Help us get better at scumplay

How to Embrace Your Inner Wolf and Be Successful

A: Fake Claim

A good fake claim doesn’t have to be perfect but has to make sense to the town people in the game. If it reads like a badly written E level script sent straight to the net production then you are just going to die.

B: Be Likeable

You shouldn’t be making the game unpleasant for the other people but be the guy/gal/whatever they feel really bad to be voting off.

C: Be Helpful but useless helpful

You should chime in with information that people will read as you pushing the game forward but doesn’t actually do that,

D: Play to Your Audience

You don’t need to care what the dead players think but always be crafting the fiction to the living players. You do not have to fool all of them but enough to win the game.

E: Kill the people calling you out

Use your kill power to eliminate the people who are threats to your team. People are lazy and wont generally go back to look at what the dead told them.

F: Embrace the wolf

I get that you have more fun being a town player but when you hate being a wolf it shows in how you play the game. Without you being a wolf then the game can’t ever be played so you are the most important part of the game. You are acting or creating a fictional story that you should enjoy doing.

G: Perfection is your enemy

I fall victim to this myself. Playing flawed is not outing as a wolf but trying to make every single thing you do be seamless to the town people is outing. Embrace the being wrong to justify all your bad pushes and the town people you get miss lynched instead of being right and voting perfectly.

H: Strengthen your Inner Wolf

Do not wreck your town play to make it lower so you can hide as a wolf. Always strive to be better as a wolf which will automatically make you better than most other wolf players who are doing the opposite.

I: Never Retreat Never Surrender

Personal anecdote 24 player game I think 5 player wolf team one of us gets a gun and he blasts a town person so gets lynched that day and a town also gets lynched. Day 2 a wolf gets lynched and another almost dies. Day 3 one partner gets shot the other gives up and dies. Day 4- 9 I survive multiple formals get the oracle lynched who doesn’t claim and gives us a confirmed town to finally reach final 3 where I convince the one town not to vote on me to win the game for my team. Other players would have just given up but I refused to just give in even though I was by myself with 1 kp for an eternity. Mindset matters a lot in the game.

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  1. Literally troll while you’re town so when you’re scum you can also troll and cause confusion. You lose alot of town games but people cant read your scum games which is what the game is about.

The only really effective ways to be “better scum” I’ve seen also involve being bad town.

I hate that.

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People have a tendency to give town centric advice or have a town siding viewpoint which is never helpful to a wolf.

A certain person said the day is just for the town and the night is just for wolves and I am paraphrasing. I arg (discussed) that the day is for all alignments and that his perspective showed he was favoring town. The wolves need the day to get the town to kill each other. The night is a period to reflect about the game for the town if they chose

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Basically support everything Rob has said itt


I’ve seen people on mafiascum talk about what phase length favors who but I don’t remember the data/conclusions drawn.

How do you think the results would sway if that were shortened or lengthened?

At a guess I think the shorter deadlines probably produce or attract more active players, which probably makes it harder for scum to win

im on the side that lengthy days benefit scum but mafia in general should be balanced to favor scum so :woman_shrugging:

I think there’s a curve where long deadlines favors scum with newer players and then favors town with very experienced ones at the very end but not sure how it looks in the middle.

48/24 I think is a good ratio. Gives scum enough time to push motions but not for town to figure everything out

thats too short imo.

48 hour deadlines kill me as either alignment.

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Oh added benefit

What do you feel comes out of the extra day?

it’s nice to sit back and consider information without feeling pressured to constantly be posting. I don’t have to be super active every day which means I can have other hobbies and enjoy other activities.

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That’s kinda the point though. Less hours means less posts to wade through.

It also makes the game unplayable for me, and I’m sure at an absolute minimum Nanook agrees with me.

I sign up for games to play an hour or two a day, with some crunch time near deadlines. I do not want to have to play 6 hours a day for a single game because the deadline isn’t long enough.

Those kinds of games are just too much commitment for me to join. They require too much time, too often.

In my experience, less time to posts tends to equate to more posts per hour and a much higher rate of posting overall, as there isn’t time for people to sit back and think about the game.

72 hours is a decent sweet spot for me because I almost certainly have 1 or 2 blocks of time to sit down and think about a game in 3 days but there are definitely periods of 2 days where that isn’t the case.

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