Quote Originally Posted by Populus Romanus View Post
Is this why you are so good at mafia?
Actually it's funny, IRL people tend to take advantage of my patience, trust, and understanding. If I played mafia the way I live my life, I'd be pretty bad at it.

When I play mafia and most of the time when I'm online, I am Askthepizzaguy, which is a persona that developed from my days playing Medieval 2 Total War. Back then, I never really played M2TW with other people until later on, so all I ever played against was the computer. I found that the computer was generally a backstabbing son of a Milanese Doge, unworthy of any form of cooperative or even peaceful diplomacy unless your intent was to screw over the computer and backstab them first. I would first go out and trade maps, trade rights, peace, alliance, and all that stuff... for money. Then I'd use that money to raise an army of generals and peasants so large that I could take their capitals and castles with ease, and use the pillaging money and better facilities and three-times the starting area of my kingdom to raise a real army and destroy the whole world at once, often times breaking records for how fast the map got conquered. Mostly because the computer ticked me off so badly that I decided that any agreement with them wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, it was merely a vehicle for conquering them harder. They have since tinkered with the diplomacy a bit and it seems a bit more balanced, but certain folks will back-stab you a lot anyway.

From there, that sort of aggressive persona kind of stuck. Being distrustful/deceitful and merciless can be useful in a mafia game where you know, for certain, there is a group of people out there who are determined to destroy you through merciless and deceitful behavior. Then the objective is to not believe their lies and defeat them before they kill your whole team, and being distrustful and unforgiving sometimes works in that situation.

I don't believe in such a philosophy for real life, even if it might be quite profitable in the business world. That said, there really is something to be said about trust being earned, not given away. It's a valuable, precious thing, and most people simply cannot afford to give it away to everyone, because that leads directly to being abused relentlessly.

I wish real life was less like a mafia game and more like... you know... trying to coexist with people.