A Beginner's Guide to Being Awesome At Mafia

Motivation and Obligatory Caveats

When people first begin playing Mafia, they often ask questions like "How do I catch scum?" or "How do I do pro-Town things?". The answers to these extremely basic questions have a nasty tendency to be longwinded and completely above what your average new player can do or is even willing to try to do - if people can even answer them at all after stepping back and thinking about it. This page is an attempt to say, in no uncertain terms, what playing online Mafia effectively is all about.

While it would be wonderful to say that going against the advice on this page should only be done at one's own peril, it would be wise to remember that this was conceived by a single notoriously opinionated person and approved by an experienced subset of the current Mafia-playing population. Your mileage may vary, but probably not by much. Similarly, this page was written within a metagame - changes in the trends of how Mafia gets played may cause some of this page to go out of date. Again, this has been considered in writing this and the effect of meta shifts should be reined in.

Now then, how does one play Mafia well...?

As Any Alignment

Read the wiki.

Hey, you're already halfway there! In all seriousness, most people who play Mafia - and not just those who play on mafiascum.net, which hosts this wiki - have perused this wiki to some degree, especially the theory sections. By reading up, all of your newbie questions should be answered and you should have a general idea of what people look for when they play Mafia.

It's worth noting that precisely because everyone knows about the theory you see on the wiki, it is mostly outdated in practice (scum will generally avoid committing the tells listed on the wiki because they know they will be caught otherwise). However, novice scum and scumhunters will use it as their bread and butter, and one of the worst things you can do when playing with these sorts is get caught out on these tells.

I don't want no scrub ♪

"Casual" has come to have two meanings - one being a synonym of "leisurely"; the other being the opposite of "competitive". Mafia is not either of these.

Mafia is not a game you can pick up and play. You need to stay focused on it until you're removed from the game. If you decide you don't want to play midway through, your options range from getting lynched to getting replaced to even getting modkilled. All of these are instances of you letting your team down, and rest assured everyone else playing doesn't appreciate it. Many people have tried to recover from burnout phases with a "nice easy game of Mafia" and found that it didn't work out.

Mafia is a competitive game, albeit unique in that players are not directly competing with each other individually. Playing to win is central to the game. On the Town's side, making light unrelated conversation with the other players, even if you like them outside the game, doesn't help the cause if it drags on for very long (especially since you may need to lynch them later). On the Mafia's side, it has been suggested that night-kills be tailored to keeping enjoyable players alive instead of making kills that will make it more likely that they will win. If that Mafia then loses, then it will come out that they essentially lost on purpose - and no victorious Town wants to hear that.

The bottom line is, Mafia is not for everyone. It's nothing personal if you don't like what you just read, but everyone will probably be happier if you stayed on the sidelines.

Do not play to a meta.

By this I mean don't do some characteristic action because you always do it, especially if it's anti-Town. Usually people do this to maintain force of personality or to make themselves more difficult to read as either alignment. While an argument could be made that this sort of thing is a crutch acting as a placeholder for real skill; it might be more worth noting that the people playing with you usually find it really, really annoying and dislike you for it. They're just too polite to say it.

Stay classy, Planet Earth.

Mafia is not a pleasant game at times. After all, everyone has to make some very personal judgments about the people they're playing with, and people are going to be very wrong before it's all over (or at least told as much). While on a tactical level it may be worthwhile to push people out of their comfort zone by antagonizing them, most of the time pissing people off will make them want to lynch you - or at least think poorly of you. Most of the time, you will come out looking like a douche.

Note that it is possible to be forceful without being brutal. Finding the fine line dividing the two is key if you want to play aggressively.

Mafia is a game. Upsetting people for no evident reason - or for "psychological advantage" - may help you win in the short run, but will likely ensure that you will not be asked to play again.

Spy on your neighbors; they might be communists.

Where possible, make sure you have some idea who the other players are before you start playing. In particular, you want to have a broad idea of how they play, any defining quirks, and how easy you expect they would be to lynch. You don't want to antagonize someone without knowing ahead of time that they may react violently, or as Town you might want to be a little leery about wagons on people you think would be easy to lynch anyway. Unless you are absolutely certain, do NOT attempt to attribute a set of behaviors to an alignment based on games you have not played.

Posting vs. Not Posting; or, Pro-Town vs. Anti-Town

As either alignment there can be times when you are not sure what you want to post - or if you want to post at all. This is normal. However, posting is generally seen as pro-Town while not posting simply lets the other players continue their trains of thought without interference (which is usually only useful for scum). Note that if if the game is at a standstill, lurking is profoundly harmful to the Town.

While some people are capable of lurking as a playstyle regardless of alignment, people don't like playing with lurkers in general and frequently criticize them for looking unreadable or scummy, making them choice policy lynches/vigs as well as objects of public ridicule.

Note that you can go too far with this - there is such a thing as posting too much. If other players are having a hard time catching up on the discussion because of the immense volume of posts that flowed in while they were away, it will hurt those players' contributions as well as your ability to read those players. It is possible to use this as a tactic as scum, but it has a tendency to result in inactivity replacements/modkills as the other players prefer to just let the game go instead of reading it all and trying to make sense of it.