town playing tips

The most important part of your role is the word Town.
Barring some role madness games, your posts and your votes are the most important part of your arsenal against scum. If you win the role-assignment lottery and draw Bulletproof Doublevoting Cop, it doesn't do anyone any good if you get lynched.

While there is some merit to attempting to look tactically scummy for the sake of avoiding night-kills, it's actually much worse if you wind up looking scummy enough to be forced to claim or get lynched, as your posts during the Day will be beneath consideration whereas if you are night-killed your posts can be considered like any other upstanding Townie's.

Even if you're just a Vanilla Townie, the fact that you are Town doesn't legitimize everything you do as pro-Town or not scummy. In essence, don't play like lynchbait - you know that you're Town, but everyone else doesn't and they're not going to take your word for it.

Keep it real.
This should seem obvious, but don't lie unless you know what you're doing. Nothing looks worse than getting caught in a lie, plus one of the major benefits of dying as Town is that everyone expects you weren't lying while you were alive.

Lying as part of a "gambit" (a risky play with potentially worthwhile rewards) is a special case. You should generally try to gambit only if you're going to get a superior result if you succeed (none of that mindgames-for-the-sake-of-it garbage) and the gambit has low-to-no chance of failure. A good gambit has the following traits:

It isn't verifiably false - you didn't mess up the flavor, someone won't counterclaim you, and (if it's an issue) doesn't call game balance into question.
Your death and roleflip will show that it was a gambit.
If it fails or when it's time to correct your lie, you can explain that it was a gambit and what you were trying to do with it.
Since gambits are risky in general, being able to talk your way out of it should it blow up in your face is always something to keep in mind.

On a similar note, if people bring up a valid accusation against you, go ahead and admit to doing it. Then argue that it's not scummy, or at least not scummier than what someone else has done. But don't try to argue an indefensible position.

While it's tempting to call everyone else stupid at times - it might be true! - resist the temptation. The rest of the Town is trying its best to win; even if you're in a disadvantageous position, don't obstruct the Town in frustration or desperation.

Do not go gently into that good night.
Lynching a Townie is a bad thing in general, but lynching a confirmed Townie is worse. To yourself, you ARE a confirmed Townie. While getting lynched is not the end of the world, the fact is that getting lynched is the one thing you can guarantee will hinder your faction. Do not acquiesce to your lynch unless it would be clearly anti-Town to do otherwise (although those situations are not common).

Along these same lines, the occasions where it's pro-Town to self-hammer as Town are extremely limited, and offing yourself out of spite toward the (evident) morons who are about to lynch you isn't one of those occasions. Even if the wagon on you is mostly Town, you still have to win with them in the end, so stay helpful.

Learn to identify Townies as well as scum.
Scumhunting is hyped up pretty well, but being able to Townhunt is fairly close behind in terms of importance. For obvious reasons, you don't want to lynch someone you have identified as Town. In addition, as you accumulate Town reads you can begin to lynch and argue from process of elimination. As long as your Town reads are accurate, process of elimination is one of the scariest things you can do to scum - now they not only have to look Town (which is already difficult for them), but they have to look more Town than others in order to evade your suspicion.

Of course, this leaves the question of how to identify Townies. This comes with the same experience described earlier when scumhunting was discussed.

Be careful what you wish for.
If you attempt to do a "meta read" on someone to see if they do or did something the same way in a different game, you are heavily biased toward seeing what you wanted to see in the first place.

If you attempt to make a Post by Post Analysis (abbreviated PbPA, wherein you list each of a target player's posts and critique each one), you are very likely to find yourself stretching to justify a conclusion you already had in mind beforehand with posts that don't actually add anything. In fact, PbPAs are quite possibly the most pointless ways you can waste time in Mafia.

Pages 18 through 43 are not required reading.
Nobody wants to read your giant walls of text unless there's a really good reason for it. No, you don't want to read them either. Be concise; it dramatically increases the chance of people reading your posts or caring what they say.

Similarly, "information" is not this amazing serum that Townies need 300 posts of per week or they wither. Learn to pick out what is important from posts. It may be anathema to new players to SKIM the thread, but many times you can do just that and not miss much if you just keep an eye out for what's worth reading.

Skilled players are probably not going to post directly scummy things. To a degree, WHAT they post doesn't really matter. It's more helpful to look at their responses to various pressures and judge their motives accordingly.

Here's a quarter, call someone who cares.
The best and quite possibly only reason you should argue with someone you think is scum is to get them to clarify something they said earlier. Telling them that they're scum won't accomplish anything except RAGE and wars of text walls - in the end, you're not going to convince them that they're scum and they're not going to vote themselves. Market your cases to the other players; convince them that you're on the right track and you'll go a lot farther.

Similarly, defense in Mafia is fairly overrated, as a competent Mafia player can talk their way out of anything and you should expect people to argue against their own lynch by any means necessary. This isn't to say that you should blindly tunnel on your target or that you should simply ignore defense; seeing the other side to an argument may rightfully suggest that you're misunderstanding something or generally on the wrong track. By all means defend yourself where you feel it's necessary, but once done you would be better off pointing out why someone else deserves to be lynched more rather than continuing to expound on your defense.