Datisi's Mini Normal Review, July 2020

[northsidegal]

ego, more in-depth review later

activated commuter is just commuter

[northsidegal]

alrighty so here i am

so as for millers being conftown or not, if we take a trip over to the mini normal archives (provided courtesy by yours truly) we can see that two out of the last five listed millers were lynched. there's a more recent example although it doesn't change the percentage (and that game also had two millers so it's probably an outlier), and i also notice that the fifth game back happened over two and a half years ago now. so i guess my conclusion here is that 1) miller isn't all that common of a role such that i think there's a

super

defined meta for it and 2) if we do consider there to be a defined meta, the meta would be roughly 50/50 on whether the miller is town or not.

might be ignoring information from theme games / micros in this but checking the normal archives was the first thing that came to mind and that's what came up.


onto the setup as a whole: i think i want to call this setup scumsided

by the fact

that it's really swingy depending on the loyal cop. simple jailkeeper doesn't seem very strong at all and so the cop is really the only strong TPR, and given that scum are informed that there is one that probably makes it slightly more likely for the cop to die / be forced to claim early on. that's not even really considering the extra weaknesses the cop has given the rolestopper

so yeah, i think this setup has a swing problem that translates into a balance problem (and maybe also a skew problem, but nobody except me cares about skew). one change that immediately comes to mind would be to remove the disloyal from the rolestopper and to change the informed to N1 or N2 informed. i think letting the mafia figure out how best to use the rolestopper would be better than sort of mechanically forcing them to use it optimally

still also probably think town needs some power beyond that but i might leave that up to you.

[northsidegal]

splitting up the informed and the rolestopper into two roles also slightly (but still probably relevantly) offers town something of better information

obviously if the informed rolestopper flipped that would be a lot of information at once but splitting it up gives more of a steady stream of information, i suppose? rather than all at once

let me know if this doesn't make any sense at all and i'll try to reword it

[northsidegal]

also, sorry, i don't know what skew is?

sorry, skew is the tendency for one faction to be able to make massive gains if they play well or get lucky, while the other faction does not have that ability.

roles can said to be skewed, like tracker and doctor being high-skew given the massive differences in outcomes depending on the skill of the player's targets, and cop and mason being relatively low-skew given that results are

relatively

similar regardless of the skill of the player

and a setup itself can be said to be high-skew or low-skew in a similar vein. in this regard skew is kind of similar to swing, but i think there's an important distinction. for instance, i would consider the newbie A1 setup cop + doc vs roleblocker to be a high-swing but relatively low-skew setup. high-swing given the huge differences in outcomes depending on the huge differences in outcomes depending on the survival of one PR (e.g. the doctor or the roleblocker dying D1 basically determines the game from there), low-skew because both factions have the ability to make big gains with good mechanical play.

being equally skewed isn't really a huge deal when balancing setups (to me, at least) because i consider almost all normal games to be skewed in town's favor just given the fact that perfect mechanical play from scum typically just looks like killing a PR every night whereas perfect mechanical play from town would be a town stomp almost every game. i think this fact is part of why some people (although i'm specifically thinking of ankamius) get upset at normal game balance when they're scum – most games are balanced around the fact that TPRs won't play perfectly, but a playerlist that randomly gets a lot of really good players as TPRs can end up with scum just getting eviscerated by night actions despite any dayplay.

wouldn't removing the disloyal modifier make the game more scumsided since scum now has a way of half-avoiding the jailkeeper? or is the point that, if they do that, they're letting the cop be stronger so it's more +town?

i think i like the idea of mafia being informed on n1 or n2 rather than at the beginning of the game (also, would that information be received at the beginning of the night or at the end?)

also i'm fine splitting the mafia informed and the rolestopper, but that weakens the jailkeeper, no? would making it a full jailkeeper make it any better?

i hadn't really considered the interaction between rolestopper and simple jailkeeper, although yeah i do think that in the end it ends up as more pro-town for scum to not be able to essentially frame someone as opposed to the possibility that they just avoid a jailkeeper block. yeah, i think making it a full jailkeeper is a good idea

i actually don't know

for certain

off the top of my head as to whether it's the start of the night or the end of the night. intuitively i would say the end of the night because i can't really think of any other effects that trigger at the start of the night other than private threads being unlocked, but i'll check previous games that used those roles to see what they did (as well as shout at

@implo

to help me)

[northsidegal]

okay having checked what i believe is the only other game to have used night X informed they had it as at the end of the night

[northsidegal]

information seems good. i'm gonna say that this leans scumsided but not to an unpassable degree

so i'll wait a bit to hear ircher's thoughts

[northsidegal]

thoughts on neighborizer miller?

[northsidegal]

aren't town neighborizers rather weak roles who don't give much in Town's favour? (also, i'm eh on "basic" neighborizers...)

its not a very strong role but it has some potential for gambits and/or if it targets a TPR, nothing that

really

affects balance but still potential there

guess i just like the idea of adding some other fun thing onto the role because handing someone the "you rolled negative utility, good luck not getting killed" role PM might not be the most fun, so having something to do each night even if its not that strong would add to the fun factor. neighborizer was just the first that came to mind, could go with a mailman or something, or if you really feel like flexing the newest shiny toys that implosion has gracefully handed to us, you could make it a Checker

that would have the effect of allowing the miller to see if someone was rolestopped or not which seems like a cool interaction

[northsidegal]

but i design my setups by looking at the normal wiki page, and it's not there...

i'm working on it atm, unfortunately the wheels of mafiascum bureaucracy are slow to turn

[northsidegal]

okay so i remembered talk about it but i just confirmed that implicit multitasking wasn't ever normalized as far as i know

in the cop role PM i feel like "no result" and "assuming no interference with your action" are kind of mutually exclusive. if you're going to include "no result" i'd remove the "no interference" part. would also personally change "does not belong to your faction" to "does not share your alignment". i dunno, feel like "faction" is sort of a weird term that you don't really see a lot

might also be like slightly more specific on the informed part – specifically, do you intend to inform the cop that it's one and only one person with a rolestopper ability? or should it be "at least one"? you don't actually have make this change if you don't want to really (probably doesn't matter), just trying to predict potential questions the recipient might ask

same thing for checker as i said for cop, wrt "assuming no interference". i also think that the result PM for checker should be more clear – the negative result is fine but the positive result should elaborate more, something as simple as "your action succeeded" would work.

i get that you got the rolestopper description from the wiki but i would personally word it something more like "All other night actions targeting that player will fail." you don't actually have to do this, this is just another more personal suggestion. i guess i just bring this up because this setup is like a perfect storm of having the potential to bring up these random weird role and NAR interactions – for instance, a strongman can go through a rolestopper but not a commuter, even though you wouldn't know that just from the description of the two.

rules seem fine, everything else seems good. i think the mafia wincon (really both, but especially the mafia's) is a little strange personally but again, not something you have to change

[northsidegal]

oh sorry one sec

[northsidegal]

yeah looks good to me. not sure what i was actually thinking with the wincon thing? seems totally fine, no clue why i thought it sounded weird

/pass