feel of the game. When I play as mafia (and sometimes as town XD) I tend to sink into the style of being manipulative. I will gather the info and allies that I can, pit them against each other, and watch the slaughter happen. I'll team up with others and we'll use our abilities in tandem. I'll lie and deceive and pretend to be your best friend before putting a knife in your back, if I have reason to.

Call me weird, but I find this to be so much fun.

Ugh... I remember this last part last december...

I usually alternate between all except agressive. Since I've only won one mafia so far, you can tell I need more experience to start playing good.
 
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