pops,
That would be POG I assume?
I play on Mafiascum.net. I don't know what POG is, but the lack of M in the acronym leads me to suspect it is one of many sites that plays some forum mafia but is mainly about something else. Mafiascum.net is the largest site fully dedicated to forum mafia; EpicMafia is a noteworthy site that focuses on chatroom-mafia, a different, faster format; I wouldn't be surprised if they outnumber us since that is probably easier to get into. Those are the only two I know of.
Mafia is really not that strategic but is widely loved.
As a prominent member of the biggest forum mafia community 3 years running, I feel obligated to object to this. Face to face mafia either degenerates into reading people's faces rather easily, or feeling like nothing you can do can help your chances of lynching correctly and that there are people waiting to play another game. Forum mafia allows games to run on longterm timetables without inconveniencing dead people, and without overly easy face reads. Playing face to face mafia and concluding it has no strategy is a bit like learning what moves are legal in chess, playing 3 games of blitz chess, and concluding there isn't much strategy.
Can you elaborate? I don't doubt you, but I'm interested in learning more about Mafia strategy.
I'll skip strategy for power roles (like Cop, the role that targets a player each night and learns their alignment) since that should be readily apparent.
A mafia game starts with no information about anyone. Games generally get off to a good start with the joke-voting phase, or in some games, the random question phase. The idea is to "break the ice", not in a social way, but to get a foothold on the game.
Any posting has a risk, sometimes small, sometimes large, that you'll post a bit differently from a town aligned player would, so mafia aligned players would refuse to join the banter, if they could. But they can't get away with that because it's like refusing a polygraph test, it's a red flag. In any phase of the game, avoiding posting or posting less is cause for suspicion, it's generally called "lurking".
Somewhere in the banter small suspicions come up. They will be really small things that probably don't mean anything after all, but they give people a chance to take a stance on another player and join the process of ascertaining whether any particular player is scum. Then those stances on the early activity can in turn be used as material for analysis, so once you get out of the RVS, RQS, or more generally, "low information stage", the town really has the ball rolling.
Once the game is going, there are a handful of basic ways you can divine whether a player is scum from the way they post. One is what I call "the survivalist tell", (many of my peers might put less stock in it than I do). No player wants to be lynched, it hurts his faction's probability of winning. But it hurts scum more than town, town is usually allowed more mislynches (innocent lynches) than correct lynches, and town can also help their faction by identifying scum players, while scum only have the goal of survival to focus on. Lurking can be considered a subset of the survivalist tell, it does absolutely nothing at all to help you identify scum players for the town and makes it harder for other players to ascertain that you are scum.
Another, bigger way of finding scum is identifying players that can't "scumhunt". Mafia aligned players know who are the scum are, so they have to fake the behavior of talking to players and trying to figure out if they are scum. They may seem disengenuous, like they don't believe their own accusation, (how do you spell disengenuous? I'm too lazy to google this is already a wallpost). They also will post things they think will look like this process, but really doesn't at all. For instance "Information Instead of Analysis" is when a scum player tries to fake scumhunting by discussing a history of what has happened so far, but totally fails to actually draw conclusions from the information and really just parrots it.
Other ways of identifying scum are debatable, situational, or even ineffable. Many people have methods by which they can identify players who are (almost) definitely not scum, rather than picking up on someone being scum. This tends to make power role interactions interesting, as a basic example, the Doctor will protect a player he thinks is definitely not scum. (Many face to face groups allow the Doctor to protect himself, which is stupid as all get out because he should protect himself every night..)
As a fun "try this at home" takeaway, forum mafia players have known for a long time that the most popular face to face setup, Doctor, Cop, a few mafia and townspeople, is broken in half. The cop should claim that he is the cop as soon as the game starts, while the doctor remains concealed. The cop can repeatedly investigate each night while protected by the doctor, then report his results to the town.
(Some groups do have a house rule against claiming your own role, which is unfortunate, since it isn't enforceable for hinting at your own role and isn't the best way to fix the doctor-cop problem)
Mafia is really not that strategic but is widely loved.
As a prominent member of the biggest forum mafia community 3 years running, I feel obligated to object to this. Face to face mafia either degenerates into reading people's faces rather easily, or feeling like nothing you can do can help your chances of lynching correctly and that there are people waiting to play another game. Forum mafia allows games to run on longterm timetables without inconveniencing dead people, and without overly easy face reads. Playing face to face mafia and concluding it has no strategy is a bit like learning what moves are legal in chess, playing 3 games of blitz chess, and concluding there isn't much strategy.
Can you elaborate? I don't doubt you, but I'm interested in learning more about Mafia strategy.
Oh good Lord do I love Mafia. I can play it online??? Where?
Help! I would love to play online. I really, really loved mafia, but you need, like, 10 friends to play it, and I spend all my time playing Dominion instead of making friends.
But anyway, yeah, Mafia is super strategic, even IRL. First of all, it's a game of memorization. You have to remember everything that people said, who they defended, because it becomes relevant in later rounds. It's been show, for instance, that if people can take notes while they play, they beat the Mafia much more consistently.
I got into it when I noticed a small group playing in an offtopic subforum of a forum I visit, thought to myself "there's probably a site for this", and googled to find a dedicated mafia site. Most good search queries will take you to mafiascum.net
