A Beginner's Guide to Claiming

This is a follow-up article to A Beginner's Guide to Being Awesome At Mafia. A lot of requests for a section on how to roleclaim were made, and it wound up encompassing so much that it wound up getting its own section.

This article presupposes that claiming roles is allowed in the ruleset. In some games outside mafiascum.net claiming is not allowed. This is usually a symptom of weak setup design, but nonetheless - if you're forbidden by the rules to roleclaim, don't do it. (It IS recommended that you toe the line as much as possible, though.)

As of the present this article is incomplete.

Claiming: The Big Red Button of Day Play

First, note that it's fairly common for wagons to die after the wagonee is placed at L-1. Maybe when faced with the real threat of a lynch the wagonee does something Townish, or maybe someone else decides to hold the idiot ball for a moment and everyone's attention darts away. It's common, and not a particularly bad thing...

...unless it's paired with a claim. For some reason it has been instilled in a few generations of Mafia players that when you're at L-1, you claim - like clockwork. This is anti-Town and frankly dumb precisely because the pressure has a decent chance of going away without the claim. Therefore, what happens is that either (alleged) Town power roles get outed at L-1 (causing everyone to get frustrated) or the wagonee claims VT and then the wagon goes down (causing the experienced players to get frustrated).

A commonly cited argument for NOT entering these claim-then-drop cycles is that it gives scum a narrower pool of targets for their NKs. This is true on its face, but with the following catches:

• Once a power role is outed, the scum NK is probably going there. Further claiming will probably not hurt unless a more preferable-to-kill role is outed AND the advantage of having that role made public cannot be realized before the role is killed on a subsequent Night. Given that Mafia Roleblockers are fairly common right now, the scum can generally neutralize two roles at once during the Night; but they cannot eliminate the effect a probTown player has on the Day game.
• There have to be a looooooot of VT claims for the scum to REALLY use process of elimination to find power roles early on. It isn't the end of the world for one or two V. Townies to claim Day 1.
• In small games scum can work out who the power roles without the help of claims.

In any event, claiming should generally be a last resort (i.e. the big red "DO NOT PRESS" button you see in comedies). When someone is willing and able to drop the hammer for a lynch, that ideally is the only time you should feel obligated to out your role. If you're a VT, you're already beyond the point of no return because people are at that time willing to lynch you without regard for your role. If you have a power role, it had better be a GREAT claim to bring yourself out of the hole you dug for yourself. Otherwise it's debatable whether your role is more useful than your presence.

Asking people to claim prior to the last minute is anti-Town - which is a fancy way of saying it should only be done by scum, but that's just not the case in practice. If you are asked to claim prior to someone announcing intent to hammer, the proper thing to do - no matter what your role actually is - is to refuse. However, an exception can be made for threads that are going particularly quickly at the time you find yourself in danger or are asked to claim. In those cases, not claiming immediately may mean finding yourself on the bad end of a lynch/flip scene. You should be able to decide on your own whether you're at your last chance to redeem yourself even if you're not technically at L-1, and act accordingly.

Screw You, I'm a Power Role

On the other hand, there are a few reasons you may want to claim when you're not under pressure.

• You have (informative) results!
• Massclaim
• To save yourself from being lynched

The first one is easy and hopefully self-explanatory. Note that early game Miller claims fall under this category, and aside from those these are the least likely to be made by scum in general. --TODO--

Massclaim deserves mention just because people generally don't know how to do them well. The scummiest person goes first, then they pick someone to claim next, then that person picks someone to go next, and so forth. This is called the "popcorn" method for reasons that probably don't make any sense. Discussing things before the massclaim is over is bad form, as the Townies should avoid influencing the scum's claims or post-claim attacks. In addition, it really annoys everyone when the game suddenly drops to two days between posts during massclaim. If you're not scum, just claim and get it over with; it's a five-word post and you can go back to your thread vacation.

Note that there are other means of massclaiming; the most obvious one is to simply randomize the order of claims before anyone says anything and force people to go down the line. This restricts the options scum has when trying to decide what to claim, but it also limits the possible connections the scum can make in regard to who they choose to claim next. At press time, popcorn is the preferred way to go.

One last note on massclaim - Note that in popcorn claiming, the goal is to get players to claim in reverse order of scumminess. This is because the later someone claims, the more information they have about what has already been claimed. Suppose a Mafioso is last to claim. They know exactly what all the other roles in the game are, and can choose the best claim to fit into the setup. If they try to falseclaim a power role toward the beginning or even near the middle, they are running the risk of a counterclaim from one of the unclaimed Townies.

Claiming to save yourself from being lynched is an interesting subset given that giant section above this one. Unrequested claims are considered annoying because they run counter to the purpose behind the previous section (keeping roles secret), but if done properly they can be rather convincing because they show a proactive willingness to come forward (and something of a flagrant disregard for the other players' opinions, which can look Townish). Your average fakeclaiming scum doesn't want to come forward prematurely with their claim due to the possibility of it backfiring and turning a near-lynch into a guaranteed lynch. These sorts of premature claims aren't the sorts of things you want to see OFTEN, but if done well they can do more good than harm. Again, it depends on whether it's more important to have the role operating during the Night than it is to have a player be probTown during the Day.

This Is My Claim And I Am Not Obvious Scum

Players who are unsure of how their claims will be taken or are just careless will try to spread their claims out over multiple posts. These sorts of "claims" tend to look like this:

• Initial post: Claim role name.
• Second post: Claim some of the role's abilities and one result.
• Third post: Claim a few more of the role's abilities (possibly contradicting the wording of the second post) and a few other results.
• Fourth post: A full claim (possibly contradicting something said so far).

Between the contradictions and how the claim is coming out in suspiciously-sized pieces, this looks for all the world like a terrible scum fakeclaim. Don't do this. If you're being FORCED to claim, you need to go ahead and lay everything you know down at once. These include: Your role name, your flavor (where applicable), your abilities, and your previous Night actions (with results where applicable). At this point in the game you have no room to hold things back from Town unless you're deliberately trying to withhold information from them (which usually means you're scum). The possibility of your claimed information hurting Town is in most situations near zero, and it will probably be obvious when the exceptions occur.

If you are claiming results of your own volition, you have a little more room to be vague about your role - simply telling the Town the results it needs to know. However, if this puts you into trouble you should seriously plan to fullclaim like above.

The last common newbie mistakes that deal with claiming should seem obvious, but: Don't lie, and don't disobey direct and obvious orders from the rest of the players. Trying to build your claim up to more than what it is will just look suspicious. In some games, the Town will try to organize a partial massclaim; if you're told to claim, you should probably check and see what exactly the other players want you to claim, and don't make them wait.

Really, the bottom line here is "don't look needlessly suspicious"; while this is the bottom line of most good Town play, it's amazing how many people completely disregard that.

You... MIGHT Be Spartacus

Sometimes you may want to fakeclaim as a gambit. This tends to work best when at least one of the following is true:

• You are in an Open or Semi-Open setup, where there are no unknowns in the setup that can make your claim look obviously wrong. Nothing can turn a good idea for a claim into an obvious lie like messing up something that the other players think is common knowledge. Alternatively, make sure your claim makes sense within the game's flavor.
• The actual power roles are not so thick that they will counterclaim you or otherwise give themselves away. This depends entirely on the other players, of course.
• People are actually going to buy that you're gambiting if you say you are (as opposed to rolefishing or just caught in a bad lie). This comes down to your communication skills and how well you craft your lie gambit.

As always with gambits, make sure you know what you want to get out of your fake claim and have a plan for if it doesn't work.

"Don't Kill Me; I Have a Cool Role"

Softclaiming is the term for what someone does when they vaguely claim to have a power role, but don't specify what it is. Sometimes people who softclaim are gambiting per the above section, trying to draw the NK or putting pressure on someone else. Other times they have a power role and want people to know about it for some reason (usually either to announce that they should be trusted and protected, or to allay suspicion). Still other times these people are scum implying that they have a power role with the same motivations as the previous case.

Most of the time softclaiming is seen as a bad thing, especially when it's done by inexperienced players who can be expected to not understand the implications of what they're doing. Consider that softclaims basically tell the scum that claimant is a power role (and thus a prime NK target) but tells the Town nothing about the setup. This is especially frustrating when the power role is worth more than the person holding it.

It's currently common practice to force softclaimants to out their role. This is to pin down scum trying to fakeclaim an ambiguous role for the sake of buying time. However, in the present meta scum don't softclaim very often. So, as of right now it's probably best to let softclaims be until you're ready to have them fullclaim (either during massclaim or prior to their lynch) and judge their claim accordingly. This forces scum to decide whether to kill the softclaimant without knowing if the power role is worth the kill, especially if the softclaimant is a prospective mislynch on future Days.

Can't Old People Scout Claims Under Midnight?

The title of this section is a (rather poor) example of a breadcrumb - a form of softclaiming where you use steganography to hide information like Cop results. (If you can't see it, look at the first letter of each word.) Crumbing can be done either to add credence to a future power role claim (by showing that you thought of it well in advance, instead of opportunistically making it up during massclaim) or to give clues toward your investigative results in case you get killed before you can state them outright.

Awkwardly worded phrases like the one shown in the title tend to be giveaways that the poster is trying to hide a message. More discreet methods of crumbing include using the first letter of every sentence in a post, the first letter of every post in a sequence, or simply saying something that from your role's point of view ("I'll see if you're scum or not!" as a Cop crumb). The latter is a nice option if you don't feel like setting up a code, but make sure it will be obvious that you were crumbing with those kinds of messages later - otherwise people will just think you're trying to match a fakeclaim to some ambiguous sentence you're trying to pass off as a breadcrumb after the fact.

Early breadcrumbs are usually done by Town, since they have the luxury of having the role they plan on claiming later set at the beginning of the game. Competent scum may decide on a claim pregame and crumb that, but by and large crumbs are dropped by Townies. This is not to say that all Town power roles breadcrumb - many just can't be bothered to do it. But if (as either alignment) you feel like your claim will be called into question later, you should at least consider it.

Because it's something Townies are overwhelmingly more likely to do and adds a more secure element to claims, some moderators try to outlaw breadcrumbing in their games. While it's probably infeasible for them to catch you crumbing unless you admit to it, you should check the rules just in case.

Steganography is not to be confused with cryptography, or the use of codes. Moderators on mafiascum.net heavily frown on using codes, as they can break the game.

Hey, scum need love too!

--TODO--