The Syndicate

This thread is meant to serve as an easy and low effort way for Syndicators to share their knowledge and experience without having to go to the trouble of doing a big writeup or a guide.

Share your favorite tips and tricks. It can be a principle or rule you use for sorting people, a scumtell nobody else seems to know about, or a reaction test that has come in handy for you.

I'll start. One thing I do to get townread as scum is to lock myself into a really tunnelly back and forth thunderdome that spans several pages. Then, I'll suddenly pretend to re-evaluate the other player and flip my read on them to town, pretending to break out of the tunnel. They are usually so relieved that I'm no longer being stubborn/wrong that they will townread me in return.

I find this to be really effective because from the POV of other players, it looks a lot like two quarrelling townies who found each other after a big fight, which is something that does happen quite often. For me especially, it fits my town meta quite well too. I used to tunnel too often as town and often try to take a step back to re-evaluate things if I feel I am getting too nitpicky. So I do this for real a lot and it helps to disguise when I am doing it for nefarious purposes.

I get drunk and wing it.

ColinIsCool wrote: ↑Fri Jul 17, 2020 9:26 pm I get drunk and wing it.

This is the way

nutella wrote: ↑Fri Jul 17, 2020 9:33 pm

ColinIsCool wrote: ↑Fri Jul 17, 2020 9:26 pm I get drunk and wing it.

This is the way

protip: don’t sign up

Hally wrote: ↑Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:32 pm protip: don’t sign up

That's my stance moving forward.

learn how to do active listening

useful as all alignments

tunnel your reads hard and tell people to go away if they accuse you of tunneling

MacDougall wrote: ↑Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:51 am tunnel your reads hard and tell people to go away if they accuse you of tunneling

If you are a busy person, stay away from mashes

Guillotine wrote: ↑Fri Jan 01, 2021 1:31 pm If you are a busy person, stay away from mashes

hahaaha. yeah, i will never be tempted to join one.

Learn to find satisfaction in being right posthumously.

Having accurate reads is the most overrated part of the game.

this post contains the best mafia strategy known to man

but be warned, only the truly worthy can handle its immense power

open if you dare

Hydra with dunia

be open minded to differences in playstyle and don't misyeet people because you disagree with the way they play the game. "a town shouldn't be doing the thing you are doing" (in the context of you justifying your scumread on someone) - is not a sentence you should ever say in a game (if you wanna win a lot of games)

dont ostracize mafia members for faking fights, emotional breakdowns, frustration, yelling, etc. towns do it all the time and they receive sympathy, when wolves do it some people ostracize them for it and that's wrong and hurts the long term health of the game

From the start of a game, try your best to connect with your fellow players with direct conversation, even if some of it isn't completely 100% game-relevant. Learn about them. Share yourself. Make friends, or at least be friendly.

1) It makes the game less miserable to play.
2) If you're town, you can learn effective ways to motivate, pick up, support, and follow your [believed] teammates.
3) If you're mafia, you can capitalize on their mannerisms and tendencies when you need to get ahead.

JaggedJimmyJay wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 7:56 pm From the start of a game, try your best to connect with your fellow players with direct conversation, even if some of it isn't completely 100% game-relevant. Learn about them. Share yourself. Make friends, or at least be friendly.

1) It makes the game less miserable to play.
2) If you're town, you can learn effective ways to motivate, pick up, support, and follow your [believed] teammates.
3) If you're mafia, you can capitalize on their mannerisms and tendencies when you need to get ahead.

4) potato soup reads

NANOOKTHEGREATANDFEARSOME wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 2:27 pm Hydra with dunia

one thing I have been working on is that if you care to put the effort into it (it's so much though ldasgjnhdks) dialoging with people about your reads, their reads, and your reads on eachother is very useful imo

1) it can help you get more information about the game so you can make better reads
2) you get more information out of other people so it's easier to read them, and especially important that I didn't consider before is that you have more things from people they can be held to account for. I used to not care to talk to people I thought were mafia that much because they're scum, I don't need to listen to them really. But it's good to make them put their thoughts in thread
3) it's probably the best way to get people to agree with you imo. You can make a wall post case, you can aggressively push your reads, etc, but I think dialoguing with people directly is much more effective than those things

One thing to note about the third point is I actually think it's less useful to make a case containing all your points, as either alignment. I will give what I find to be the most convincing reasons to read someone this way/that way, usually involving only a few posts/votes they made, but I still have a lot more to say.

IMO, when you draw out your explanation, and bring up points that are not needed to mention specifically in a case, you are much more convincing to people.
They will consider your few strong points more fully, without them being leveled by maybe having weaker points;
your primary position is harder to disagree with just based on some minor nitpicks;
you appear to be much more involved in the read, active, having considered a lot when you are in thread giving newer points to the read, etc

These are all very useful for either alignment and I think trying to do this better is one of the things I've improved at the most since starting mafia

1) Don’t take the game too seriously. At the end of the day, mafia is just a game on the internet that is played in our leisure time. Our win/loss rate and playing skills won’t be remembered by future generations and they matter far less than how we treat the people we engage with during the course of the game.

2) Be the same person you are during a game as you are outside of the game, because how you behave inside the game is often the first impression people make of you as an overall person.

3) Above all else, make it fun.

G-Man wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 10:30 am 1) Don’t take the game too seriously. At the end of the day, mafia is just a game on the internet that is played in our leisure time. Our win/loss rate and playing skills won’t be remembered by future generations and they matter far less than how we treat the people we engage with during the course of the game.

2) Be the same person you are during a game as you are outside of the game, because how you behave inside the game is often the first impression people make of you as an overall person.

3) Above all else, make it fun.

great advice, G!!! and too easy to lose sight of the goal of this hobby we all share.

Sloonei wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 2:04 pm Having accurate reads is the most overrated part of the game.

@Sloonei
Name 4 things more important.

mansnicks wrote: ↑Mon Jul 05, 2021 1:11 pm

Sloonei wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 2:04 pm Having accurate reads is the most overrated part of the game.

@Sloonei
Name 4 things more important.

It's not that "having accurate reads" is unimportant, it's that I feel like people often over-emphasize this one thing at the expense of other crucial aspects of gameplay. A common gripe I see from folks is something like, "my reads were correct but no one would listen." Getting people to listen is an important skill to have too. Everyone is trying to pinpoint their own reads, and so naturally some people will be more right than others. Creating and sustaining an environment where the "correct" reads are able to be brought to the surface for many matters about as much as being able to (individually) identify those correct reads in the first place.

Basically it's a game that relies to a great extent on communication, so simply having the answers alone isn't the recipe for a victory. You need to be able to get the answers and have enough of your team members agree with those answers to win as town.

Then there are things like testing those reads, being open to reassessment and alternatives, etc. This all fits under the umbrella of "communication", I guess. If your reads are correct, they should be able to hold up when tested, so you should usually be willing to test them.
Speaking personally, I try to put much more emphasis on creating an environment where everyone's voice is heard and my own reads are fluid than on "being right", especially in early games. I've seen people in the past hold back from putting their ideas into the thread for fear of "being wrong", and that just strikes me as counterintuitive. You gotta start somewhere.