Not everything within mafia is strictly about the game that you are playing in. Outside factors will often determine your success and your ability to sustain long term success. Never harm yourself, even mentally, over how you approach the game and thats the first and best moment important way to become a very good player. You have to show up to be good, after all.
Learning to cope with being wrong
No mafia player is ever going to always be right. No matter how successful, intelligence, or diligent mistakes are always going to happen. It feels amazing to do everything right and to bask in the warm glow of victory, but what about when you make the decision that leads to towns downfall? What happens when you are trusted to safeguard a victory only for the final scum to have tricked you despite your best efforts?
Pinpoint the moment where the scum(s) started you on the path of faulty logic, embrace the error as solvable with diligence and post game strategizing, and move on to the next sign up topic.
Mafia is an incredibly hard game to play among peers who are comparable in skill, but when you are also playing against your ghosts it becomes next to impossible to play. Every one of you who has read this has been, and will be many times again, wrong in the game of mafia. As has this author. Thats OK! It does not mean that you should accept your flaws and not seek improvement, but for good mental health and steady progress it is imperative that you not punish yourself and become emotional over even really poor decision making. We have all been there, and you are only human. This essay is meant to instruct on how your best can be better, but at the end of the day if you gave it your best thats all anyone should ever ask of you.
b. The absence of fear
As either alignment mafia is largely a game of personality. No matter what you do as town you have to realize, in conjunction with the fact that you are human and are going to inevitably err, is that you cannot be afraid of making tough decisions. You will either be right or you will be right, it is a yes/no paradigm. Undue hesitation (which is not to be confused with prudent consideration) only harms both your decision making process as well as your reputation as a decider for future games.
When you allow fear to enter into the equation you allow yourself to be manipulated by arguments that do not matter. It does not matter who the person is or what role they have claimed or how upset you are making them if you, through your diligent method, believe them to be scum. Mistakes of thought are to be analyzed when an alignment becomes a known quantity, not while in the midst of the action.
We all fear that anxiety. That bubbling in our stomach of wanting to get it right. It is, again, human nature to hesitate and to torment ourselves when we invest fully into something. We dont want to mess up, of course. However it is key as a member of town to be able to quash that rebellious tendency and to move forward regardless. Measure twice, cut once, and you will never miss your mark unduly.