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mastina/Glossary
| mastina | Played Games | Modded Games | Mafia Theory Work | Account Avatars | Mish Mash | Miscellaneous | Terminology |
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Article Background
Part of Mastin Academy.
History
Original Publication: November 26, 2017 by Mastina.
Revised: January 1, 2018 by mastina.
Revised: February 5, 2018 by mastina.
Last Edited: Mastina (talk) 19:28, 5 February 2018 (EST).
Introduction
So something I've wanted to do for a while is a glossary for me: a mastina dictionary of my terms, where I define and explain them in detail. I figured I might as well post them here. These things are, in essence, a complete list of mastinaisms: my terminology, my phrases, my quirks, and the connotations they carry when I use them.
Terminology
Playerlist Synergy
The ability of a playerlist in a given game to synchronize. How well they mesh together. Usually, when I use this term, I am referring more specifically to how they do so with me, and vice-versa, in that I am going to make it well-known how well I can work with the players in the game (or more likely, complain about the inverse).
This is how well different players can work together. Too much of the same style is bad, as is a conflict between two entirely alien styles of posting. The best level of playerlist synergy offers a mixture of the familiar and the unknown, of people you know well and call friends, people you know but don't really interact with much, and people who you don't know. (It is best to avoid having people who you strongly disagree with most often.) It is closely tied to situational awareness, specifically as town.
Gamestate
The state of the game. It is directly tied to situational awareness, in that situational awareness is essentially knowing what the gamestate is. A gamestate is how the thread is progressing. It is the way the game is moving, for better or for worse. It includes type of content and also direction of momentum. Mood is both influenced and a driving force behind gamestate, in that the emotional state of players will determine how things go, and yet how things have gone will influence the emotions of players. Playerlist synergy (or lack thereof) has the strongest influence over it.
Mood
I use mood typically in two different, but related, contexts. The first is the obvious: as a synonym to emotions/feelings, to refer to the general state of being of a player, usually myself. However, Mood additionally refers to what I call a game's Atmosphere. It is the general feelings of the game as a whole. For what thread consensus is to conscious thought, Atmosphere is to feelings.
The Mood/Atmosphere of a player/game depends greatly on the playerlist synergy (or lack thereof) in a game, and has a perpetual self-feeding direct correlation with gamestate. The atmosphere of the game influences the gamestate, and the gamestate influences the atmosphere surrounding players.
Situational Awareness
Simply put, it is self-descriptive: the ability to have a level of self-awareness about your situation in any given game. As town, this manifests as knowing the playerlist synergy in your game (or lack thereof) and having a good feel for what your role in the game will be/needs to be: what role you need to fill, what you need to do. This is from a combination of your role PM, your confidence level in your reads (or lack thereof), and your interactions with your fellow players.
As scum, this mainly manifests in psychologically profiling players and creating plans: knowing what the likely obstacles you are to encounter to endgaming town, and producing the best path to overcome said hindrances as quickly as possible. You get a good idea of how players are going to interact with each other, you get a good grip on how your team will play with one another, and then you form a strategy wherein you manipulate circumstances such that events always favor your faction. It is THE most important skill to have as scum, hands-down, because if you lack the awareness to know where you stand in a game, then you fundamentally cannot make decisions be it day or night which move the game in the direction you want.
Psychological Profile
More or less exactly what it sounds like: profiling your playerlist. It is a compilation of their meta, which provides you with a predictive algorithm of how they are likely to act in any given game as the given alignment (usually town, because usually you use psychological profiling as scum). This is how you guess how players will act, and interact, with one another. You take everything you know about a player, and then given the introduction of elements you control, you guess what will happen to them.
This skill isn't useless as town, but it is mostly a tool for scum. It is also exactly that--a tool. It is not infallible because no matter how good your profile of a player is, you cannot perfectly predict their every action. It can and will be wrong. Mostly, you use it to form an initial plan, and then change the plan based off of new data. Profiles, when the skill is mastered, can be adapted on the fly, where when that new data comes in the profile is updated.
As town, I do tend to have fun with it. A large part of my RVS voting relies on psychological profiling: I will look at posts in the RVS (even if just confirms), and then off of all the data I have, I run a guess on whether the player in question would be town or scum, combining this with situational awareness. However, I am of course quite aware that my accuracy rating there is low; it is mostly a way to kickstart serious game discussion.
Town Triple-Threat
This is a term I use near-exclusively as scum, however, I will make occasional references to it as town. (Largely when describing what I would think of a player as scum, but even outside of that it has an occasional use.) The town triple threat is exactly what the name implies: the stronger these three aspects are (especially in conjunction with one another), the more threatening that town player is and the higher (if nothing else on policy alone) that player will be on the kill list.
Obvtown
Exactly what it sounds like, when a player is obviously town. Of the three points in the triangle, this is actually the one I fear the most as scum. Inversely, it is also the one trait I value most in a town, as it is the trait most valuable in my particular playstyle, which relies a great deal on a combination of process of elimination and townblocs. (Specifically, trusting in other players about those that I know I'm not good at reading and/or those which I am having trouble locking down a read on.)
A player can have shitty reads and utterly lack charisma, but if that player is impossible to lynch because they are so blindingly obviously town to literally every town player, then scum are in danger of losing via POE. ONE player being obvtown, on their own, is actually not much of a problem (unless said player holds a key PR and is thus an unlynchable PR). But when you leave that one obvtown player alive, and then there's another obvtown player created, and you leave that obvtown player alive to have two obvtown players alive, and then a third is created...
...It doesn't take long before when crossreferencing roles with obvtown, the scum start to get cornered. So while one obvtown player might not be threatening (thus making it the weakest of the three), get to a certain point and it becomes problem number one. Yes, with that many unconfirmed players considered obvtown, doubt does creep up. They are, after all, unconfirmed. However, if scum failed to successfully weave their way into the inevitably-resulting townbloc from said obvtown, then the townbloc will lynch those outside before they start to dissolve it.
Being obvtown is also a necessity for those who have the other parts--it doesn't matter if you have the charisma and accuracy to lynch scum. If the town turns on you and thinks you were scum bussing, you get mislynched out of paranoia and the final scum who you had pinned gets to walk out free.
It is also not a one-off thing, usually: being obvtown frequently doesn't get you an indefinite pass. (It can, depending on circumstances, but this is not as common.) To ensure success in a game, a town player needs to CONTINUOUSLY be obvtown, especially in a day and age where town players have the memory of a goldfish (figuratively speaking that is). They won't remember that amazingly awesome towntell you did three weeks ago. They'll remember that towntell you did yesterday...until a week or two later that is.
The more a player is capable of continuously reminding/demonstrating to people why they are painfully-obviously town, the harder it is for scum to deal with that player in any method other than the nightkill.
Charismatic
Next down on the list and closely tied to being obvtown is being able to convince players. A player who is able to get others to follow them is an absolutely terrifying force to be up against. And, sure. Say that player is off in their reads NOW. What happens when their inaccurate reads with that charisma suddenly turn into ACCURATE reads with that charisma? If they're still in the game, and if the town still trusts them enough to not lynch them, then you can kiss your scumteam goodbye.
Of course, it's possible to lynch charismatic players if they are not obvtown, because getting people to follow you doesn't mean they'll think you're town and you can see a battle between two charismatic players which means ONE of them has to lose (unless there's a read reversal that is), but in general, a town charismatic player is the greatest enemy of a scumteam.
Charismatic players often have the illusion of appearing as tunnelers with confirmation bias, but frequently they possess the ability to reassess at the most inopportune of times. They are usually smart enough for instance to piece together that "I'm charismatic-->It's lylo-->I'm not dead-->I'm alive for a reason-->My reads have been wrong", a chain of thought you absolutely cannot afford.
However, that being said, accuracy is important because if a charismatic player IS wrong, and doesn't reassess, they cost the town a game which was easily winnable with just a little more skill involved in scumhunting.
Accuracy
As scum, I actually don't fear accuracy that much when it comes to players, because accurate reads mean nothing if you can't convince others they're accurate, and/or you get mislynched before you can push them through. HOWEVER, when in tandem with other factors, accuracy can be a huge hindrance.
An accurate scumhunter with a vigilante role is going to trash your scumteam regardless of their charisma. An accurate scumhunter WITH charisma is going to lead lynches on scum, and good luck figuring out how to deal with that down the road. (It's possible, but incredibly difficult.)
An accurate scumhunter who is obviously town is someone you can't get the town to discard the reads of by mislynching. (Because towns will in fact discard the reads of mislynches no matter what.) This is by no means a complete list of ways accuracy synergizes well with other things. So in of itself, accuracy may not be a threat, but when paired with other factors, it amplifies the threat level of a town player considerably.
Absent from TTT:
Notably absent: Roles. I do not take roles into consideration when creating threat values for players. Roles are more of a tiebreaker. When all other factors are equal between players, the greatest role threat is never a bad idea to take out. Roles CAN contribute to a threat--players who are conftown are more of a pain; an obvtown player with a role you don't want obvtown is a huge problem; accurate player lands vig; etc.--but for the most part, roles don't influence my evaluation of a player.
TTT: Closing Word
Keep in mind that the town triple threat also is variable by the individual game. Players have a "set value", so to speak, in all three fields...however, those values increase or decrease on the merits of the individual game.
A player who is borderline-lynchbait in one game might be the closest thing to conftown in another. A player who is a scumhunting god in one game might be a village idiot reads-wise in another. You can average these, but only after observation is it possible to generate accurate data for the CURRENT game.
Three Axes of Reads (Merits)
This is a relatively new terminology I've started to use, even though the methodology behind this has been refined for over nine years. The three axes of reads are exclusively something I use as town, and are how I scumhunt these days. This is, in essence--the three driving factors which are how I generate my reads when I play a game.
Play-based Merits
This is, essentially, reading a player off of their play in a game, evaluating off of the available information I have and referencing it against my mental playbook of town versus scum play.
That will take some explaining--basically, I have mentally compiled and archived a set of "tells"...but not in the sense people think of the word. When people think "tell", they think 'scum are more likely to do this' or 'town are more likely to do this'. That methodology is flawed and doesn't work. Mine's different. The simplest way of saying it would be, I suppose...
"In the current situation, given the gamestate, a town player of this sort would be more likely to do this, whereas a scum player of this sort would be more likely to do that".
There are a couple of key differences. Most prominently: my 'tells' are circumstantial, NOT universal. They apply only in specific situations. They rely on context. They cannot be boilerplate applied across any/all games.
They depend specifically on the individual situation. "Given the play I have witnessed thusfar, scum are more likely to have this as their aim, whereas town are more likely to have that as their aim". My internalized tells do rely on a few assumptions and make a series of links, chaining things together which can (and often will) be a mistake.
That being, meta and interactions tie into these tells. I will see how a player interacts and off of the data I have stored in my mind, I file the play as increasing or decreasing certain scenario's likelihoods.
These play-based merits typically don't actually adjust for meta (in spite of what I just said), especially not when I feel I lack familiarity with the player(s) in question. A major flaw in my system is when I lack data to the contrary, I often assume others will have a similar subconscious tendency to act in a way I would. That is, my tells for situations operate largely on what I assume to be the optimal play for an alignment given what I know.
If what I know is massively wrong, and/or the scum simply aren't operating on a wavelength I'd consider even remotely optimal, it makes them much harder for me to pin down and identify.
OF NOTE: My VCA methodology? It largely works off of play-based merits. In fact, my VCA can be thought of as play-based merits from the summary of votes alone to tell the story. I predict the patterns of what I think scum are likely to have done in the current situation, and from there map out the people with the highest probabilities of being scum.
Play-based merits also get stronger the later into the game I can survive. They work off of information. They work off of gathering what has happened, and from what has happened, predicting what was most likely the cause of what happened. The more data points I have on hand, the better. Up to a point, of course. The human brain can only handle so much information at once and while I do my best, my mental archive for any given game is only so big.
Meta-based Merits
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Crowd-based (Consensus) Merits
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Soulread
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Thinking In Concepts
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Scenario(s)
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Possibility
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Plausibility
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Probability
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Play > Role
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Role != Alignment
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Opportunism
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Stances
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Context
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Circumstances
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Situations
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Nothing's Universal
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No right way, many wrong
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Critical Analysis
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Acknowledgement
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Three Axes of Tools
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The Tool
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The Method(ology)
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Player Specialties
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Motive
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Mindset
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Intention
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Information
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Facts
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Truth
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Lie
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Best Lie is the truth
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Interconnected
AKA, Interlinked, entwined, and other such various terms. (Further description here)
Engagement
AKA, interaction. (Further description)
Cooperation
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Collaboration
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Cohesion
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Strengths
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Weaknesses
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Playing to Audience
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Playing to Strengths
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Negativity
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Subjectivity
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Objectivity
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Logic
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Reason
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Philosophy
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Theory
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MD Debate
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Theoreticals
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Mechanics
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Roles
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Reasonable Doubt
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Assumption
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Suspicion
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Hypothesis
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Flow
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Coherent
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Manipulate
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Narrative
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Gap
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Picture
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Flawed
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Common Terms
Create, Write, Weave, Compose, Uncover, Craft, Conflicting, Conceive, Convincing, Contradicting, Confuse, Expose, etc. Some as scum (implication of falsified/exaggerated/manipulated narration), some as town (implication of discovered narration), some as both (implication neutral, context sensitive, etc.). (Details here.)
Transparency
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Scumhunting
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Reads
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Scumreads
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Townreads
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Nullreads
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Lurking
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Fluff
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Artificial
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Forced
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Faked
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Unnatural
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Inorganic
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Natural
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Real
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Genuine
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Organic
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Fluid
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Expecting to be wrong
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Delusions of grandeur
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Innocent until proven guilty
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Scum are scum
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Town are town
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Policy lynch
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Regardless of alignment
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Strongarm
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Push
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Readslist
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>/< random
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+/-EV
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Point
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Control vs. Influence
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Reads to fit the evidence
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"Do as I say, not as I do"
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Content
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Direction
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Plan
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Obstacle
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Path
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Playstyle
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Townbloc
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Paranoia
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Town Glue
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Lynchbait
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