Explicitly Normal/non-Normal Roles

[Leafsnail]

Friendly Neighbour (ie reverse cop)... yes or no?

[Vi]

Friendly Neighbour (ie reverse cop)... yes or no?

It's not Normal in the sense of standard use, and that's unlikely to change, so no.

It's something of an interesting role though. I think I like I. Child better though.

[Ether]

Come up with a name for it that isn't completely godawful and we'll talk.

[Vi]

Come up with a name for it that isn't completely godawful and we'll talk.

What if we took the 'u' out?

[Yosarian2]

"Would you be mine, would you be mine, won't you be my" *BLAM*

Mr. Rogers, Friendly Neighbor, shot by a paranoid gun owner, night 2.

[TheButtonmen]

Come up with a name for it that isn't completely godawful and we'll talk.

What about a merely somewhat godawful name?

Really Obvious Townie?

Terrible Pokerface?

Enlightener?

Con Man?

Buddyer?

[Ether]

Keep going.

[TheButtonmen]

I feel this role needs to die if they target mafia.

[nhammen]

I feel this role needs to die if they target mafia.

Oh, they will. They just told the Mafia that they are a PR. Definitely dead next night. If they don't claim, Mafia kill them, and everyone is left wondering who he targeted the night before. If they do claim, Mafia kill him, and everyone thinks it is because he claimed.

[The Fonz]

The thing is, Mason is an already extant and commonly used role. I don't think I've ever seen a game broken by Masons. The roles that we propose eliminating from normal games are either extremely swingy (most overpowered roles), simply not fun (Jester), or extremely unpredictable (bus driver). Mason is none of the above.

Basically, if a bus driver changes the target of a town power role, it isn't likely to have a major effect on the game state. If you get a cop to investigate someone else, no great loss; if you change the doctor or the roleblocker's target, it probably isn't even going to be noticed.

The real "swing" a bus driver can have is obviously if he re-directs a scum kill back to another scum. That's very unlikely, though; in order to do that, he has to both target the person the scum want to kill, and target a scum, at the same time. Just as an example, if there's 8 people alive that night, and 2 are scum, he's only got a 1/32 chance of doing both at the same time.

Basically, the chances of a bus driver having a big effect on the game is small. He might confirm himself, which helps the town a little, he might get the scum to kill one townie instead of another, which gives information, but in general it will probably have less of an effect on the game then most pro-town roles. The odds that a bus driver getting lucky or unlucky "swinging" the outcome of the game in a dramatic way is fairly low.

Yos, you may be correct for certain ways of resolving the bus driver action. But the problem is, the resolution of target-switching actions isn't standard. Xyl, I know, still reports investigative results as being on the player originally targeted. So if you target a town, and a BD switches you to scum, then you claim guilty on the townie. (It's even worse with trackers). I suppose town BDs can claim to allay it- but the lack of a standard for how to process the role renders its normality questionable.

And you know I disagree on Masons. The original standard was always confirmed, and that was always thought of as perfectly normal. Then some bastard mod came up with scum mason to penalise the town for playing well.

[Max]

Eh... Does that mean insane cops aren't normal?

[The Fonz]

Of course not, because everyone knows exactly how they work. Or do you mean the mason thing? Having variant sanity cops does not defeat the object of having cops.

[Yosarian2]

Yos, you may be correct for certain ways of resolving the bus driver action. But the problem is, the resolution of target-switching actions isn't standard. Xyl, I know, still reports investigative results as being on the player originally targeted. So if you target a town, and a BD switches you to scum, then you claim guilty on the townie. (It's even worse with trackers). I suppose town BDs can claim to allay it- but the lack of a standard for how to process the role renders its normality questionable.

Yeah, I really dislike that way of resolving it; if your target gets changed, you should be told the alignment and name of the person you ended up targeting.

That being said, I think that technically, that's more a problem with the lack of standardization of the cop role then anything else.

What I'm really bugged about, even more then the masons, is the way that a lot of clearly normal roles like redirector and PGO won't be allowed in mini normal games at all anymore. I really feel like we're dumbing down the normal queau here, and if the experienced mods have to start running all the interesting normal games in the mini theme queau to get around the overly restrictive rules for the mini normal queau, it's going to make even less people play in the mini normal queau, which is going to make the wait for modding there even worse.

[The Fonz]

Redirector will be ok if we hammer out a standard for it. PGO's just a bad role.

[Yosarian2]

Redirector will be ok if we hammer out a standard for it. PGO's just a bad role.

PGO's only a bad role if, when the PGO claims early on day 1, the scum have no way to handle it. That can be a problem. However, that's easily fixable; all you need is to give the scum a mafia doctor, for example, and then the mafia can kill a known PGO safely (protect the scum who's making the kill with the mafia doctor.)

Other then that, it's not an unbalacing or unfair role at all. If you're a PGO, then claiming is generally a good idea, for safety's sake, unless you really think you can draw a scum kill without having any pro-town power roles target you. If you can do that, you're probably awesome. And even if you pull that off, it's still just a 1 to 1 trade of a scum for a town power role, which is good but hardly game breaking.

It's also worth having in the meta, because it's such an interesting scum claim, and creates an interesting situation of what to do when someone does claim PGO.

[StrangerCoug]

Uh, Yosarian2, aren't passive abilities like paranoid gun owner usually unblockable?

[zoraster]

PGO is one of those roles that mods would love to say, "you can't claim." But as everybody knows, it is really problematic (especially in a normal game) to make any sort of requirement like that.

If normal roles are defined by whether something "should" or "should not" be normal rather than by use, then I'd vote PGO be ruled non-normal.

[Yosarian2]

Uh, Yosarian2, aren't passive abilities like paranoid gun owner usually unblockable?

Unblockable, sure; you generally can't roleblock a PGO (especially because then you'd have to target him). Usually, though, a PGO kill can be prevented by a doc protection, just like any other kill. At least, that's how I've generally seen it.

So if mafia doctor A is protecting mafia goon B, and mafia goon B kills the PGO, then the PGO dies and mafia goon B survives because of the doc protection.

[Pomegranate]

Uh, Yosarian2, aren't passive abilities like paranoid gun owner usually unblockable?

Unblockable, sure; you generally can't roleblock a PGO (especially because then you'd have to target him). Usually, though, a PGO kill can be prevented by a doc protection, just like any other kill. At least, that's how I've generally seen it.

So if mafia doctor A is protecting mafia goon B, and mafia goon B kills the PGO, then the PGO dies and mafia goon B survives because of the doc protection.

I dunno, I've always assumed that it was similar to the way lovers work- one lover dies, the other one dies to, whether or not the first one was roleblocked, or there's a doc protect on the second.

I think that it's fine though either way though, as long as the mod works it out before the game starts.

[StrangerCoug]

Uh, Yosarian2, aren't passive abilities like paranoid gun owner usually unblockable?

Unblockable, sure; you generally can't roleblock a PGO (especially because then you'd have to target him). Usually, though, a PGO kill can be prevented by a doc protection, just like any other kill. At least, that's how I've generally seen it.

If you want to allow a doctor to protect a PGO kill to prevent a bloodbath, that's fine, but I view that role as a modified bomb, and I don't mod that doctors can protect from bombing. I

HAVE

thought of a role to get around the "unstoppability" of a bomb (namely, a Mafia minesweeper, that permanently removes the bomb aspect from a target player), but I've yet to implement it.

[Max]

Think of it thematically:
The doctor can't cure heartbreak.
The doctor can cure gun-shot wounds.

Alter the Resolution so it's:

Kills
Protects
Suicides

It makes logical sense that the Lover only commits suicide once they are certain that their lover is dead.

Of course not, because everyone knows exactly how they work. Or do you mean the mason thing? Having variant sanity cops does not defeat the object of having cops.

Nor do varying sanity Masons.

You can determine the alignment of one other player, except it has more skill as you actually have to scum-hunt.

The invention of the Neighbour has been

bad

for the use of the role Mason. People now presume that Mason is Alignment-Confirmed. Whereas with cops their sanity isn't revealed upon death the sanity of masons are. Is that really just?

I like the idea of the Partner role proposed here, where the town is not aware of whether the Masons are confirmed or not upon the death.

If a cops judgement can be wrong why can't the members of a masonic group get things wrong?

[Mr. Flay]

Redirector will be ok if we hammer out a standard for it. PGO's just a bad role.

PGO's only a bad role if, when the PGO claims early on day 1, the scum have no way to handle it. That can be a problem. However, that's easily fixable; all you need is to give the scum a mafia doctor, for example, and then the mafia can kill a known PGO safely (protect the scum who's making the kill with the mafia doctor.)

I like this idea (and it doesn't tell you there IS a PGO, because it could instead be a balancing factor toward multiple normal killing roles).

[Azelf]

I am surprised by the amount of bizzare and generally ab-Normal rules that made it into most people's Normal listing.

If I made the rules, I would allow the following roles in a Normal game;

• Townie
  
• Cop (sane only)
  
• Tracker
  
• Watcher
  
• Doctor
  
• Roleblocker
  
• Vigilante
  
• Serial Killer (NK Immune or not)
  
• Mafia Goon
  
• Mafia Roleblocker
  
• Mafia Godfather

Yes, it's a bit limited, but the whole point of a Normal game is that there

aren't

a lot of really weird roles running around.

[Leafsnail]

Can't really comment on name... Friendly Neighbour is the name I've always seen for it, heh.

[zoraster]

I am surprised by the amount of bizzare and generally ab-Normal rules that made it into most people's Normal listing.

If I made the rules, I would allow the following roles in a Normal game;

• Townie
  
• Cop (sane only)
  
• Tracker
  
• Watcher
  
• Doctor
  
• Roleblocker
  
• Vigilante
  
• Serial Killer (NK Immune or not)
  
• Mafia Goon
  
• Mafia Roleblocker
  
• Mafia Godfather

Yes, it's a bit limited, but the whole point of a Normal game is that there

aren't

a lot of really weird roles running around.

Well, for what it's worth, when I wrote my Proposed Normal Guidelines 1 and Proposed Normal Guidelines 2 (note that the 2nd is not automatically superior to the first.) I did a large-scale survey. I got a lot of responses. You can see what they were by clicking here. The survey didn't include every role that might be normal, but it did include a lot of them.