What happened to Vanilla Cop?

[Zachrulez]

Vanilla cop fits what we currently call Neapolitan far more than the current role does. That role is more consistent with a power role cop.

I'm pretty sure the stronger role was the original but a majority of people for whatever reason thought that the mafia goon should be immune to a non vanilla result. (The role doesn't outright catch scum, but the result you get on a goon does impact how they need to react to being investigated.)

Would I get into a massive amount of trouble for calling the Neapolitan variant a vanilla cop in a normal game? (With a reference to the variant)

[Zachrulez]

Thing about goons though is that they were originally called, "Vanilla Mafia(te)s". (Or if not originally, then 'popularly back in the day'.) And that term for them, Vanilla Mafiate, is a fairly common term for the role offsite. The term 'Goon' is pretty rare outside of mafiascum.

Thus, Goon = Vanilla Mafiate = Vanilla = Vanilla result to a rolecop.

This is how I wrote the role pm in the first large normal I used the role in.

"Vanilla Cop:

You are a Town Vanilla Cop.

*At night, you may pm me the name of a player you wish to investigate. You will investigate whether the player has the word Vanilla in their role PM and your investigation will return a result of vanilla or not vanilla.

*You win when you eliminate all threats to the town."

The important part in interpreting the role pm is that it investigates whether the player has the word vanilla in their role pm.

"Mafia Goon:

You are a Mafia Goon. Your partners in crime are _______, _______, and _______.

*At night you or one of your partners may eliminate a player of your choosing.

*You win when there is at least one mafia member alive and all the other players are dead or when nothing can prevent this from happening.

*You may communicate with your partner during pre-game and night here ________."

The word vanilla is pretty obviously missing from that pm.

I guess it depends on what you really want the role to do. From it's conception I have seen the role as one that literally investigates whether or not someone is a vanilla townie.

I'm just following the lead of this game which has a vanilla cop role pm worded like this.

"VANILLA COP
Role Name: Vanilla Cop
Abilities: Each Night, you may investigate one other player. If successful, you will be told whether or not that player's Role Name contains the word "Vanilla".
Win Condition: You win when all anti-Town players are dead, and at least one member of the Town is alive."

Goon Role PM like this.

"MAFIA GOON
Role Name: Mafia Goon
Group: The Mafia Family is: XXXX (Mafia Goon), XXXX (Mafia [?]), XXXX (Mafia [?]), [XXXX (Mafia [?])], [XXXX (Mafia [?])]. Each Night, your group may attempt to murder one player - please specify who will be carrying out the kill attempt. The Mafia Family may communicate at Night by PM or Quicktopic: [Quicktopic Link].
Abilities: You have no additional abilities.
Win Condition: You win when all non-Mafia players are dead, and at least one member of your Family is alive (or when nothing can prevent this)."

Again given the wording that it's investigating the role name for the existence of the word vanilla, I would expect it to return a negative result on a goon. I don't know if that's the first appearance of a vanilla cop, but it's the first time I saw the role.

Also alternatively that the role getting a vanilla result on a mafia goon basically makes the role useless. (For town.) The only possible utility the role has is to basically catch a non pr scum in a lie or a pr scum fakeclaiming vanilla. The chances of that actually happening in a game seem pretty low to me. What's more likely to happen is that the role ends up outing town power roles and negatively affecting the town.

Would I get into a massive amount of trouble for calling the Neapolitan variant a vanilla cop in a normal game? (With a reference to the variant)

I'd raise hell over it, yes.

If someone claimed Vanilla Cop and specified only getting postitive results on VTs, I'd lynch them.

If the variant is noted in the role pm. The player knows exactly what to expect the role to do. (You are a vanilla cop [Neopolitan variant] ect.ect)

Both variants are normal. I just really dislike the name of the version I prefer. It feels like it does a poor job of describing the role.

</silly rant>

[Zachrulez]

Like, Mafia Goon comes up as Vanilla to a Rolecop, the only way for us to go your way is if we change Rolecop results to be "Goon" which is awful.

Vanilla Cop being VT/Goon finder and Townie Cop being VT finder makes most sense to me.

Rolecop is generally a terrible role to have on the town side for exactly those reasons. You either give false results for mafia generally or it's a broken role. Flip the alignment around though and the role works a lot better.

That said, I don't have any problem with your naming proposal. It could even be as slight as Vanilla Cop (gets a vanilla result on VT and Goons) vs Vanilla Townie Cop (Only gets positive results on VTs)

[Zachrulez]

When I think of Neapolitan I think of this:

[Zachrulez]

If you're a player with a weird role that no one's ever seen before, do whatever you need to make your point clear!

But when we're talking about naming roles officially--roles which are whitelisted by the NRG and likely to come up a lot--we don't have to make every single one of them sound exactly the same just because they're investigative roles and cops are investigative roles. This is just a saddening lack of love for the English language.

You damn philistines.

It's kinda weird though that I would have to run a game in the theme queue to make this paticular normal role

sound

more normal though no?

You would think all the really interesting sounding names would exist in a theme game, and not done there to get back to more of the other way around.