Article #9: The Art of Power Wolfing
- written by Thingyman
Hello, my name is Thingyman and it has been 5 years since I last pussy wolfed.
It is my strong belief that your average mafia team can greatly increase their chances of winning any given game if they put the core principles of "power wolfing" to use, something which I started doing myself in 2012.
Power wolfing (aka “power playing as scum”) is a strategy that relies heavily on forcing the town into submission and/or manipulatively guiding the town towards self-destruction by actively taking control of the game thread and deciding the agenda. It is a proactive strategy, the success of which is dependent on complete mafia teamwork and an aggressive, confident mentality.
Part 1: The Problem
The first step of power wolfing is getting into the proper mindset. Unfortunately, in the current climate, mafia teams tend to cruise control instead of fully exploiting their inherent advantages. I believe this tendency is closely related to the fact that most people to a certain degree dislike being mafia.
The general attitude towards being mafia
According to a
survey I conducted earlier this week, 84% of all players would rather be town than mafia (sample size: 53).
The following examples perfectly exemplify the overall pattern in the responses to the survey:
- “I prefer the solving aspect of the game”
- “My main motivation as scum is to not let my team down”
- “Whether I like being scum depends on energy level and my schedule”
- “I don’t mind being scum in turbos, but I definitely prefer town in normal games”
Overall, the results of the survey seem to indicate that being scum is considered a mentally exhausting chore to most people, especially in non-turbo games and even more so if one is randed scum several games in a row. People tend to feel more pressure and a bigger responsibility to their team when they are mafia, whereas they feel they have more freedom when playing as a townie because they can be honest and/or because they feel more detached from their team.
This lack of motivation and apathetic attitude towards being mafia is, I would argue, the reason that the vast majority of people approach playing mafia with one of the following mindsets:
- “I will try to do just enough”
- “I will try to at least make the game somewhat competitive out of respect for the spirit of the game”
- “I will try to imitate my town game”
Most people falsely believe that achieving any of these three things is a victory in itself. It is not. The goals being set are too weak and/or misguided. More on this later.
The consequences
In practice, the lack of motivation leads to very suboptimal plays, a severe lack of coordination and allows luck or circumstances to play too big of a role in deciding the outcome of a game.
To be a bit more specific, a typical mafia game often plays out in a way where the majority of a mafia team’s members are merely going along with the flow or trying to adapt to whatever mood and consensus they seem to be sensing from the thread in the hopes that they each individually are able to do their part by avoiding detection. In short, they are playing by the town’s rules and are mostly focused on just pulling their own weight. Any planning or strategy is usually limited to deciding night actions and/or giving thoughts on who to vote or what to claim near End of Day.
When individual members of the mafia team do try to shake things up by making a “play”, i.e. try to make an active and independent contribution to the state of the game, this often consists of either needlessly bussing a fellow mafia member (sacrificing equity in the hopes that an easy temporary pass can be achieved by the individual busser) or overcommitting to getting a specific townie lynched all by their lonesome (calling a lot of unneeded attention to themselves and being hurt by lack of coordination).
Furthermore, these teams often depend on one or a few individuals from their team emerging into the role of "deep wolf", which is a popular denotation for a member of the mafia team that is “deep undercover”, i.e. has infiltrated the town core or at least gotten on the right side of the town core's reads. What this typically means is that the other members of the mafia team are often resigned to having to be lynched at some point, and because of this they either stop giving a full effort or they try to set up the "deep wolf" for the endgame.
This dependency and tendency to put all your eggs in one basket is suboptimal for many reasons. For example, it runs the risk of the "deep wolf" being somehow outed along the way through mechanics or simply through the fact that they are too clear too early for their own good or just because the town is being given extra time to work out a stronger POE that excludes the "deep wolf". Additionally, and even more importantly, it causes the mafia team to willingly give up their two strongest advantages: Their strength in numbers and the town lacking information.
So why do mafia teams still win as often as they do?
The answer is: Largely due to random factors or being lucky that the individual efforts mentioned above are sometimes enough to carry the team.
Because of how the game is naturally balanced and designed in addition to town not usually taking advantage of subpar mafia play, what you will have a lot of the time is a game where town either 1) self-cannibalizes, and/or 2) misuses or gets unlucky with their mechanical ways of solving the game, and/or 3) misclears one or more members of the mafia team while going into “auto pilot mode” for the endgame.
These are self-destructive tendencies of a town that
can be brought on by deliberate mafia strategy, but which most often are not. They, quite frankly, just happen sometimes, due to the largely random circumstances of how certain interactions, timings and mechanical results happened to turn out in that game. Note that I do not count bussing or distancing as deliberate mafia strategies that by their nature cause the town to self-destruct - because the mafia leaves themselves vulnerable to self-destructing as well through these actions by unnecessarily giving up ground.
Because of how the game is designed, mafia teams capitalize on town mistakes without needing to put any effort into it, whereas the informational imbalance between the teams will cause the town to often not even being aware of the mafia's "mistakes". Put even more simply, mafia teams
can win by sitting on their hands – town teams cannot. Now just imagine if your average mafia team employed a power wolfing strategy.
Part 2: The Solution
Now to the fun, and probably more interesting, part of this article: The core principles of power wolfing. I will not be covering all aspects of playing a good scum game, I will merely focus on those relating to power wolfing (as I define it). A lot of these principles overlap with each other, as you will probably notice.
1) Remember that you are mafia, not town
Aim to be an effective scum rather than a "consensus townie". Your win condition is to kill townies, not to imitate your town game or to side with the town. At the end of the game, people usually hail the mafia players that were considered consensus town, while they
should be hailing the mafia players that managed to survive while getting tons of dirt on their hands. There are no bonus points awarded for being "consensus town" when the game has ended. If everyone in the graveyard is calling you an obvious scum, then great - that is why they are there.
What usually happens is that a large majority of people handcuff themselves and restrict their possible range of actions and opportunities in the game by feeling like they have to act a certain way that is in accordance with their usual town meta - or else they might be "outed". Specifically, this leads to scum having reads that they feel they would have as town. Part of the reason for this is also that they feel it is easier to explain these reads if they are similar to their usual reasoning.
However, I challenge you to be bolder. Obviously, you should still aim to be considered townie by a majority of the people in the game, but you also need to recognize that most people are
not as deeply aware of your meta as you may think. You are very likely overestimating what people will pay attention to. And you are likely overestimating the accuracy of your reads as town. In some cases, players even try to replicate their town games despite the fact that they are often mislynched as town, which makes little sense, but people do it because "well, they
should read me townie for it".
Instead of all this imitating business, you need to think about what is best for your team's chances of winning. You need to ensure an impact or you at least need to not be working against your team. Analyze the game situation and find out which players are optimal to push and which players are optimal to defend, and then fabricate reads to make this happen. Do not just make random reads or reads that you feel you have to make or reads that are the easiest for you to flesh out. Challenge yourself.
If you are pushing someone while thinking "I really wish I could be on another wagon right now", then you are doing it wrong, and you are likely a victim of your own TMI or the disease known as "rigid scum'itis".
2) Stop bussing
Just stop it. You are overdoing it.
This partly relates to what I said above; Do not be afraid of being wrong, townies usually are, so you can certainly get away with it too. Especially since, if you are successful in preventing scum flips from happening, then you are on equal footing with everyone else in the game in terms of not getting anything right.
In order to maximize your chances of winning, you need to create an environment where the townies are constantly paranoid, frustrated and not able to find any solid footing because they have little or no reliable information to act on. This means you need to stall that first scum lynch for as long as possible. Until that first scum lynch occurs, you have the largest number of options available to you that you will ever have. You can use this window of opportunity to lynch people that will otherwise be tough to lynch later down the line and also to narrow down the pool of potential important town power roles.
You have these opportunities not only because of the town being at an informational disadvantage, but also because for each town lynch that occurs, you need to convince one less townie to vote your way the next day. That one vote (and then two votes, and then three votes, etc.) can mean all the difference in the world. You need an X number of mislynches to win the game, and by keeping your strength in numbers for as long as possible you will almost definitely get those extra one or two mislynches that you might not otherwise have gotten.
Yes, sure, if you strongarm those town lynches into happening, that might mean that some members of your team start attracting a lot of negative attention, but as the game goes on without scum flips the town will need increasingly many of its members to agree on the same scum, which you should easily be able to combat with a united front and by feeding the town's paranoid tendencies. Sometimes it might even be a blessing in disguise if almost all of your members are suspected because that might cause a disagreement and spread in votes amongst the townies, which you can use to create a majority on one of the townies.
In a record-breaking sweep I was a part of (only sweep ever to occur in a 21-man vanilla game), the final day ended with a townie self-voting. That is an example of the townie frustration caused by no bussing; That person had actually solved the game, but simply could not take the collective town failure anymore. For each day that goes by without a scum lynch, you will be surprised at the gifts you are given from such paranoia and frustration.
In another record-breaking sweep (
30-man open role madness setup played on this site) one of the members of my team was the secondary wagon for every single day of the game, but as a team, we just simply kept saving that person because we could. That is an example of strength in numbers.
In short, stop trying to bank on a "deep wolf" while considering the rest of the team as fodder; Use your numbers instead of freely surrendering them and then hoping for the best.
3) Drive the agenda, control the narrative
Referring back to something I touched on earlier, most mafia teams tend to adopt a "wait and see" approach where they often passively stand by as the town comes to a consensus on how to interpret an event, how to read a person or whatever it might be. Then members of the mafia team generally either fall in line or make an obligatory comment on the matter. In other words, they wait for town to act, and then they react. This is the wrong approach.
If town is allowed to drive the agenda, you are basically at the mercy of their decisions. If luck does not swing in your favor and you suddenly want to impact something about a bad situation, you are now automatically in a weakened defensive position, because you are the one voicing a concern with an already established paradigm or consensus in the game. You will, as a result, have little credibility to work with.
This problem stems from people's belief that as mafia you have to "fit in" and "hide amongst the town". To that I say: Hell no, build your own town and convince the townies that they are the ones who need to adapt to
you. Establish yourselves as some of the "town leaders", produce original content, be the ones deciding the wagons, plant ideas, and decide all the topics of interest. Do this confidently and make townies feel like they are being ridiculous or like an outsider, if they question the agenda put forth by your team.
This will wear them down mentally or at least make them feel vulnerable. By not allowing too many townies to position themselves comfortably in the game, your chances of applying principles such as "divide and conquer" and "fear mongering" become easier to do without seeming suspicious or obvious about it. When townies feel vulnerable like this, they are also less likely to question your authority and position in the game, because they will tend to feel that they need to be on your good side, so voicing any suspicion that they might actually have deep down would, in their mind, be too huge a risk.
To sum up, it does not matter if individual townies are on the right track or have some of the right ideas if you manage to establish you and your team as the authoritative power in the game. In a power of position, you combat these people easily through psychological principles such as "availability cascade" (i.e. "repeat something long enough and it will become true"), "anchoring" (i.e. exploiting the fact that people rely too heavily on the first piece of information acquired on that subject when making decisions), or simply by drowning out their voices, as Panther once put it to me:
[27/10/15 20.19.42] Panther: I can say I would be reading ppl well if village, but it doesn't matter
[27/10/15 20.19.46] Panther: Bc Wolves just drown it out and you don't get heard
4) Start strong
This probably sounds like generic advice, but I hope and think that my thoughts may put things into a different perspective for some people.
First, the importance of starting strong is related to the fact that people have a strong tendency to "confirmation bias", meaning that if Player A confidently town reads Player B on Day 1, then Player A will be much more likely to ignore or forgive any slip ups or scummy sounding posts on future days from Player B, simply because their mind is already attuned to the fact that they are probably townie. And this is just on an individual level; It also works on a macro level. If a person attains a consensus town read on Day 1, then groupthink and complacency will begin to kick in for the town as a whole and that person will most often be largely disregarded as a suspect for the next few days. This works as a sort of self-reinforcing psychological mechanism: "Well, no one else expresses worry about that person, so I guess I will just focus on other stuff". Note that, of course, it does not always work out this way, but the tendency is definitely there.
Second, getting a strong start helps you achieve all the things addressed in 2) and 3). You put yourself in a strong position to delay that first scum lynch, and you set yourself up early to control the narrative of the game before town takes initiative instead and grabs the control right out of your hands.
Third, if you happen to be playing a vanilla setup or any other setup that includes a Cop role with a n0 investigation check, then a rather significant advantage to getting a strong start is the likely event that a lot of your team will draw "fake peeks" (read this article about
"Hypo cop'ing"/leaving seer cover, if you are confused), making it much easier to narrow down who the Cop is.
5) Be creative
As I explained earlier, bussing a partner is a weak play. Instead, be more creative and try to think of actions that will benefit your team.
Example from the real world: The O.J. Simpson trial where the defense used the phrase "If the gloves don't fit, then you must acquit." to help sway the jury. This is based on the "rhyme as reason" cognitive bias that rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. Would this translate well into mafia games? Probably not, but the idea is that, if needed, you should be prepared to utilize unorthodox methods of getting results.
Example 1 from a mafia game: In order to keep my teammates motivated in a game, I promised that I would make a mafia-related song if we won. Listen to my fabulous Adele cover
here.
Example 2 from a mafia game: One of my scum partners was getting heat Day 1 and barely survived. So during the night, I conjured up a plan that involved my partner claiming Cop the next day with a scum peek on me. I would then react to it in a townie way, and he would eventually retract the claim, and we would both town read each other and hopefully everyone else would town read us too (which, fortunately, is what happened, and we both survived the game). Perhaps the true beauty of this plan, though, is that several townies made it obvious they were not the Cop through their reactions.
Now, the latter example here is obviously not anything revolutionary, and in practice, you will most often want to do "smaller plays" to help out your team. What I want to emphasize, though, is the importance of an optimistic attitude, a creative mind, and a need to win when faced with adversity - think of how you can flip the script on something if things are not going your way. Which brings me to...
6) Never give up, never surrender
Finally, there is always a chance to turn a certain loss into a win. On two occasions, I have managed to survive and win a game despite a Cop investigating and outing me as scum. One of these was a
36-man game where my 8 team members were all dead by mid Day 3, leaving me alone as an outed scum vs. 16 townies in a game with pro town mechanics (by the mods' own admission). Without going into too much detail, this was a role madness/mish-mash though that allowed me to argue that I would
become a townie (not true), which I managed to do, lynching townies along the way that had been investigated as town and finally a mason who was voted by their mason partner.
Without exaggerating the least bit, I would have gladly bet a million dollars that I was never winning that game, but I still kept fighting. I had to fight for the 0.01% chance, and you should too.
So next time you are on the chopping block and ready to accept your fate because, oh my god, a few townies pushed you, ask yourself: Why the hell are you giving up? How many times have you been town and successfully escaped the chopping block and become widely read as town through sheer passion? Now just do that as mafia too – and hey, you even have a team backing you up, making it easier than if you were actually town.
Just channel the Denzel and power through:
Cliffs:
- Motivation is key. Force yourself to set ambitious goals, and the game will naturally become more fun and exciting for you.
- Stop depending on luck and individual efforts being enough to carry your team. This is a team game, play it as such.
- The game of mafia is designed in such a way that it allows mafia teams to potentially win just by sitting on their hands and being fortunate enough that the town self-destructs. Increase your chances of winning further by actively provoking this self-destruction to happen.
- Follow the six principles of power wolfing: 1) Remember that you are mafia, 2) stop bussing, 3) drive the agenda, 4) start strong, 5) be creative, and 6) never give up.
- Overall, just fight as hard as you can to hold on to your two strongest advantages: Your strength in (united) numbers and the town lacking information.
Originally Posted by Frog
This device is useful in acquiring tips.
Reply With Quote
