The Town are the primary protagonists of Mafia, an uninformed majority who do not know each other's identities, but who must gain each other's trust and work together in order to eliminate the Mafia / Triad and any Neutral Killing or Neutral Evil players who seek to overrun them. The Town will primarily accomplish this through voting to put suspicious players on trial during the day and lynch them. Certain Town roles may also be able to kill suspicious players at night as well. In terms of identification in the game, Town roles are colored in green whereas Mafia roles are colored in red, Triad roles in blue, and Neutral roles in a variety of other colors.
At the beginning of a Mafia game, the biggest advantage that the Town has is numbers -- simply put, there are far more members of the Town than there are members of the Mafia / Triad and Neutral Killing / Evil roles. The most popular setups today contain 9 Town members, 3 Mafia or Triad members, and 3 Neutral roles (usually 1 Neutral Killing, 1 Neutral Evil, and 1 Neutral Benign). Described another way, the Town has more than enough votes to lynch all players opposed to it with plenty of margin of error to spare. This is the "majority" part of uninformed majority.
The biggest disadvantage that the Town has is the "uninformed" part of uninformed majority -- simply put, the Mafia / Triad know the identities of all their members, but the Town does not. Therefore, the Town must spend days and nights discussing who may be a member of the Mafia / Triad, investigating players, and attempting to reach a consensus on the players who seem the most suspicious and should therefore be voted up to trial and lynched.
Being a good Town player requires critical thinking, cooperation, and consensus-building skills. It will be very difficult to succeed as a Town without theses qualities present in at least some Town members, who can lead the others to the right leads, accusations, and lynches of Mafia / Triad members and Neutral Evil / Killing roles. However, the flip side of cooperation is a healthy dose of suspicion, as the Mafia and Triad are hiding among the Town and will pretend to be Town members in order to gain the Town's trust and lead them to mislynches, in order to reduce and potentially eliminate the Town's majority.
There are a total of twenty (20) different Town roles, divided up into categories based on each's role's abilities. Please note that a given role may be cross-listed below under multiple of the following categories. In addition, the descriptions on this page are deliberately brief, but please feel free to click through to any category or role for a much more thorough description of it, including, but not limited to strategies for playing the role and host setup options available for customizing the role's abilities.
- Town Investigative. Town Investigative roles are able to take actions at night to gather information which will assist the Town with determining which players are members of the Mafia / Triad or Neutral Killing / Neutral Evil roles. Their actions range from checking a player's alignment / crimes, seeing whom a player visited / who visited a player, and gaining more information about what happened to a player after that player's death.
- Town Protective. Town Protective roles are able to take actions at night in order to protect other members of the Town from the Mafia / Triad or Neutral Killing / Neutral Evil attempts to kill them. Their actions range from healing a player who has been attacked, intercepting and killing the attacker of a guarded player, switching a player's location at night to keep them out of harm's way, or roleblocking someone who may attack another player.
- Bodyguard (also a Town Killing role)
- Bus Driver (also a Town Power role)
- Doctor
- Escort
- Town Killing. Town Killing roles are able to take actions to neutralize / kill other players who may be members of the Mafia or Triad or Neutral Killing / Neutral Evil roles. Their actions range from intercepting and killing the attacker of a guarded player, imprisoning, interrogating, and executing a suspicious player, killing anyone who visits one's house at night, and shooting another player who may be a member of the Mafia / Triad.
- Town Power. Town Power roles are a bit of a catch-all category, with all of the roles other than Spy falling into another category as well. The three non-Spy roles (Bus Driver, Jailor and Veteran) are all able to take action upon another player at night, either in the form of switching a player's location at night to keep them out of harm's way, imprisoning, interrogating, and executing a suspicious player, or killing anyone who visits one's house at night. In contrast, the Spy is a much more cerebral role which receives information about the Mafia / Triad's targets and which is able to read their otherwise inaccessible night chat in the hope of finding clues.
- Bus Driver (also a Town Protective role)
- Jailor (also a Town Killing role)
- Veteran (also a Town Killing role)
- Spy
- Town Government. Town Government roles are another broad category consisting of three different kinds of roles. The first are those roles which may self-confirm and have an impact on either voting, lynches, or night chat (Mayor, Marshall, and Crier). The second are the roles which know each other's identity, share a special night chat, and which may recruit Citizens to their cause (Mason, Mason Leader). Finally, there is the Citizen who is the most basic role in Mafia -- a player without a night role and whose chief function is to participate in daytime discussion and help the Town vote to lynch the Mafia / Triad or Neutral Killing / Neutral Evils.
In addition to these roles, there is one final Town role, the Stump, which is only found under rare circumstances (administrator / moderator action, an Auditor auditing himself, or being placed on the Stump List). It is basically a Citizen who no longer has the ability to vote, but which nevertheless is aligned with the Town.
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