Why do people play open setups?

[Cheery Dog]

But scum, when cornered, should be forced to think about the game they're playing when they're caught. Fake claims should take effort.

Let's say someone is playing a fictional "super mario RPG mafia". Scum is pretty much caught and at L-1. Scum is assigned smithy, but can't claim Smithy from 'cuz that would be autolynch. Smithy is obviously one of the villains. But scum could claim Jinx or croco, because they're not quite a bad guys, may be in said hypothetical game, are not so obscure as to question "who is that", but are not so popular that they would have been given to actual town players. Scum couldn't claim Princess Toadstool because that role is obviously going to be assigned to a town player and will be counter-claimed in this hypothetical theme. Knowing the meta of super mario Rpg in this hypothetical theme game should be a benefit to town and scum alike.

I know I'm in the minority on this but since the topic came up I figured I'd share my thoughts on theme games and scum being handed safe fake claims.

a theme game without scum safe flavor claims would be easily broken by Day 1 flavor massclaim.

I disagree.

You've just stated in your example theme Princess Toadstool would be obvious town.

Therefore by not having the possibility that scum getting that (and other roles that you also describe as obvtown alignment), it reduces the lynch pool to just the not quite bad guys.

[Cheery Dog]

It does actually depend on how much flavor you put in the roles.

If it's just names, I'd expect scum to receive a list of names known to not actually be in the game.
If everything is flavored such as ability names, I'd expect the mod to offer scum extra fakeclaim service by fitting roles into the flavor.

If the mod wants a broken game possibility, they don't give any, although the game would also break slightly if scum are given complete fakeclaims and town attempts to massclaim day 1

The beet choice is to just have flavor names randomized separately to alignments/roles. (but then I haven't actually modded any theme games yet)

[Cheery Dog]

This has been brought up several times: has anyone ever seen a massclaim on day 1 in a theme game?

Yes, that's why we're saying what we're saying.

http://www.mafiascum.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23215 (not broken because scum had fakeclaims)
We may have only been doing characters, but it's still happened.

[Cheery Dog]

Something I've never tested but seems viable would be a scum ability: "Name a hypothetical role that might exist in the game. The moderator will give you full details of the most similar role that exists in the game, but not who has it." That way, you can test the waters to see if anyone has a role similar to the one you plan to claim, before you actually claim it, but the claims themselves still originate entirely from scum, who can make the final call on whether a claim will be believable or not.

I think it would get used to find out what type of investigations they need to hide from rather that for fake claiming purposes.