JEEP's Common Tells

OK, I'm going to outline a few simple tells that will often help you find various roles in Mafia. Please don't get too caught up in the terminology. My basic strategy for determining who has what role is outlined in the topics below. This is a wiki, so feel free to expand this, but if you simply have comments, please use the talk page feature.

I will slowly be adding in the information so as to reduce the impact to running games. See the release schedule in the table below. If I fall behind, feel free to ping me.

Please note that simply by making these "tells" public knowledge, they should fade away. In the short term, it is likely that people, esp. when playing as mafia, will attempt to plant some of these. This is natural and will settle down eventually. Ultimately, I think it will advance the game. And I cannot resist putting in my two cents on good play, so this will probably have some suggestions for play too.

Some general rules of thumb[1] that I use:

• Players want to tell you their role on some level -except when they are playing doctors-... docs want to tell you they aren't docs
• Pro-town roles rarely have a valid reason to lie. Almost always, pro-town lies are the result of poor play. Therefore, you should LynchAllLiars. This is a MetaGame ploy to help encourage people to play better.
• Experienced players have seen variations on it before. So when experienced players ask "what's up with XXX" it means they probably did it. Esp. if they try to tell the town that it "must be" a pro-town ability. Same with Newbies, generally, but there is more variability.

I do things on a percentage basis when I take notes I add a percentage (shown in parens). I won't say that the numbers are all I use, but they help. The numbers are not very scientifically generated...

I misplaced some of the files. If I find them again, I'll change the status, but otherwise, I'll have to start again.

Title	Expected release date	Status as of July 16, 2004
Finding the doc	Published	You will [NOT] be disappointed
Finding the cop	Published	100% complete
Finding mafia	Part 1: Published; Part 2:December	Part 2: 60% complete
Finding masons	January 2005	25% complete
Finding the serial killer	November 2004	50% complete
Finding townies	February 2005	90% complete
Misc tells	On-going	Unknown- in progress
Game Analysis	After all others are current	5 of 10 complete; others started
JeepBot	I might have time to write this	A gleam in my eye

Note

[1] Note that these are rules of thumb, not hard and fast rules. There are and will be exceptions. The key to being a great player is being able to identify them.