Crypto's Guide to Not Being a Terrible Person Who Shouldn't Be Allowed to Play Mafia

See, sometimes people say things they know aren't true because they are trying to piss you off. That is called trolling.
— KillHimNotMe

This is true, though.
This is—
Like—
Totally legit.

All good Mafia players are self-confident. Take a look at the hall of fame. The "Most decorated players!" and "Highest win percentages!" columns consist pretty much exclusively of players who speak assertively and act decisively no matter their role or alignment. Humility is one thing, but total mistrust in your own abilities is a paralyzer and it will cost you a lot of games. Self-confidence is the number-one cornerstone of good play as both town and scum. This doesn't mean that as a townie, for example, you should cherish the first set of reads you come up, close your mind to alternative hypotheses, and race through the game accordingly. But it does mean that you shouldn't second-guess yourself solely because you've got creeping fears that you're making the wrong move.
In order to consistently do the right thing at the right time (timing is important—as mafia you can't bus too early or too late, and as town you often have to decide who to lynch before another player runs away with the game and irrevocably ruins your chances to win), you've got to step back from the game and look at it in as detached and objective a manner as possible. When I started resumed competitive games on a regular basis in June 2011, after at least half a year of primarily unranked play, I frequently allowed the fear of mishammering and getting yelled at by someone I liked to influence my decision making. Sometimes, when I was really stumped, I would just give up and hammer in favor of the person I liked because I didn't want a big ball of hate shoved down my throat. No surprise: I made way more mistakes than I would've made if I hadn't let that insecurity dominate my thoughts. After a couple of months I realized what every player needs to realize: (1) it's only a game, although pie charts and pixelated trophies might try to convince you otherwise; (2) you're going to screw up every so often no matter what; (3) you're going to get raged at every so often no matter what; and (4) if a friend holds a grudge against you for one wrong hammer among many right hammers, then it's safe to say that, between the two of you, you're not the one with problems.
Bearing these facts in mind, I began to actually look at the flaws in my play and figure out how to patch up those holes. During competitive games I would go out of my way to focus on avoiding the initial lines of thought that had led in the past to making the wrong decisions. Each of those flaws (viz., seizing up as mafia, struggling to read friends, allowing instinctive paranoias to overrule concrete logic, and falling too easily for emotional appeals) resulted from a lack of self-confidence, which in turn resulted from too strong an emotional attachment to the game. Once you learn to detach yourself from the game, you'll be able to absorb and analyze information and make judgments with greater objectivity. An added perk is that it becomes a whole lot easier to get a handle on your weaknesses and look for ways to improve.
Activity and Persuasiveness

Another common characteristic of elite players is that they speak frequently and coherently. They're good at putting ideas together succinctly and convincingly without much preparation. To an extent, eloquence is an innate skill, but you don't need to be Ernest Hemingway in order to be good at Mafia. You simply need to do anything but internalize your thoughts. When you speak your mind, you are interacting with other players, allowing you to bounce ideas off them and to get a better idea of their thought processes, and you are minimizing the risk of getting lost in your own conflicting thoughts (these benefits are especially important when you're town). Yes, Mafia is about deception and detection of deception and all that, but at its core it's a game about getting your way, and you can't get your way if you're not persuasive enough to convince the town that your argument is the right one. This means that you need to (1) talk a lot, (2) be reasonable (being nice helps a lot, too), and (3) be good at expressing your thoughts. You can be a human lie detector and you can be a total wizard at thinking up ways to baffle the town but none of that matters if you can't get your way when the chips are down.
On Being Town

Play the Part
I've seen a lot of cases where someone complains about how the player he just mishammered didn't play the part (i.e., didn't town-tell) well enough, and that he needs to work on that. Too bad. When you're town, making sure you look like you're town isn't your primary objective. Finding and lynching scum is your primary objective—that is playing the part. Formulate, vocalize, and act upon opinions regarding other players. Answer questions directed at you. Refute accusations against you. Tell people when you think they're wrong. If you've done all that then you've done your job.
Find the Mafia
Scumhunting is basically a process of behavioral analysis. You have to get inside the mind of the player you're evaluating and understand the thought processes causing him to say and do the things he says and does. In other words, you have to work out (1) what his thought process are and (2) whether his thought processes are those of a townie or those of a mafioso trying to look like a townie. It's basically a glorified guessing game, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth your time. Aside from simple observation, there are two measures you can take to drastically increase your likelihood of guessing correctly.
The first measure is testing for reactions to certain behavior. Reaction tests are of limited use because any competent player will either see through them or, given that he's either town or scum trying to look like town, react as a townie would. What's more, they can easily backfire and very quickly create a sense of mistrust among closed-minded players. All in all, reaction tests are not something you should rely on to get reads when the game's on the line.
The second measure is asking questions. Ask a lot of questions. It's the most effective way to deeply understand another player's thought processes. Determining whether someone is town or scum boils down to making an educated guess about the sincerity of his play, and the more you know of that person's thought processes, the better your odds of guessing correctly. "What are your general thoughts?" "What do you think about x, y, and z?" "Why do you think that?" "Who do you think is town?" "Who do you think is mafia?" For any game-relevant statement or action made by anybody who isn't confirmed town, there is an underlying thought process worth examining. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Lynch the Mafia
Finding scum is only half the battle. It's not enough to say, "I think this guy's scum," vote him, and sit on your conclusion. More often than not, you'll need to explain your reasoning to the town. This goes back to activity and persuasiveness. Tailor your speech to your audience. If you're too abrasive then the town is less likely to give you a fair chance. Don't be too dispassionate, but be calm and reasonable—it's one thing if there are a bunch of votes on the wrong guy with time winding down, but if that's not the case then you probably don't need to flip on caps lock and start cussing people out.
Regarding Tells
Being pro-town isn't necessarily a tell. Spouting a load of attractive-looking rhetoric isn't necessarily a tell. A truly reliable scum tell is something that a townie wouldn't think to say or do, period, barring certain mistakes such as those due to forgetting, misreading, or misunderstanding some item of information. A truly reliable town tell is something that a mafioso wouldn't think to say or do, at least not without forethought. The best town tells are reflexive. Reflexive behavior is something that scum are very unlikely to have thought to produce on the spur of the moment.
On Being Mafia

Emulate
One of the biggest mistakes that people make as mafia is that they try to look town by acting pro-town. They say what appears to be the smartest thing for a townie to say in a given situation, while doing their best to cut the corners they need to cut in order to win the game. This is all wrong. There is always a difference between what you perceive to be optimal from the essentially objective perspective of a mafioso and what you perceive to be optimal from the subjective perspective of a townie. If you make the mistake of taking action according to the former perception rather than the latter, then your play will differ in a way that is noticeable, if only on an instinctive level, to perceptive townies. When you're mafia, you don't want to look generically pro-town. You want to look like your usual town self. This means that you should concentrate first on maximally improving your town game and second on structuring your scum game around your town game. If your town game is good, then you can emulate it without fear of getting lynched for being scummy on a fundamental level (i.e., for having a "scummy personality"—not a nice thing to say, incidentally—or a scummy approach to the game). It will also be harder for other players to spot the differences between your town game and your scum game, although some differences will always exist no matter how hard you try.
Short version: Do what you would do as town in a given situation, not what any townie should do in a given situation, and cut as few corners as possible.
Play to Win
Don't bus if you don't have to. Yes, it's flashy. No, it's not worth looking flashy if it gives the town another day to nail you. If a misguided town hands you the game then go ahead and take it. Trust your foresight and don't mess around.
A Word on Meta-Analysis

There's a huge stigma on this site about meta-analysis. A lot of players say that it's a crutch that bad players use because they aren't good enough to scumhunt in a game without friends with whom they can meta-abuse. If you like to puff out your chest and spout, "Wow, stop relying on meta, you idiot!" at every opportunity, then not only is your argument wrong but you've also managed to be completely ignorant of the facts that Mafia is a psychological game and that in order to be good at psychological games you must acknowledge certain psychological principles. Among these principles is the notion that different people will act differently in the same situation, because—surprise!—each person is different. And guess what: Mafia players are people.
Yes, there are limits on the range of possible reactions to a given stimulus. But if you accept that each player has a unique personality and approach to the game then you must also accept that each player's behavior corresponds with his unique personality and approach to the game. One player would probably say x as town and y as scum in situation z, but another player might say y as town and x as scum in situation z. That sort of thing is worth taking into consideration. Meta-analysis is an extremely useful scumhunting tool, and it's not worth rejecting just for the sake of a misattributed stigma.