yells
guys saki is so cute
Uh but seriously though. There aren't any hard an fast rules--it's kind of the nature of the game. Since town will be going like, "Hmm, [behavior] is suspicious!" mafia will be thinking, "I should do [opposite of behavior] so that I don't look suspicious!" and then town will be thinking, "Mafia knows that [behavior] is suspicious, so they might be trying to do [opposite of behavior] to trick us into thinking they're town!" and it goes around in circles forever.
The more information town has, the easier it'll be to find mafia. Sometimes, like what happened in the last day phase, someone will come forward with information that will help us find a particular member of the mafia and lynch them, but usually what happens is process of elimination (which is why everyone makes lists). It's easier to find reasons why someone is probably town versus finding reasons why someone might be mafia, so you pick out all the people who you think are town, and then you pressure the rest.
Your main goal is to uncover behavior that doesn't help town (for example, if someone stuns the player everyone knows is actually the doctor, that's not a really pro-town thing to do). Since mafia will occasionally lie about any anti-town actions they may have taken, you're also looking for clear contradictions. We caught a mafia in a recent game because the mafia member claimed to spend 9G on items on D1, when town only had 8G to spend, for example, so those kinds of things.
Really though, a lot of what this comes down to is gut feelings and knowing how other people usually play, which is something you need to pick up over time. For example, earlier in the thread, a few people including myself were like "Lux is suspicious because she's not posting as much," because we know that Luxaria tends to post a lot. She seems to have some irl stuff going on that's preventing her from keeping up with this game as much as she has in past games, but those are the kinds of things people will bring up.
Also a lot of the time, you'll get this weird feeling about someone and you think they're kinda sketchy but you can't really put your finger on why. Gut feelings can be surprisingly accurate, because when you feel off, it's usually for a reason, even if you don't know exactly what. So while you may not be able to convince other players to vote for someone you have bad feelings about by just saying "idk guys I'm getting bad vibes from this one," you shouldn't dismiss those vibes.
Everyone's got their own playstyles, though, so don't feel like I'm writing a textbook that you need to follow to the letter. Just be yourself, try a lot of things, make mistakes and learn from them, learn from other peoples' mistakes. You'll get the hang of it. :>
throws this wall of text here I need to get going but hopefully it's enough to start. Seriously, ask us questions if you have any, we're all happy to help.