Noraa's Mini Normal review, January 2021

[Isis]

Ohno

[Isis]

I posted that before reading your setup, I'll look tonight. I just find nsg a funny review partner.

[Isis]

So, the sequencing on me uncorking a wine bottle and visiting this thread for this evening is a bit off for me, trying to generate an estimate of townsided/scumsidedness on a paper setup is something that requires maximum faculties. Design considerations require slightly less so that's what I'm going to post about.

1. Neighborizer being part of a JOAT seems like a design fail here. It's pretty gamethrowy to use the neighborizer before N4 here, and a N4 neighborizer is extremely nothingy.
2. We should be able to accommodate a novice 3-shot vigilante if that's the sacred cow. There's not anything particularly wrong with a novice 3-shot vigilante. It's preferable that the final design includes a town power role that can cause a kill to fail, because that makes it more likely that the 3rd vigilante shot can remain positive utility, due to evens/odds logic.
3. I'm a ninja-abolitionist but that's not the mainstream view. I

suspect

that the way ninja is being utilized in this setup is not the way players who are pro-ninja think ninja is best incorporated into setups, but I feel less confident about that assessment due to trying to make it through my own belief that ninjas shouldn't really be in setups in general (which is not mainstream, and idiosyncracies from a reviewer shouldn't be pushed on designers in the review process. Reviews are about things more widely held to be cardinal sins.) I'd like to hear from nsg about it
Like to me, if I tried to shift my view a couple inches to where I thought ninjas were cool, as far as town-aligned ninjas go I think I'd want to see a Friendly Neighbor Ninja. On the other hand, a Doctor Ninja seems like reduced-scum-agency layered onto reduced-scum-agency in a way that makes me bewildered.

[Isis]

Using the tracker correctly and then watching kills fail anyway seems kind of frustrating.

Probably it's not something that's going to rise to the level where I insist on removing it.

[Isis]

Removing the ninja is a way to reduce overall setup complexity, though, and msg is correct that the setup complexity here is too high.

[Isis]

If I had to call this setup scumsided or townsided I'd take townsided. Which makes revising a bit awkward because the scumteam is where a lot of the complexity should be removed.

[Isis]

Generally I'm supposed to give you a revision I would pass, it's just tricky when I'm looking at something like this.

Role watcher seems pretty lost in the setup and it feels hard to predict how much extra setup insight and investigation it might add. That seems like something that could go. And that would help by killing the backup too.

[Isis]

Gating PRs doesn't reduce setup complexity for the most part.

[Isis]

That's much more appealing.
Investigatives that can only guilty one of three scum usually get frowned upon. Backup is a modifier so the mafia doctor is immune to the gunsmith whether the town doctor has perished or not.

[Isis]

If the complex was dropped I'm no longer sure what I would have against passing it. Unless I'm underrating some of the town power roles it would just be fine.

Pedit: yeah, enabler doesn't let you toggle the gunsmith vs. doctor interaction either. It sucks a bit for what you wanted to do.

[Isis]

It is a bit guessable. I'm also not sure I tallied in the strength dead mafia backup doctor softclearing the town doctor.

If you're doing the gunsmith vig mafdoctor trinity, I don't think the modifiers on those three roles are as helpful for obfuscating the setup as trying to mess with the other elements, though.

[Isis]

I hate town enough to pass something like this, as-is, but this probably needs a nudge in the town's favor. I think ungating the JK would be enough.

[Isis]

Hm.. I feel like NAR itself ought to incorporate a severability concept to resolve paradoxes like that. Like, Alien does two things, it roleblocks, and it rolestops. Once it's been raised that there is some kind of paradox, look at whether Alien is a role that can be severed into multiple components (it can). Then apply NAR logic to each of the components. Is the rolestop dependent on not getting jailkept, and is the jailkeep dependent on not getting rolestopped? The rolestop is dependent on not getting jailkept, but the jailkeep is not dependent on not getting rolestopped (the rolestop only applies to other people), therefore NAR says the jailkeep wins. The gunsmith gets to see stuff.
A similar analysis would sever the doctor off of the Jailkeeper and conclude that the vig successfully kills.

That's kind of a proposal for inventing the wheel but as far as I know this is territory that's been considered "nobody knows" ground. NAR paradoxes like this are rather rare.

I don't really want to change the setup just because of the paradox because I like the way the alien and JK function here (or dysfunction here, there is some lack of synergy in the general layout of the setup but that can be a good thing, to me, it's part of a heterogenous meta). I'd rather chance it and make some kind of ruling if it comes up. Stars have to align pretty hard for it to happen. You could maybe slightly shift the gating to make it even less likely

[Isis]

I don't think you can shift the gating in any way that helps actually. Because the JK is already acting on the night when the vigilante isn't acting.

[Isis]

I pass #26, but I want a moderator note about the double roleblock in addition to rules and role PMs. Making the wrong ruling is fine, deciding on a ruling later when it happens and involves players you've been spectating and feel biased towards is less preferable than hashing that out precisely beforehand.

[Isis]

Do you dislike or like the current balance? I passed 26.
I don't really like the feel in such a heavily gated mafia gunsmith, I'd prefer 26.

JK and alien are both roleblocking type roles, both at "level 4". It's an ambiguous interaction.

[Isis]

I didn't know there's a separate NAR page just for normal games. I was using the general NAR page.

I don't really understand why it would be set up that way when a jailkeeper is just a Combined Roleblocker Doctor with flavor but, yeah, just go with that I guess.

[Isis]

Yes, role PM, results PMs, and rules. Noraa PMed me a draft of her rules (but I didn't review them, she just wanted help with BBCode), so she's not offloading that part on you, if that wasn't clear yet

[Isis]

Normal games are sometimes a player's first mafia game, so the implications of one night, one action, need to be spelled out. Some mods write it as a constraint on the factional NK, some write it as a constraint on the mafia PRs. This is particularly important when you have a non-visiting mafia PR.
I don't know for sure what gunsmith PMs ought to look like, I wake up every day and feel amazed it's a role. If you're minimalist the mafdoctor interaction seems unclear if you haven't seen that movie where the mafia doctor disposes of a handgun because he buys so many poisons he can't afford to keep it loaded all the time, not many people have seen that movie. If you spell everything out it feels like you're modslipping that your game is heavier on the interactions than a VT Goon game, maybe.
Nsg what do you do

You're game has both sides win if the game ends with zero players alive, I have to object to that as a mathy nerdy logician. It's ok if neither win (a draw) but it's illogical that both win. Personally I don't think any game should end in a draw if it can be feasibly designed to produce no draws but that's too peculiar to me to push it in reviews. I -can- push in a review though, that, these would technically be bastard role PMs where both the solo vig and solo goon think the other person's role PM is the one that requires a survivor, so they're the one that gets an exclusive win.
I would remove "to fail" from the alien role PM, it's redundant, but it's the wording out of the two redundant wordings that doesn't track best with how tracking someone who visited an alien'd player resolves.

It would be great if your gunsmith PM made it clear that, like I said before, backup is actually a modifier in normal game mechanics. It's not "someone dies and you stop being vt and become this role", it's, "you are always this role, but you're nervous about using it". The good formattings I've seen describe the action, then say you can't use it until the gunsmith dies. It's important because the mafia gunsmith can check the backup gunsmith for a gun, and the backup gunsmith should expect that to be a guilty.

Some reviewers insist on putting "assuming no interference with your action" in every single role PM but I kind of don't care, and I think I actually don't when I'm running themes or whatever. I get the concept but I feel like playing mafia at a sweet sixteen birthday party and seeing that the doctor can make a kill fail makes for sufficient notice that mafia mechanics disrupt other mafia mechanics sometimes.

[Isis]

I typed this on my phone and the paragraphing looks bad

[Isis]

A clearly communicated draw ruling is fine, there's wordings that produce that like "wipe out the town before they wipe you out" or by putting a minimum 1 living member requirement onto both factions instead of just one.

[Isis]

I can pass this

[Isis]

I passed it without multitasking. I'm not interested in passing it with multitasking. I would be very concerned about gamestates where the ascetic ducks the JK night 3 while successfully performing a kill and gets fake soft cleared.

[Isis]

For the to become normal we would need modifiers of modifiers and an inverse of lazy... Today is not this day. These scum will just not multitask.

[Isis]

Are they? Wow, it's so close!

There's no invert lazy though. Pretty sure

[Isis]

No I'm the primary, you don't really

[Isis]

if I said something like : "You win when all threats to town have been eliminated and there still is a town-aligned player alive"
would that be alright?

Yeah that's a good wincon

[Isis]

Comic sans is regarded as one of the vanilla fonts so it wouldn't be considered flavor.

[Isis]

The twisted emoji is quite a bit more of an affront than comic sans would but we kind of brushed that off instead of complaining.

"can not" should be "cannot", which is more than a grammar nitpick because the former reads a little like you're spelling out the no-kill option.