cuban smoker wrote:The person who got it could claim it day 1, and the Mafia would literally have to sacrifice a person to take them out, which is a good trade for the town.
This actually isn't true. The mafia can win ultimately without killing the paranoid as long as they can reach endgame without accidentally killing him.
Obviously if he's an armed townie then he's not a doctor or a cop or a role that actually contributes to the town. Something I really liked about this role is that it's pro town and there's no good that can come out of claiming it. You're really better off faking being a doctor to get night killed if you can.
Something I didn't like about this role is how it's very presence can screw the mafia. In a game I played on another board we had a paranoid(we call it the bomb there) and I was the mafia leader. We were really close to winning and I sent my thug off to target what turned out to be the bomb. He died and we got no night kill. It added a whole two extra day cycles to my win condition because we went from having 5 town and two mafia to having 5 town and 1 mafia.
There was another game in which we had two bombs(These games were open roles by the way. We knew what all the roles were before the game started, just not who had them.) And on nights one and three the mafia targetted bombs. This meant that there was one mafia member left and that there was no way for the mafia to win without lynching a bomb. It was pretty cool when the remaining maf said she had reason to believe that I was scum and I knew that the "reason" was that I was the bomb and she needed one of us lynched in order to win.
Anyway in both those cases it would've been very nice to the mafia if the bombs had died when they were attacked.
Another way it's been balanced is by making it so that any targetting role can be killed. That means that the paranoid will kill a doctor that tries to protect him or a cop that tries to investigate him. It actually presents a powerful conundrum to the player who's received the paranoid role. On the one hand he doesn't want the mafia to know who he is, that would make his role useless, and would be the easiest possible claim for scum(He has an excuse for not having any information and for not being killed by the mafia) and therefore makes it easier to get lynched. On the other hand he wants the mafia to think he actually has a powerful pro-town role like doctor so that they'll come after him, and finally he wants the town to ignore him and think that he's an unimportant role so that he doesn't get investigated or protected. That would spell disaster.