I don't really get why a decent person would do either of these things when the mod has explicitly banned them. Which private communication about the game is basically always banned.
*cough* Diablo mafia *cough*. Something like private communication out of game takes an explicit, proactive breaking of rules which is a bit different from what I'm trying to say here. :V And even after that I'm sure people break it fairly often, even if it's casually mentioning that mafia is taking up your free time or ranting to a friend about how stupid people in the game are.
Besides, if you ban flavor talk then there shouldn't be any "finding ways around it", because this isn't a court of law where you can just loophole. You'd just get yelled at by the mod regardless, and probably wouldn't try to do it in the first place because you -know- the mod would yell at you. When I banned flavorclaims in one of my games there wasn't any issue.
That's not what I mean. Let's say you're a townie that knows a bit about the flavour of the setup and also knows that flavour and roles are related in this setup. Even if discussing the flavour explicitly is banned or you're personally against flavourgaming, it's not hard to imagine privately letting some of your flavour knowledge influence which scumleads you pursue, even if subconsciously. Even if flavour claims are banned, people will drop hints accidentally, or use their own knowledge about the flavour to deduce by process of elimination. I would come up with examples but you probably have an idea of what I'm talking about.
I think a valid comparison would be using last active times or online status to try and figure out whether someone is trying to avoid the thread. If something is staring you in the face it's hard for people to ignore it; it'll influence them to some extent even if they despise gaming the setup in that way.
Basically what I'm saying is this. If you're clever enough as a mod to let roles and flavour match up in a way that flows well, you're clever enough to make it so the flavour can't be gamed.
Edit: A better example. Someone claimed their role in a way that you know their role pm can't be town because of the way the role pm is worded. Even if you hate using ~*role pm wording*~ to play the game, how many people are going to ignore caught scum in front of them? This kind of situation is avoided by mod communication/quoting bans and sample wincons, but if flavour is a big part of your setup, then there's a good chance info will leak through just normal game discussion.
Edit2: Another example would be banning player guesses in an anon game to preserve the spirit of the game. But people let their identities slip (and other people are just obvious), and if you figure out that the person pretending to be a newbie is actually an experienced player, then that's going to influence the way you view the game. (That said, it normally wouldn't influence much. I don't have anything against banning player guesses in anon games but my point is that people will still let private player guesses influence them in the same way flavour would influence a person in the original example).
Wow that post got bloated fast.
