Mini-Normal 2070 is done

[mastina]

Really... "thoughtprovoking" game and interesting setup

Hi this was BNL's setup and I reviewed it!

[mastina]

i think it's a lot less townsided than it appears to be but still townsided. definitely within standal normal range

Standard normal range is "50%, give or take 10%"--so a setup that is 60-40 town-scum is in fact within the bounds of Normalcy.

I'd rate this setup somewhere in that 50-60% range, soyeah. Within the balance range. Maybe not perfectly balanced, but it is not 60+% townsided.

[mastina]

Btw this was what I said on the original setup:

Basically, loyal neighborizer is a cop; odd night gunsmith is a second cop. Town has sufficient investigative power to get a boost, but they're vulnerable--the jailkeeper can save their lives, but causes their investigatives to fail. Because the mafia have almost free reign over who to kill, the strong investigative power is something that they don't have to worry too much about, especially since there's heavy room for the town to assume their role failed for reasons other than hitting scum, and/or for scum to fakeclaim.

If the town roles live for long, they gain an advantage, but this is countered by how if they are taken out early (and there's little preventing this), the scum gain a huge advantage.

So while there's swing based around how long the strong investigatives live, the swing is balanced equally between which directions it can swing. Good townplay will reward the town heavily; good scumplay will reward the scum heavily.

The changes since then? The scum gained a Rolecop; the gunsmith became a cop; the odd-night was shifted from being on the cop to onto the loyal neighborizer; the bulletproof became ascetic.

On second thoughts I am afraid this is may be too townsided, because I feel the loyal neighbouriser recruiting any town PR, even the BP, will create too much synergy

I wouldn't remove much from the town. You can probably safely drop the BP (I almost recommended it initially before changing my mind), but I wouldn't recommend heavily nerfing town/buffing scum here.

I'd have still passed it without the BP present, and thought of it--my reasoning was,

I initially thought it might be a bit much, in part due to the reason you mentioned, of it being cop cleared. I ultimately ruled that it being shot putting the game on evens meant that it wouldn't make much difference; for the town to gain a lynch, TWO kills need to be stopped, and that is something that while possible, is unlikely.

The change of it to ascetic helped fix that, too.

If you are still worried, drop the bp, it'd still be passable albeit I'd think scum would be more likely the victors by even a small margin, but I still recommend against radical redesigns. You don't want to lose the core of the setup.

This is what I said when the setup was near-finished, and I stand by that statement. The BP dropped would've been passable, but I'd rate it as ~52.5-47.5 scum-town, in comparison to this setup with the BP being probably somewhere roughly inverse to that.

[mastina]

Taking a serious look at the setup, I do think it should have been rolecop -> roleblocker.

I pointed out the problem with that suggestion (BNL did make it!) in the review:
Two town loyal roles, versus a scum roleblocker = recipe for absolute utter scum stomp.

Because what happens when a town loyal role is roleblocked? They think that they targeted scum.
Plus, roleblocker + nightkill = two methods of stopping power roles.

Rolecop + nightkill = two methods of

finding

power roles per night, but once found, a PR still needs to be nightkilled.
Rolecop + nightkill is thus absurdly stronger because stopping power roles > finding power roles in terms of scum controlling the game.

[mastina]

Roleblocker doesn't interact unfavorably with the loyal JK. It probably doesn't give a false guilty (you only know you've failed if your target provably acted (an investigative) or they died. If your target dies, you now have confirmation that you were roleblocked.

Say the loyal jailkeeper targeted one of the investigatives.
The loyal jailkeeper was roleblocked.
The investigative claims a result.

BAM.

1v1 between two town roles--absolute worst possible case scenario for town roles possible, yes?

And yet it's fully possible with a Loyal Jailkeeper interacting with two investigatives and a roleblocker.

Thus.

Recipe for disaster.

[mastina]

Basically (I'll only say this once because I've had this discussion with mastina b4) setup mods expect town PR's to play as poor as possible and they expect scum PR's to play excellent which allows them to justify over powered town setups. Now mastina may disagree but that's fine and I respect her opinion.

It's not that I disagree, so much as you're using vastly different words than I would to convey a similar concept.

Mafia are, by their very nature, the INFORMED minority. The INFORMED part is the important bit; the scum, by their very nature as the informed minority,

know more about the game

. Because they know more about the game, their night actions will also be more informed. They are going to have a better grasp on the setup than the town will, they will have a better idea of what town roles are present than the town will, they will have a better idea of WHO the town's roles are than the town will, because as the informed minority they have access to that INFORMATION.

Town are, by their very nature, the UNINFORMED majority. The UNINFORMED part is the important bit; the town, by their very nature as the uninformed majority, know less about the game. Because they know less about the game, they are going to make night actions that are less informed--and as a result, more suboptimal than they otherwise should be.

So absolutely, yes. Towns underperform PRs from random chance because as they are uninformed, they lack grounds to make superior actions often.
Scum PRs overperform from random chance because as they are informed, they have grounds to make superior actions often.

[mastina]

Informed/uninformed... I like that.

It's classic terminology all too often lost in the newfangled lingo of the youngsters, but yet it remains such an important concept that it should never be lost.

The three strongest tools of the mafia are that they are informed (knowing more), that they are a minority (thus have a statistically smaller chance of being lynched by random odds and it's easier to form a coherent team dynamic; it's much easier to get three people working together than it is 7-10), and that they have the ability to remove a town player from the game every single night phase without input from the town (the nightkill).

None of these tools should ever be forgotten; none of these tools should ever be underestimated. As an example: Many people when reviewing games can altogether forget to factor in the power of the mafia's nightkill, for instance, thinking that a setup which would be balanced without it is fine and yet which when given said nightkill is horrendously scumsided because of how OP it is.

Another example: properly utilized daychat for a scumteam is disproportionately scumsided, because it allows them the chance to bounce ideas off one another in private in real time, coordinate, create drafts of ideas, figure out strategies on the fly, etc. Properly utilized daychat was at a time considered equivalent to giving the scumteam a

full extra member

because it was considered

that

strong a role, especially when hidden from the town. Nowadays because it's so commonplace (more games have scum daychat than don't) we tend to think of Encryptors as one of the weakest scum PRs out there, but back in the day it was up there with Godfathers and Roleblockers as being the role you'd most want to have on your scumteam.

Of course it gets more complicated than that the more you move away from the base game, but the basic mold is always there. The mafia have tools the town simply don't have at their disposal. Underestimate the power of those tools, and you run into scum stomps because the things you thought were enough for the town were woefully inadequate for what the scum were given.

[mastina]

Which means town's only real power is... Communication, the ability to work with one another. And as you can see on site recently that is even at a very low point (I would hope). So my question is as a setup spec mod (not sure of the title)...

To be more precise, town has 3.5 tools at their disposal.
The .5 is that they are uninformed, which can be a tool in that a fundamental of scumhunting is searching for the difference between players who're uninformed and players who're informed; town are meant to identify the former and differentiate it from the latter.

The main three tools?

Their voice, their vote, and that they are the majority.

Two of those are not unique to the town, because scum also have both a voice and a vote--but it is the third which

makes

the two tools of voice and vote belong to the town in spite of scum having access to them; being the majority

causes

town's voice and vote to be their tools.

You can understand this by simple mathematics; statistically, because there are more town in the game, there are more town voices to be heard. With extra voices comes extra feedback, and with extra feedback comes extra theoretical potential to hone in and identify who the scum are. Statistically, because there are more town in the game, they are going to control the lynch.

Think of the math this way--on D1 of a mini normal, it takes seven votes to lynch.
Even if there's a scumbloc of three votes (which pretty much never happens on the lynchwagon), know what that means?
The D1 lynch was still controlled by the town, in majority.

Even with the scum all voting together at their strongest.
The MAXIMUM percentage of a lynch scum-controlled on D1 is 43%.
That's 57% town, at MINIMUM.
If it's 5/7 town, even better; 71% town.
6/7 town? 86%.
7/7 town? 100%.

57%, 71%, 86%, or 100%.
Regardless of which percentage it is, the town controls the lynch, the town controls the vote, more than the scum do, because of numerical superiority.

So the tools of the town aren't

exclusive

to the town (except majority), but by utilizing their majority, they become

owned

by the town.

And in site meta these days, usually you'll find that the town controls most lynches, and make most of the posts, as the scum active lurk and let the town eat themselves alive.

[mastina]

I include daychat in most of my setups because I think it tends to be more fun than not having daychat for the scumteam. I also balance with daychat in mind.

If you're looking for a fight with me on that you won't find one because I agree with that.

The problem comes when people

don't

balance with daychat in mind.

(Though, I do confess: sometimes, as a reviewer/designer, a game I review/design won't have it and I'll forget this fact; the resulting townsidedness of the setup would thus in part be because I forgot scum didn't have it. So I'm guilty of the opposite problem, on occasion. )

[mastina]

if the prospects of a fake guilty are so devastating the setup is probably really bad.

The thing about a false guilty is that it needs to be something that can be reasonably anticipated, where if you receive a false guilty you can reasonably deduce that it is not inherently necessarily a guilty.

If that ability is absent, then absolutely, yes, the setup is probably bad, because if the false guilty is that devastating it shouldn't be allowed unchecked.

Jingle raises a valid point about the idea of Loyal positing the possibility of roleblocks--I'm not sure if I fully agree with him, but in this case, it ultimately doesn't matter; the important part is that past-mastina when reviewing the game most decidedly did not, by virtue of not having thought of that angle.

Reviewers aren't all-knowing, and the angle of Loyal positing roleblocks didn't occur to me during review, whereas the angle of roleblocks fucking town over because of Loyal thinking they had a guilty they didn't, did. So from the viewpoint of past-mastina, the possibility of roleblock + loyal was a false guilty that was devastating--and thus, shouldn't be allowed unchecked, and why I vetoed the idea.