Datisi's Mini Normal Review, July 2021

[implosion]

Subject: Normal Queue Thread (Players and Mods)

/in to mod a mini

i have returned to test nrg's patience again

town:
1x town novice 2-shot disloyal vigilante
1x town n1 psychologist n2 detective
1x town lazy motion detector
1x town checker
6x vt

scum:
1x mafia informed disloyal babysitter (informed of the setup)
2x mafia disloyal babysitter

- daytalk and multitasking enabled

[implosion]

Primary: northsidegal
Secondary: mastina

(seems datisi misspelled "nsg" as "nrg" in the pm to me)

[northsidegal]

(seems datisi misspelled "nsg" as "nrg" in the pm to me)

don't tell anyone implo, NSG is just my secret identity. by day, i'm just a mild mannered townie. by night, i am the masked hero normal review gal, bane of evil, destroyer of complex setups, sacred protector of the mini normal archives.

[northsidegal]

okay so i hate to do this but first things first: mafia babysitter is one of those roles that we haven't technically gotten around to saying isn't normal yet (and to be honest some people on the NRG might disagree with me on this one), but i basically consider it non-normal. given the potential as a mafia killing role—which i suppose you were going for—i take a pretty hardline stance that extra mafia kill power is basically not meant for normal games. it's also a

serious

amount of power for scum – even gated to them being shot, it's sort of a big deal, so normality concerns aside i would say the setup is probably far too scumsided.

[Datisi]

ego

will type up my thoughts and what i was going for in a little bit

[Datisi]

okay so. i was trying to think of a ~gimmick~ that i could use in my next normal, roaming around the wiki. despite the run of my last mini normal turning out to be an utter disaster, i kind of liked the idea of "all scum has the same non-goon role". then i realized that mafia babysitter is a normal role. *then* i thought how "disloyal vigilante" seems like a funny concept for a role, and how i would want to try to design a game that can't get onto evens. with those in mind:

novice 2-shot disloyal vig is obviously the main town power. any shot they take that doesn't fire is a clear (though i know they don't necessarily know that), and any shot that *does* fire results in dead scum and one dead extra townie - though the way i was looking at it is, it's a "timeskip to the next day", speeding through "cop gets a guilty, outs it, guiltied scum gets the yeet, the remaining scum make the nightkill". except more townsided that that scenario, since the cop doesn't out themselves while doing so, and scum has to pre-queue the extra nightkill.

since i was trying to keep within "no getting on evens", i was a bit limited in what roles i could add, but - the n1 psy n2 det is a weaker version of a gunsmith (i didn't want another investigative that can get clears), motion detector is there because i didn't want a tracker that can get clears by tracking scum somewhere, then realizing that the person is confirmed town because the scum are disloyal. that's also why i gave scum the informed, so that they know what their role is supposed to do, and that they don't holster because they fear a tracker.

scum are all disloyal because i didn't want a scenario where scum cross-protect each other directly, and end up getting a "false inno" from the disloyal vig. and since any shot that doesn't fire is a hardclear, my idea was that the only way to stop that is if scum fakeclaimed some sorta blocking role - which is also why i added a motion detector and a checker, as roles that they have to be careful about since they can disprove a bad fakeclaim. (i guess scum can also fakeclaim protective, but considering the vig will probably be shooting at the more scumread players...)

i don't see why the extra babysitter shot is a big deal, maybe because i'm looking at it as "damage control" rather than "extra killing power". again, i felt it was more townsided than the "traditional" cop gets guilty claims guilty sequence, since the "cop" doesn't get outed and scum has to pick the extra nightkill with less information that they would otherwise. so, uh. not sure what to do, i didn't expect that the first thing i was gonna hear in review would be "hey, the main gimmick of your setup is not supposed to be normal".

[mastina]

okay so i hate to do this but first things first: mafia babysitter is one of those roles that we haven't technically gotten around to saying isn't normal yet (and to be honest some people on the NRG might disagree with me on this one), but i basically consider it non-normal. given the potential as a mafia killing role—which i suppose you were going for—i take a pretty hardline stance that extra mafia kill power is basically not meant for normal games. it's also a

serious

amount of power for scum – even gated to them being shot, it's sort of a big deal, so normality concerns aside i would say the setup is probably far too scumsided.

Echoing this; I would consider a mafia babysitter to be a role that shouldn't exist because mafia should not have access to killing roles in Normals, and their access to them serves to punish the town vig for using their action in the first place.

[Datisi]

damn, nrg got hands

okay uhh. not sure i feel like trying to rework this setup, considering it started from mafia babysitters. will think of something else then.

[northsidegal]

i don't see why the extra babysitter shot is a big deal, maybe because i'm looking at it as "damage control" rather than "extra killing power". again, i felt it was more townsided than the "traditional" cop gets guilty claims guilty sequence, since the "cop" doesn't get outed and scum has to pick the extra nightkill with less information that they would otherwise. so, uh. not sure what to do, i didn't expect that the first thing i was gonna hear in review would be "hey, the main gimmick of your setup is not supposed to be normal".

so i wanted to talk a little bit about this. it may be true that, in complete isolation, the interaction between disloyal vig and mafia babysitter is somewhat more townsided than would be the interaction between a cop guiltying the same person the vig shoots. after all, as you say, the vig doesn't have to out like the cop does, and thus the mafia make their shot with less info. the problem, i think, is that in looking at this only in isolation, you miss how it interacts with the rest of the roles in the game. it's not similar to just "timeskip to next day" for town, it's actually a lot worse – mafia gets two kills, but every other town power role doesn't get a second chance to act. going back to the example of the cop, it would be a more accurate comparison to say that the night after the cop guilties scum, every town power role gets roleblocked that night.

there's also a subtler but still perhaps relevant point to consider – in "timeskipping", mafia gets a chance to silence someone before the day even begins. so, let's go back to the day after a cop guilty – if some other power role got a relevant result, they could also out it that day. compare with if the mafia babysitter targeted that role – the person never gets a chance to out. so, in the end, while the town gains the advantage that the person with the "guilty" (i.e. the cop or the vig) doesn't have to out, mafia gains a time advantage in silencing someone they wanted dead, and they also gain an extra kill without the corresponding night for town power roles to act. so that's sort of the gist of why i think that even this kind of gated scum kill power is probably still too much.

[Datisi]

i see, that makes sense. balancing that out would probably require more town power than i am confortable with, so... new idea:

1x town macho combined checker loyal mailman
1x town combined roleblocker rolestopper
1x town ascetic 1-shot bodyguard
1x town night 3 informed (each member of the mafia is ascetic)
6x vt

1x mafia informed ascetic (there is a town night 3 informed that will know that each member of the mafia is ascetic)
2x mafia ascetic

- daytalk enabled

keeping the idea of "all three scum are the same non-goon role". i'm not ~sure about this one (i like to sleep on a setup before presenting it, and i didn't get the chance to do that here), but i've been thinking of the role "combined checker -modifier- mailman" for a while now, and i wasn't able to fit it anywhere so far. i keep going back and forth on whether to make the 1-shot bodyguard just ascetic or keep as-is, but i might be widely off-balance regardless, so might as well hear the nrg first.

originally this setup was 3 mafia commuters, but as i was typing this, i decided to actually check the wiki, and it said that commuters cannot both carry out night actions and commute. considering there's no vigilantes (so it's functionally identical), i changed it into mafia ascetics instead.

also, am i correct in thinking that a combined rolestopper roleblocker that targets a macho role would successfully perform the roleblock and wouldn't rolestop them?

[northsidegal]

also, am i correct in thinking that a combined rolestopper roleblocker that targets a macho role would successfully perform the roleblock and wouldn't rolestop them?

my interpretation would be that the rolestop would happen for any non-killing action against that person. compare jailkeeping a macho player, where the roleblock happens but the protection wouldn't

[northsidegal]

also i think combined rb / rs is an alien?

[Datisi]

oh, the roleblock would still happen? i originally had it as an alien, but decided against it, because i thought alien targeting a macho player fails completely, not that just the rolestopping action fails.

pedit: yes, it is. but i wanted the player to still be roleblockable and not rolestoppable.

[Datisi]

actually, if the alien targets a macho player, would the rolestop fail, or eould the macho player be untargetable by all non-killing actions?

[Datisi]

every time i think that i finally understand all normal roles and interactions, something pops up that proves me wrong

[northsidegal]

my interpretation of macho is that it individually prevents you from being protected from a kill, not that it makes anything attached to a protective action fail. so i would say that the alien action would go through, that player would just still die if shot

[Datisi]

This role modifier is considered Normal on mafiascum.net. It negates the effects of any roles that would prevent it from death

taken from the wiki. this wording makes me think that it negates all effects of a role that would prevent it from dying. however, i would agree that that interpretation night be a bit too nitpicky and i wouldn't be surprised if it's wrong.

how does the setup look otherwise?

[northsidegal]

i want to say that it's probably roughly balanced, within the 40-60% range. i was going to say that it falls on the scumsided end of this range because the only real town power is in one role (the mailman, i don't consider alien or BG that powerful) and a lot hinges around that role's survival and not being interfered with. i think i probably still think that, but also loyal mailman is sort of similar to loyal fruit vendor in that even if killed it gets one last action off which can be powerful, so it's better than i initially gave it credit for.

i think especially in the current meta it's probably passable, although only under the condition that you just call the combined RB/RC an alien.

[northsidegal]

if you did want to boost town power, though, making the n3 informed also into a checker might be a slight EV boost. there's a lot that can disrupt the checker and give false positives for when that player eventually does get informed, but even still it'd probably overall help town.

[Datisi]

i don't have a problem with renaming the role into alien, in fact that's my preferred course of action. i just wanted the cop to be blockable. so if an alien targeting them still blocks them, fine by me.

maybe an issue with that would be that players *assume* that alien targeting a macho role doesn't block them, and then it *somehow* leads to a false guilty on someone, but... i dunno what to do about that, lol.

and uh, i'll actually sleep on it first. (and see what mastina thinks.)

[mastina]

my interpretation of macho is that it individually prevents you from being protected from a kill, not that it makes anything attached to a protective action fail. so i would say that the alien action would go through, that player would just still die if shot

I was under the impression that rolestoppers do not function like a doctor protective and function more like a commute/asceticizer-that-works-on-nightkills-too in that it makes all actions targeting the player fail--nightkill included.

[mastina]

(Also, not feeling up to reading revised setup tonight, will do so tomorrow.)

[northsidegal]

i think that we've already had this debate before in the nrg, let me check the thread

[Datisi]

@implo

, what happens if an alien targets a macho role?

(1) is the macho role protected from kills?
(2) are they roleblocked?
(3) are they rolestopped (wrt non-killing actions)?

[Datisi]

if you did want to boost town power, though, making the n3 informed also into a checker might be a slight EV boost. there's a lot that can disrupt the checker and give false positives for when that player eventually does get informed, but even still it'd probably overall help town.

okay, so yesterday i knew there was a reason i was against this, but it was very late and i couldn't remember why. i remember now - i'm vary of including another role that gets results because any result that they do get back will (if/when town figures out scum are all ascetic) turn into a clear. i know there's two roles that can potentially screw with them, but it still feels like it could enter an uncomfortable amount of clears.

also, i am very close to wanting to include something like town disloyal fruit vendor. is that mean? am i a mean moderator?