Scumtell

A scumtell is jargon used in mafia. It can be abbreviated to "scummy," "strikes my scumdar," or even "scumilicious." It is often said or used by players to state that an action a player takes makes them think he is scum

Definition:

The working definition of a scumtell is an action that is more likely to be taken by a scum player than a town player. This relies on motivations, as most things in mafia do. When a player takes an action, evaluating it on the basis of "would this action more likely come from a town player, or a scum player" should be the way that players determine the scumminess of that action. It is worthwhile to note here that subjectivity plays little to no role in this distinction. POSSIBLE motivations for scum to take a given action are not sufficient to call an action a scum tell. An action is scummy if and only if it can be deemed more likely to come from scum than from town, A perfect example of this occurs in mini 636: Gangland mafia. Kuribo asserts that an action is a scumtell to him, because he can think of A justification for scum to do it, but neglects, as vollkan points out, to show that this reason is likely.

Meta Considerations:

There are some on the site who argue for meta considerations. While the author is one of the above, he will attempt to present the argument without assuming its credence. In mafia, players play with a certain style, known as their "meta." This includes actions that they take more or less often as scum or town. This means that dependent on the player taking an action, it could be more or less likely to be a scumtell, based on that players meta. This would ammend the definition proposed above to "An action is a scumtell if and only if a specific player is more likely to take it as scum." A scumtell along these lines would look like this: Guardian has a tendency to claim cop-like roles as scum. Since he was under pressure and claimed cop, I am not likely to believe his claim because it is likely to come from scum guardian, and is therefore a scum tell.

Disincentive:

Paradoxically, once a scumtell becomes widely known, then scum are less likely to do it, and it becomes harder to discern whether it is or is not scummy. This is because scum tend to avoid doing things that will get them caught. A prominent example of this is lurking, which many regard to be a scumtell. Since players now get lynched for lurking (some would say not enough) lurking has arguably shifted to being somewhat of a town tell. It is worthwhile to note here that what is or is not scummy is a fluid thing. For this reason, occasionally visiting the Mafia Discussion forum is beneficial, since awareness of the progression of "site meta" or "environmental meta" (that is, the public opinion on mafia theory and the commonly accepted tells) will invariably give some advantage.

Examples:

Examples of scumtells are numerous. One of the earliest examples is the "third vote" scumtell, which stated that the third vote on the band wagon was very likely to be scum. Scumtells can be simple like that one, or complicated, such as the Deliberately weak argument developed by Seol. In this scum tell, the player A will put out a deliberately bad argument in the midst of several good ones. Check out Heroes smalltown where thestatusquo uses DWA on Zoneace. Notice that the second argument is deliberately bad, and screams for it to be attacked. The basis of DWA is that scum and town players have different motivations when arguing. A town player is going to be actively trying to find scum and determine who is town, while a scum player is looking to score points, or win arguments. This leads to different arguing styles. Unfortunately, this scumtell is risky because sometimes town players can argue in the second style too, if they're not great at their jobs. Notice in the example given zoneace was not scum, though he did fall for the DWA. JEEP's Common Tells are legendary, but have become almost completely obsolete, after he published them, based on the reasoning above about scum disincentive to commit known scumtells.