Errors and Lies

Playing dumb is a viable strategy. In multi-player competitive games, players tend to coordinate against whoever is in the lead. If you look like you are stumbling while you move into a better position, you will be ready to strike while your opponents are looking elsewhere. This can become difficult in iterative games; my tabletop group knows me to be too good a strategist to buy too much of this, but they seem not to have caught on that I will complain about crummy randomization both when I get horrible luck and when I want to distract attention from how well I am doing.

In Town of Salem, I am rarely sure of who is an idiot and who is engaging in obfuscating stupidity. A standard villain strategy is to run out the clock by preventing useful discussion, because a town that cannot coordinate information cannot find the mafia. Idiot chatterboxes are more likely to be villains, but this is a F2P online game, so you have lots of idiot chatterboxes and trolls. Is this person sabotaging discussion or just legitimately useless?

Say some information gets through that. Then the town starts puzzling out how to deal with it. Few players know exactly how all the roles and rules work. If you know, you might mis-apply those rules in this circumstance. If you know, you might lie about how those rules apply if the truth would get you killed. Then you have incomplete or wrong information, because other players are taking secret actions and may not mention that your logic is valid but your premises are false. Sometimes players will guess the right answer despite having invalid logic, which is aesthetically displeasing, although sometimes players do have a valid deduction but are presenting an unsound argument intentionally because telling the real reasons would get them killed. And then the original “information” might not be true, due to error or lies.

Most people know at least one Raymond Smullyan puzzle of the format “one always tells the truth and one always lies.” More advanced puzzles introduce the complication that people can be wrong, so you have insane liars who always say true things because they believe false things. It is often unclear whether you are winning/losing by your own merits or are the beneficiary/victim of outrageous fortune.

: Zubon