Named Townies in Normals

[Persivul]

Personally I don't think named townies should be allowed in normals. While the role itself may be technically normal, I think useless roles go against the spirit of "normal."

I was just in a mini normal in which town had two millers but no cop, and an ascetic encryptor but no hood. I mean wtf? We were playing against mod

and

scum.

[Something_Smart]

I mean, that's always true. If you don't like town vs. mod, opens are the only way to avoid that.

(There was a town rolecop though, so the millers were not quite named townies. But I agree that the design of that game was pretty weird and needlessly WIFOMy.)

[Persivul]

I mean, that's always true. If you don't like town vs. mod, opens are the only way to avoid that.

Yeah I said afterward I was probably moving from normals to opens.

[callforjudgement]

There's a really hard balancing act in Normals between making the setup too predictable (allowing a player who's good at balancing setups to figure out the alignment of every player who claims a power role purely based on setup balance considerations, making it massively townsided), and making the setup too unpredictable and turning the game into an outguess-the-mod event rather than proper Mafia.

I wasn't involved in the Normal in question, but suspect it went far too far in the direction of outguess-the-mod.

A pure Named Townie in a Normal can only be modWIFOM, and thus should be (and IIRC is) banned. However, it's not uncommon to add roles that could do something but don't, either as Rolecop targets or to make the setup less guessable; I think some amount of that has to be allowed in order to prevent experienced setup reviewers breaking games they play in, but it's clearly possible to overdo it, and probably most Normals at the moment do in fact overdo it.

[callforjudgement]

(As a side note, my experience is that Miller is used without a Cop more often than it's used with a Cop. Arguably this is a bad thing.)

[Umlaut]

Named Townie isn't necessarily just modWIFOM, it has meaningful interactions with roles like Neapolitan. I would argue it is

less

deceptive for a role intended solely as a zero-utility non-vanilla to be an actual Chocolate Townie, than for it to be something like a Deputy with no Cop.

[Not_Mafia]

I like named townies