New Normal Guidelines - April 2017 update!

[mykonian]

I really don't like vanilla cops as weakened rolecops. Rolecops already aren't that strong, and we have plenty of crappy investigative roles already. A role that returns the same positive results on mafiates and town power roles is a lot more interesting, strategically. Even if "vanilla cop" doesn't wind up being the name for that role, it should still exist.

I suspect having a range of crappy investigative roles was a result of people disliking the cop role.

Gunsmith positives always felt arbitrary to me, and I think it would have been better to just straight-up say that they're arbitrary per game then tie their results to flavor that doesn't exist.

This was actually a topic of discussion when these new normal guidelines were set up. The decision was made to standardise and write down in the wiki what people would recognise as a gunsmith. Quite simply, there's not a precedent for "role that gets positive on x, y and z roles" apart from the gunsmith, and it's always more or less had the same group of roles it finds. "Normal" isn't what the NRG thinks the game should be, it's what (the NRG thinks) people expect out of a normal game. It's not the NRG's job to invent new roles. Doesn't mean that mods aren't invited to do that, there's at least one slot in a normal game where they can put a non whitelist role which uses normal mechanics.


I fear I didn't get the NAR complaint yesterday, and I still don't really get it.

[mykonian]

As far as I can find, exactly two motion detectors have been used in completed games on this site, and both of them are in games that are over 5 years old. I don't really have a problem with them being normal now, but I don't think that that's an accurate reflection of site meta at all.

that is indeed awkward.

[quadz08]

I was under the impression it had been used more recently / regularly than that based on commentary from some of the people discussing that role when we did the new Normal guidelines. If that's not the case, then I'm interested in having that discussion again, potentially.

[Ether]

Crappy investigative roles are fine! But there need to be ones that give meaningful results as well. The way to have fewer cops isn't to add roles that barely do anything--it's to offer roles that are valid alternatives to cops, but just a liiiiiiiiiiiittle weaker. People might dislike cops, but that's what's available in that niche, so we'll keep seeing more of them if all the alternatives go too far in the opposite direction.

This was actually a topic of discussion when these new normal guidelines were set up. The decision was made to standardise and write down in the wiki what people would recognise as a gunsmith. Quite simply, there's not a precedent for "role that gets positive on x, y and z roles" apart from the gunsmith, and it's always more or less had the same group of roles it finds. "Normal" isn't what the NRG thinks the game should be, it's what (the NRG thinks) people expect out of a normal game. It's not the NRG's job to invent new roles. Doesn't mean that mods aren't invited to do that, there's at least one slot in a normal game where they can put a non whitelist role which uses normal mechanics.

"More or less" is the keyword there. Different games--and the NRG itself--had different interpretations on whether gaolers and bodyguards and other non-killing roles had guns. And now we have a standard, but that's not the only one we could have gone with!

I don't know. It's common and useful, but it's one that's inherently tied to flavorful roles in a queue where we discourage flavorful roles. I think we could have done better.

[mykonian]

"More or less" is the keyword there. Different games--and the NRG itself--had different interpretations on whether gaolers and bodyguards and other non-killing roles had guns. And now we have a standard, but that's not the only one we could have gone with!

Bingo. The thought was that it was valuable to have a set role to go with the name "gunsmith" so that people wouldn't have to ask the mod everytime what version it was this time.

If someone really wants to have a similar role but who gets positives on mafia, JK's, deputies and voyeurs, they could, but it'd be nice if they found a different name for it than "gunsmith".

[Ether]

Sort of.

But what if gunsmiths that

did

have to ask the mod every time, and got only a "No comment" in reply, were a feature instead of a bug? What if gunsmiths not knowing for sure if they had actually caught scum in a lie was completely intentional?

There's a place for putting absolutely every edge-case up front in the role PM, but there's also a place for leaving things in the mod notes. I think gunsmiths fall under the latter.

[mykonian]

There are places for mod notes, but probably not in normal games

[Ether]

Why?

[Ether]

Anyway I'm saying all this but the vanilla cop/neapolitan and socialite/debutante stuff is more important.

The NAR stuff is mostly a problem because it handles voyeurs/followers by slotting in each individual role, instead of using better defined but more open-ended categories. And maybe that's okay in the normal queue, but really we should be able to have a voyeur/follower that works the exact same way regardless of the queue it's in.

[mykonian]

Because esspecially in normals an effort was made to reduce the amount of nasty surprises and hidden information.

[Oversoul]

I was under the impression it had been used more recently / regularly than that based on commentary from some of the people discussing that role when we did the new Normal guidelines. If that's not the case, then I'm interested in having that discussion again, potentially.

The only time I've seen a motion detector was when I replaced into the most recent pokemon uPick.
The role was decidedly useless in that game. And there were two motion detectors.

The role might be fine in a non-large, but when you have so much power flying around it really does not confirm anything.

[Ether]

Sure, except it's not a nasty surprise! It's exactly what gunsmiths have expected in the past, especially if the mod's up front about that.

Avoiding hidden information for the sake of avoiding hidden information is kind of tautological. Mod notes are a problem when the player doesn't know there are mod notes at all, and then they spring up as a "gotcha." Not knowing everything about the setup is a perfectly normal part of closed games.

[chamber]

A gunsmith that operates like that may or may not be normal, but is certainly bad design. It's bad design for the same reason things like framers/paranoid cops/insane cops are bad; when you get a guilty it's the right move to lynch them, even when that guilty isn't certain, it's still much more certain than reads are.

[Ether]

Not really.

Framers are so left field that occasionally lynching a townie by surprise and probably also getting the cop lynched next and screwing up everything is all they're good for. If every game had a framer in it, then it would be possible to argue your way out of guilties and they'd loop back into being a good role, but framers are nearly unheard of, so they're terrible.

A gunsmith positive isn't the same as a cop guilty, and gunsmiths know that. This is about embracing that kind of role. And I think making them

more

ambiguous actually helps with that.

[chamber]

If you catch someone in an apparent lie you are going to lynch them. Period. That you get fucked by the mod defining a gunsmith differently than you do will just be chance.

[Ether]

Could you spell out an example?

To be clear, I don't want gunsmiths to go back to the way they were...or, not exactly. What I'm pushing for is for mods to just say outright, "All vanilla townies get a negative result, all mafia get a positive result, and town power roles could go either way." Which I don't think tricks anybody. It's taking what they were to its logical extreme--but an extreme that

is

perfectly logical, I think.

[quadz08]

I don't really think it is particularly logical, to be honest?

[chamber]

Could you spell out an example?

To be clear, I don't want gunsmiths to go back to the way they were...or, not exactly. What I'm pushing for is for mods to just say outright, "All vanilla townies get a negative result, all mafia get a positive result, and town power roles could go either way." Which I don't think tricks anybody. It's taking what they were to its logical extreme--but an extreme that

is

perfectly logical, I think.

I think your 'vanilla town cop' or w/e you want to call it is a fine idea. It should be definitive and separate from talk of gunsmith or gunsmith like roles though.

As for an example, I get a guilty, get the guy run up without claiming, he claims doc, I call bullshit and lynch him, oops in the mods mind docs carry guns.

[Ether]

I think your 'vanilla town cop' or w/e you want to call it is a fine idea. It should be definitive and separate from talk of gunsmith or gunsmith like roles though.

Absolutely! People keep arguing about the gunsmith, so I feel like I have to argue back. But the vanilla cop/neapolitan thing is more important to me, let's be clear.

I think your example is a valid concern from the pre-clarification days of gunsmiths, which kind of goes back to how gunsmiths are inherently tied to flavor. If we revamped it, then ideally I'd want things to get to a point where doctors

aren't

specifically associated with "not having guns," whatever that means--but yeah, gunsmith maybe isn't the best name for the role at that point.

[StrangerCoug]

A gunsmith that operates like that may or may not be normal, but is certainly bad design. It's bad design for the same reason things like framers/paranoid cops/insane cops are bad; when you get a guilty it's the right move to lynch them, even when that guilty isn't certain, it's still much more certain than reads are.

Define "bad". I agree that sanities don't belong in a normal, but I think their only other real problem is that they're out of vogue. (I know that begs the question of why, but that's not what I'm arguing.) Framers and sanities are designed to break the follow-the-cop strategy. Yes, other ways to do it exist, even if we limit ourselves to the framework of what is normal, but absolutes rarely work well in Mafia. Framers might balance well for a particular game; they might not.

[Ether]

The trouble with framers is that nobody used them, even when they were on the whitelist. So it was safe to assume they weren't in any given game and act accordingly. The WIFOM factor they were supposed to create wasn't there; they were just a dumb "gotcha" that screwed over the town on the rare occasions when they did show up and score a hit.

It's a shame, because that WIFOM factor would be huge if we could actually have it. It would be awesome if arguing your way out of a guilty was a thing people could actually do. I think you'd have to outright say "This game contains a tailor" now (or put that warning into the cop's role PM) to make it work, but I'd love to see that happen.

It'd be pretty cool to add a list of roles that are blacklisted UNLESS they were confirmed by the mod to be in the game, but I've picked enough arguments for the moment. Use neapolitans!

[StrangerCoug]

I think you'd have to outright say "This game contains a tailor" now (or put that warning into the cop's role PM) to make it work, but I'd love to see that happen.

I think that warning would gimp the Mafia too much for my liking. Something like "your results are not guaranteed to be correct" if we wanted to allow things that mess with the cop investigation again?

[Ether]

Cops need a concrete reason to pay attention or they'll ignore it. The point of tailors isn't to give scum occasional free mislynches that screw over the game and trick the town into clearing mafia: it's to let guilty results argue their way out of lynches, and keep otherwise confirmed townies potentially lynchable. The WIFOM factor is the whole point.

[Bicephalous Bob]

I made the public Gun list because there are only a few roles whose gun ownership status is questionable, and allowing it to change from game to game only leads to confusion.

As far as I can find, exactly two motion detectors have been used in completed games on this site, and both of them are in games that are over 5 years old. I don't really have a problem with them being normal now, but I don't think that that's an accurate reflection of site meta at all.

Huh, I should start making a case for a percentageless Faith Healer then.

[callforjudgement]

I know that I argued for VT cop (as opposed to rolecop that can't distinguish the role) for vanilla cop during the last Normal update, but got outvoted I think. Being unable to distinguish scum from power roles is very interesting because it basically gives you an investigative role that's pretty powerful, and yet shouldn't claim (because it helps out rolefishing scum so much).