Mafiascum.net

there are plausible scenarios where you could lie and not be a detriment to town

don't think anyone would argue that if they really sat down and thought about it

it's also a stupid argument to make since most of the time when people talk about why lying in a game of mafia is bad, they're not talking about the sort of calculated low-risk lie that can't really backfire

Because disinformation leads to wrong conclusions, I dunno why do I need explain this. Well timed lie is grasping at straws, you know that in most cases you can get away without a lie and using once in a blue moon scenario to prove your point and give people permission to fakeclaim is bad

Is this how how you approach mafia within games?

In post 151, Ramcius wrote:Because disinformation leads to wrong conclusions, I dunno why do I need explain this. Well timed lie is grasping at straws, you know that in most cases you can get away without a lie and using once in a blue moon scenario to prove your point and give people permission to fakeclaim is bad

If you believe everything you read as a townie, then you need to stop it. The ability to divine lies, and the ability to craft lies are both skills that every player in a game of mafia should have, regardless of alignment or goal.

In post 153, Jake The Wolfie wrote:

In post 151, Ramcius wrote:Because disinformation leads to wrong conclusions, I dunno why do I need explain this. Well timed lie is grasping at straws, you know that in most cases you can get away without a lie and using once in a blue moon scenario to prove your point and give people permission to fakeclaim is bad

If you believe everything you read as a townie, then you need to stop it. The ability to divine lies, and the ability to craft lies are both skills that every player in a game of mafia should have, regardless of alignment or goal.

How to find scum, if I can't trust anything other players say without any hard proof?

In post 154, Ramcius wrote:How to find scum, if I can't trust anything other players say without any hard proof?

Look beyond whether or not they're lying, and ask why they did what they did. Is it to further a pro-town agenda, or does it further a pro-scum agenda?

never thought of that one before

In post 155, Jake The Wolfie wrote:

In post 154, Ramcius wrote:How to find scum, if I can't trust anything other players say without any hard proof?

Look beyond whether or not they're lying, and ask why they did what they did. Is it to further a pro-town agenda, or does it further a pro-scum agenda?

Know an easy way to determine when it's pro-town and when it's pro-scum? Because people use "town has no reason to lie" approach for a reason - determining motivation is hard, especially when dealing with edgelords who think they are smartest cookie in the room and try to lie just because they can

In post 155, Jake The Wolfie wrote:Look beyond whether or not they're lying, and ask why they did what they did. Is it to further a pro-town agenda, or does it further a pro-scum agenda?

Okay, so people telling lies that would further a pro-scum agenda, like getting town eliminated or preventing themselves from being eliminated by claiming something that doesn't fit with the setup should just be policy eliminated without further question?

I agree.

In post 158, Akarin wrote:

In post 155, Jake The Wolfie wrote:Look beyond whether or not they're lying, and ask why they did what they did. Is it to further a pro-town agenda, or does it further a pro-scum agenda?

Okay, so people telling lies that would further a pro-scum agenda, like getting town eliminated or preventing themselves from being eliminated by claiming something that doesn't fit with the setup should just be policy eliminated without further question?

I agree.

No, no no, you got it all wrong, he says that lying is a pro town behavior and we should learn to recognize that

once again i will say that i see where he's coming from in that i have been the sole person hard defending someone who made an unbelievably stupid fakeclaim on the basis that i thought that the player was town regardless and that people were just blindly following a policy of "he fakeclaimed, lynch him". in that case i was sort of making the same argument that he is now, that someone fakeclaiming doesn't instantly mean that they're scum, it's just an element of a read that can be weighed against other evidence (and i was correct in that case).

that still doesn't change the fact that the fakeclaim a stupid thing to do and, in most cases, a very bad idea. yes, someone who fakeclaims isn't necessarily immediately scum, but that doesn't mean that fakeclaiming is a smart thing to do. for perhaps an equally relevant anecdote, one of the more recent games that i've played was probably lost solely because an investigative role lied about having a guilty and even after being lynched didn't retract the lie. he prioritized his own reads above everyone else's and it ended up costing town a game that they really otherwise should've won.

if your read accuracy is such that the expected benefit of a fakeclaim is positive, you probably don't need to be fakeclaiming in the first place. that is, the chance that you're correct "multiplied by" how much it benefits town for you to have fakeclaimed correctly weighted against the chance that you're wrong multiplied by how bad it is for you to have fakeclaimed incorrectly is almost always weighted towards it being a bad idea, because the downsides of an incorrect fakeclaim are almost always much more severe than the upsides of a correct fakeclaim.

Tbh, executing or not executing exposed liar is lesser of an issue in fakeclaiming, but still it hurts town, because there's always are people with "execute liars" mentality and they will push that idea clogging thread and dampening discussion. But real problem with fakeclaiming is that it leads discussion in the wrong direction, you have to think of a setup that makes sense with fakeclaim, with night action that never happened, what if there is CC and fakeclaimer doesn't budge? What I'm trying to say it's the act of lying that hurts most. And even if you get scum with your lie, it may have drastic consequences like outing PRs who CC liar or exposing PRs in the process with different roles that doesn't make sense setup wise given fakeclaim

And policy execution of liars is more of way to say them that this stuff isn't ok and they shouldn't do it rather than thinking that liar is a scum

In post 157, Ramcius wrote:

In post 155, Jake The Wolfie wrote:

In post 154, Ramcius wrote:How to find scum, if I can't trust anything other players say without any hard proof?

Look beyond whether or not they're lying, and ask why they did what they did. Is it to further a pro-town agenda, or does it further a pro-scum agenda?

Know an easy way to determine when it's pro-town and when it's pro-scum? Because people use "town has no reason to lie" approach for a reason - determining motivation is hard, especially when dealing with edgelords who think they are smartest cookie in the room and try to lie just because they can

Determining motivation is hard, even if the town are 100% truthful and the scum truthful about everything that isn't explicitly anti-town. This is not a problem with lying, it's a problem of determining motivation.
I repeat: Determining Motivation has nothing to do with Lying.

Enforcing a "Do not lie as town" policy does little to help the town, but helps the scum a lot, because they now know that is 100% reliable, which is a bad thing. The scum need more information than they already have, so offering up true information 100% of the times helps the scum, which hinders the town.

knowing that everything claimed is truthful doesn't mean you can't misdirect, plant suggestions, use word play etc to mislead scum as town... or simply not talking about role-related stuff unless it's actusllyt important is another super-obvious way to keep scum in the dark

not sure what you're saying is the downside to truthfulness when it comes to role-related stuff

you just state it's a "bad thing" like that should be self-evident. i could just as easily reverse what you said and say that offering up true information all the time helps town, which hinders scum

In post 164, zMuffinMan wrote:knowing that everything claimed is truthful doesn't mean you can't misdirect, plant suggestions, use word play etc to mislead scum as town... or simply not talking about role-related stuff unless it's actusllyt important is another super-obvious way to keep scum in the dark

not sure what you're saying is the downside to truthfulness when it comes to role-related stuff

you just state it's a "bad thing" like that should be self-evident. i could just as easily reverse what you said and say that offering up true information all the time helps town, which hinders scum

I agree that more true information helps town, however the town would have to go through the extra layer of divining the truth from the lies (something they would have to do irregardless of a truthful/untruthful town), while the scum would not have this issue. Why not impose the same challenge for the scum to gain information when you're already at a disadvantage of not knowing between fact and fiction?

if you don't want scum to gain information then don't claim anything

generally if you're being asked to claim in thread it's because town wants information to make a judgment - lying doesn't help that

lying unprompted can be useful in certain circumstances but barring a few exceptions, pretty much anything a lie could achieve could also be achieved by just... not lying and using writing techniques that don't have the potential to harm town

In post 166, zMuffinMan wrote:if you don't want scum to gain information then don't claim anything

guilty

In post 166, zMuffinMan wrote:generally if you're being asked to claim in thread it's because town wants information to make a judgment - lying doesn't help that

What? Does it somehow impair the town from making a judgement?

In post 166, zMuffinMan wrote:lying unprompted can be useful in certain circumstances but barring a few exceptions, pretty much anything a lie could achieve could also be achieved by just... not lying and using writing techniques that don't have the potential to harm town

Every action has the potential to harm town in the wrong circumstances.

We have to remember that this a guy that fake claimed guilty b/c they were "bored". You'd think that Jake would see how much this screwed over town and would chance her stance but nope.

In post 162, Ramcius wrote:And policy execution of liars is more of way to say them that this stuff isn't ok and they shouldn't do it rather than thinking that liar is a scum

I don't think I've ever really gotten that vibe. I think the vast majority of people just straight-up scumread liars although PLing liars is prob a sound policy.

Lies that benefit town are almost always a strong indication that the liar is town. Lies that hurt town are usually scum indicative, though not always. Every game is different, and I don't think strict rules about how to play are helpful or fun. You're going to make mistakes as town, lynching your own teammates happens, and sometimes you might even get yourself lynched.

In my view, fakeclaiming is a rhetorical technique, not much different from, say, writing up an extensive case with all sorts of logical & emotional appeals. I don't think cases are helpful 99% of the time, just as I don't think fakeclaiming is helpful most of the time. In general, both tend to entrench reads that maybe you need to reevaluate. But every now & then, casing or fakeclaiming helps lynch scum or protect townies. So I support the limited use of both, on rare occasions.

That said, I've always thought that you shouldn't trust investigative results over behaviors -- and I've actively ignored alleged guiltiest to positive effect before. If people followed that philosophy more, there'd be a lot less fakeclaiming because it wouldn't have any rhetorical power.

In post 163, Jake The Wolfie wrote:

In post 157, Ramcius wrote:

In post 155, Jake The Wolfie wrote:

In post 154, Ramcius wrote:How to find scum, if I can't trust anything other players say without any hard proof?

Look beyond whether or not they're lying, and ask why they did what they did. Is it to further a pro-town agenda, or does it further a pro-scum agenda?

Know an easy way to determine when it's pro-town and when it's pro-scum? Because people use "town has no reason to lie" approach for a reason - determining motivation is hard, especially when dealing with edgelords who think they are smartest cookie in the room and try to lie just because they can

Determining motivation is hard, even if the town are 100% truthful and the scum truthful about everything that isn't explicitly anti-town. This is not a problem with lying, it's a problem of determining motivation.
I repeat: Determining Motivation has nothing to do with Lying.

Enforcing a "Do not lie as town" policy does little to help the town, but helps the scum a lot, because they now know that

EVERY DAMN THING POSTED BY NON-SCUM EVER

is 100% reliable, which is a bad thing. The scum

DO NOT

need more information than they already have, so offering up true information 100% of the times helps the scum, which hinders the town.

See, that's where we disagree - it's much more harder to determine motivation, when people are lying or when you can't trust people

Again, this is false, scum already ahead, giving info doesn't help them that much, but false info hinder town more than it hinder scum - scum are more likely to see a lie with their info advantage, but town has to consider a lie to be true, also, scum doesn't really need info outside of figuring few most powerful PRs to deal with them ASAP, everything else is in towns favor as more info in play makes missexecutions harder

Lying as town is too difficult for most players to pull off. It has a tendency to have unforeseen consequences (e.g. imagine faking a guilty on scum – but a town Vanilla Cop has a "vanilla" result on you, it isn't going to work out well even though you were "right"). As a consequence, I think it nearly always hurts your win condition, with the possible exception of situations where you're confirmed or confirmable as town (and even then it's very easy to get it wrong and very hard to get it right). Having a policy of policy eliminating anyone who's proven to lie is also something that can substantially increase town win rates, by limiting the various gambits that scum can pull; as long as it's publicly known, it's a policy that limits town a little but limits scum a lot, so is helpful in the long run.

That said, it's possible to be manipulative as town, doing things like selectively revealing information. (In my most recent game, I made a statement that was literally true, but explicitly intended to be misread; this was intended to allow a player to confirm themself as town in the future without giving away to scum that they would be confirmable as town. We ended up catching one member of the scumteam as an unexpected consequence) This seems similar in purpose to lying, but does less damage to town's victory chances because anyone who has the information to spot a discrepancy will likely look for possible explanations, and in this case they'll find one, and is likely just as helpful when it comes to catching the scum.

In post 157, Ramcius wrote:

In post 155, Jake The Wolfie wrote:

In post 154, Ramcius wrote:How to find scum, if I can't trust anything other players say without any hard proof?

Look beyond whether or not they're lying, and ask why they did what they did. Is it to further a pro-town agenda, or does it further a pro-scum agenda?

Know an easy way to determine when it's pro-town and when it's pro-scum? Because people use "town has no reason to lie" approach for a reason - determining motivation is hard, especially when dealing with edgelords who think they are smartest cookie in the room and try to lie just because they can

Town can lie.
Scum HAVE to lie.

Town's collective job is to find out the motive of the lie to determine if such could come from town or mafia.

Scum's collective job is to lie to appear town and get town misyeeted.


In law enforcement cops lie to get truths from suspects out. Parents lie to catch their misbehaving children in their lies. Wives lie to trap and catch their cheating husbands (and viceversa) and there are many scenarios from real life.
The same applies in a game of deduction like this one.

If you think that liars should get killed then i will tell you this, my best scum games were when i truth wolf. (The act of always telling the truth as scum). The best way to “lie” in a game of lies is by not lying.

So by definition as per your logic. If lying towns should get policy eliminated. Then truth wolves should too?