How much have things shifted?

[GreyICE]

The players have gotten worse, the games have gotten less frequent, everything is bad.

Also welcome back!

[GreyICE]

Eh I appreciate the drive towards standardization in normal games. Mostly because it makes them more distinct from Theme Games, and that's all for the good. There was some truly bizarre shit in the normal queue that should never have gotten there.

Agree Neapolitan and Role Cop are the only two needed and Vanilla cop is the bastard love child that's totally worthless in every way.

[GreyICE]

Vanilla cop is better than Neapolitan because it adds a sense of mystery. Neapolitan is just a bargain bin Normal Cop.

Mystery is exactly what we don't want too much of in normal games. The idea always has been normal games are more or less "the setup adds spice to dayplay, but doesn't become the focus of it" and theme games are where "setup mystery" can sometimes take over.

[GreyICE]

Also effort is super alignment indicative. If Red Coyote is making any, lynch him.

[GreyICE]

Not arguing for or against either, but how does Vanilla Cop add "mystery" exactly?

Well, why is the Vanilla Cop in the game? Like Tracker, I know some things about the setup - the mafia has at least one targeting role, there's at least one other targeting role in the town. Just the way things are. I bet you could find at most a handful of normal games with trackers that don't follow that. Too obvious a use case. Or masonry. I know there's at most one more weak investigative role, I know that if the scum have some sort of detection it's likely a role cop over a tracker/watcher. But these only slightly inform your use of the role. It's more or less the same.

Vanilla cop, lets jump in the hole. So I know there's a vanilla cop. How are the scum/town power role balances arrayed? If one goon flips this becomes VERY pertinent. Is it 2/1 or 1/2? If the mafia have two PRs you're clearing people, if they don't then you're not. If you're sitting there looking at two "vanilla" results this might just be the most important question possible. You have most of the information, you just need to sift it.

And something I've learned having run two normal games... most people suck at setup spec. Seriously. The game can and will devolve into a debate between people who think that its just fine for the town to have a mason recruiter and a town cop and people who think that a 4-man scumteam is reasonable in a 13 player normal game. These are things that happen.

So you're giving them exactly enough information to cause serious fucking damage, and for what? It's not actually good information. If they guess that the mod gave the scum team 2 PRs and the mod gave them two goons but the Vanilla Cop happened to investigate a handful of townies, does it matter? Does it do anything other than piss the scumteam off when they lose?

It's just like... it's not a good role. It's information that's close enough to hard that it can do serious damage without actually being hard, and as such its impossible to balance. It's like if I made a "

Binary Sensor

" role that could only tell if the lynch wagon from yesterday had scum on it or not.

Obviously

it will always say "scum on wagon", but then there will be that 5% where the town just literally wins on the spot. Vanilla cop is not that bad, but it's pretty bad. It's a role that usually tells you nothing useful but then sometimes gives you a ton of information, and the hows and whys are a little murky. It's not only a role without an obvious use case, but a role where the power of the use case varies so much that it's nearly pointless.

Plus there's no way that it doesn't encourage ridiculous setup debate if you have 1-2 dead scum and some Vanilla Cop results. For all this, what does it bring to the table that, say, a Town Role Cop doesn't? And town role cop has a really clear use case - you're checking people's claims to see if they're really the role they said. Vanilla Cop is just frustratingly vague.

[GreyICE]

It feels like there was a game long ago that had a role cop who investigated a scum goon but the mod didn't want the scum to lose so they said vanilla and then here we are.

Nai

Man your join date ain't too far back from mine and I never heard of Goons showing up "goon" to town role cops. I mean at that point isn't the role cop an even more powerful cop that catches godfathers and confirms millers?