Well, we WERE scum. I admit I probably would have put more effort into it as town.
What, and actually re-read the game? Heavens no, that would have been so much effort! The simple answer to that is we still wanted Pamela to be a viable mislynch! Our lame sounding reason wouldn't convince anyone to clear her. >.>
:V
These are the answers I was more or less hoping to hear, because it was more how you handled that situation than OMG THEY SAID CASES ARE BAD THAT'S SO DUMB that convinced me you were scum. You played like you were banking on revealing the roleclaim, not like you were doing whatever you could to avoid revealing the roleclaim. In retrospect I should have suspected Pesco more because I had already spoiled everyone's identities for myself and he was the only player in the game that would have noticed this and yet he said nothing about it (as I recall).
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Anyway, I don't have a problem with favoring succinctness, because it is true that long drawn-out Level 20 Walls of Text tend to obfuscate and make reading and playing the game a chore, both of which are good for scum. I do prefer putting everything I have forth as soon as I have it, though, for a few reasons.
- Not all cases boil down to a series of independent bullet points that can be rattled off one by one as the person being accused responds to each. Some cases are a collection of lesser wurgles and coincidences, each by themselves not necessarily scummy, but that look terrible when all added together. Here's a kinda-sorta example from Meme Mafia over at the DL; it's not the epitome of what I'm getting at here, especially given it focuses more on the role game aspect then the scumhunting aspect, but it's at least a good demonstration of the whole being much greater than the sum of the parts. (References to "Touhou" are to me playing the TOUHOU HIJACK LOL meme.)
For what it's worth, I think the meta case on him was mostly worth persuing. His claim looked much like other fakeclaims I've seen in the past.
- He claimed under pressure.
- His claim was an investigative role that could easily not produce anything meaningful.
- He then went on to... not produce anything meaningful! In fact he told blatant lies based on information town already knew.
- I didn't mention this in game, but why would he track Cake, who looked for all the world like a vig at the time and thus would be super obvious as to what he's doing anyway? It's incongruous with Touhou's otherwise smart-seeming play.
- The other two roles that could produce coplike results died before he did, despite him seeming like the towniest player of all of 'em based on words.
- His role was an outright copy of someone else's weirder role in a ROLE MADNESS game.
Yes, sure, all this can actually happen, but as this stuff piles up it's really hard for me to think of someone in this circumstance as town and I would be willing to lynch them on that. I honestly don't know what I could've pushed on Touhou to actually get him lynched though, even on reflection. Pretty much the first thing I did after dying was go to gate, go 'was touhou scum', and headdesk when he said yes. I wish I'd been wrong, honestly, because at least then I wouldn't remain confused over when/when not to use role/meta tells.
- I feel throwing out one or two parts of a lengthy case starts to look less like a case and more like throwing shit out to see what sticks if the first few individual points start getting reasonably countered. This ends up making the attacker look bad instead of the defender and suddenly you've not done your job as a proper townie to make people not suspect you.
- I like to give people time to digest cases. Partly because I think it's the sporting thing to do, but mostly because it allows points to either be strengthened as time goes on or be debunked by things I didn't see or misread while still allowing me enough time to revisit what I've read and rethink my stances. If I'm going to make a non-concrete point, I'd much rather do it with 48 hours to go than 12 hours to go, because in one of those two scenarios I'm not deadline-scrambling to make a new voteworthy case and ending up looking bad myself. (This isn't to say I have no confidence if my reads, of course; if I didn't I wouldn't be backing them with votes.)
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UK mentioned something especially interesting that I hadn't considered, though...
Townies like voting for something THEY came up with. So, when you provide one or two concise points, and let people join the wagon, they add their own points and they're freer to do so. It makes them feel like they're really taking part in the lynch rather than sheeping.
I admit I haven't bothered to extensively study this myself, but I can easily buy it as being true. The thing is that I also see it as a rather large gameplay hurdle that people need to overcome to better themselves. I'm going to say something that will sound somewhat controversial to those that play by "the book" and don't spend time actually thinking about the why of things: bandwagoning is not scummy. There is absolutely nothing wrong, as a townie, with seeing a case another townie made, agreeing with it, and realizing you find it stronger than anything you've seen yourself. After all,
convincing other people that your target is scum and getting them to vote with you is the point of making cases as all! What this means is that we need to eliminate the stigma of voting for someone because of someone else's reasons, because that stigma impedes player development. What
is scummy is using other people's cases as an excuse to avoid having to try. Bandwagoning is not scummy IF...IF you are willing to put in the effort to read the case, check to make sure that it makes sense to you (including fact-checking!), and then explain why you think that case is the best case on the table. If you are town, you should be willing to put in this kind of effort; otherwise Mafia is perhaps not the game for you.
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Now. On to the rhetoric version of "Cases are scummy", alongside the sentiment that "Explaining town reads is anti-town". Both of these are scummy because they avoid accountability, and avoiding accountability is one of the extremely few inherently scummy courses of action one can take in Mafia (outside of super-stupid roles that force avoiding accountability, I guess, in which case you all vote to lynch the mod in postgame). Town has
no reason to avoid accountability, and scum has
every reason to avoid accountability. Incidentally, this was really sold me on Bathory scum: a combination of "Explaining town reads is anti-town" and "Just because I was wrong, that doesn't make me scum" (as much as they don't directly connect with one another in this particular game, since the wrong in this case was thinking a townie scummy, the general sentiments behind the two statements are still incongruous with each other). The second of those is very true! Townies are wrong all the time. What's important in distinguishing townie wrong from scummy wrong is in looking at the 'why's of their opinions. But when you don't provide those 'why's, and you end up being wrong without having good reasons for being wrong, what are people supposed to think?
So yeah. In general, players, plz to be providing 'why's when posting opinions. You don't necessarily have to provide ALL of the 'why's but you should be providing enough of them that will at least start to make people think about what you're saying. If you think someone is scum, you should be doing your best to make sure other people see what you see and agree with you. If you think someone that other people find suspicious is town...you should be doing your best to make sure other people see what you see and agree with you. Unless you don't actually care if the person gets lynched or not and just want to be able to say that you called them as town. But only scum don't care if a townie gets lynched, so. <_<
