Umlaut's Mini Normal Review, May 2020

[northsidegal]

:>

[northsidegal]

yeah, you're gonna need to get your own role PMs

you should specify if you want daytalk enabled by default or not

[northsidegal]

i'm gonna call this setup too townsided to pass as is, on first impression

3x mafia strongmen is probably net zero utility for scum: negative utility for them in that it builds a potential expectation of roles that the setup doesn't provide (e.g. rolecop, doctor), positive utility for them in that it may allow for some more believable fakeclaims following a scum flip

i consider the town to have too much investigative / clearing power, especially given no scum utility. there are no false positive for the traffic analyst and any chance scum has of saying they're a neighbor or mason with a scumbuddy after being guiltied ties them together completely. false negatives (basically only traitor) are uncommon but still possible so this cheapens TA innocents, but guilties are still just as powerful with no false positives. disloyal fruit vendor has a similar problem? DLFV "clears" aren't known to be clearing to the DLFV given the potential for roleblocking, but guilties are pretty much surefire guilties

i consider it pretty much meta standard for people who get fruit to claim fruit so that's not really a consideration for me

so two roles which essentially function as cops (although it isn't known to them that this is the case) plus a full tracker and a backup for any of these roles is just too much, i think.

i'm not sure what kind of suggestions to give you because i'm not sure what kind of setup you may have been going for or what theme you might have had in mind, so if you want to talk a little bit about that i'd be interested to hear it.

[northsidegal]

rules seem fine

having "when nothing can prevent this" in the town wincondition is a bit odd, i feel like that's normally a scum thing and doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for town? probably not actually important

[northsidegal]

one thing i hadn't considered is that DLFV is unlikely to get more than one guilty depending on how they go about their claim given that scum would just stop claiming fruit once they receive it

this isn't really a real consideration though. pretty much any role which gets a guilty and then claims it wouldn't get a chance for another investigation, because they'd be shot. in fact, a DLFV is slightly

more

powerful in this scenario than, say, a Cop, because if a DLFV gets a guilty (i.e. someone claims receiving fruit), the DLFV can just not say anything and continue investigating people at night. whereas a cop doing this would have to make sure their softs were

really

good and even then people would question why they wouldn't out a guilty if they got one, the DLFV instantly reveals their guilty targets upon their flip. this is even

extra

insurance – if you get a guilty, you can just not claim it. then, if you live through the night, you get another investigation, and if you don't, your guilty target still gets lynched the next day.

the only thing a DLFV would have to crumb in a noticeable way would be innocent investigations.

[northsidegal]

I would expect Mafia in this setup to (correctly) conclude that there are no protective roles at all since it would be kind of lame to include a town doc who can't actually ever doc anyone; the point is scum can just kill whoever they want all the time and they know it. I'm trying to give town enough power to counter that disadvantage, but it's possible I overshot it and I'd be happy to tone that down.

i personally don't consider threats of protection to be as significant of an aspect of most games than you seem to, although like most things it depends on the setup.

i think people as scum have at least a baseline amount of faith that if someone claims something like an investigative role (especially one that's ungated), they have the ability to counter it – either a roleblocker or just by being able to kill that player. i think (or at least hope) that most NRG reviewers will tend to not include random follow the cop situations, and so i think that this sort of confidence is less of a benefit to scum than you might think.

[northsidegal]

i think dropping the fruit vendor entirely would put the setup into scumsided territory, although still within an acceptable range such that i would feel alright passing it

so it's up to you on if you want to just leave it as a VT or turn it into some other

also would like to hear schadd's thoughts before saying anything too definitive

[northsidegal]

hadn't considered the scenario of DLFV being inherited by UB which is an interesting one

[northsidegal]

i think that that's a good direction and like the rolecop / strongman element but i feel like that's a disgusting amount of ways for scum to get guiltied

i think i would want some kind of scum counterplay if that were the direction the setup were to go

[northsidegal]

i think that would be roughly balanced enough to pass? the "false positive" effect is negated if the neighbors claim neighbors but i'm not sure how common that really is

[northsidegal]

i also liked that suggestion

let's see your role PMs

[northsidegal]

and just for implo, final setup:

Roles:

3x

Mafia Strongman

1x

Town Traffic Analyst

1x

Town Tracker

1x

Town Disloyal Fruit Vendor

1x

Town Night 4 Vigilante

Rules:

• Daystart
  
• Majority required to lynch, no-lynching is allowed
  
• 10-day (240-hour) days, 2-day (48-hour) nights
  
• Anything else I need to specify?

[northsidegal]

your tracker role PM is wrong, tracker learns who (whom?) someone visited during the night, not if

your "private communications" result pm is probably less clear than it could be

[northsidegal]

some more minor quibbles:

i would prefer if your disloyal role PM said "You can only successfully visit players aligned with the Mafia" instead of what it is now. seems like it's super pedantic but sometimes newer players read their role pms quickly and i think this is just clearer, it's not like multiball is possible in a mini so it's not really necessary to say "aligned against", just saying mafia is clearer.

having multiple fruit results is fine but make sure that you don't allow the fruit vendor to choose which one, it could potentially convey information that isn't supposed to be a part of the role.

[northsidegal]

apart from that i didn't see any problems

[northsidegal]

i think this is a /pass? would like to also have final approval from schadd but given that there aren't any minis in signups right now it'd be nice to get this in queue

[northsidegal]

yeah, i prefer daytalk.

[northsidegal]

good reminder for a non-often seen interaction, and if it even needs to be said then those changes are approved.

[northsidegal]

could you add me to the dead/mod thread for this, please?

[northsidegal]

Loyal causes a role to behave as though it were roleblocked unless the target has the same alignment as the user. Trackers can't see roleblocked actions. So yes, the tracker would see that the DFV went no where.