In post 1527, Tchill13 wrote:my personal belief is the game should be won in the day phase by either alignment.
Definitely by town, but the job of scum with their dayplay is just as much to influence nightplay as townplay--by which, I mean. Scum should be able to, using
dayplay
, manipulate town PRs into using their actions in pro-scum ways rather than pro-town ways.
Make the rolecop get useless results, make the vig shoot town, LET the vig shoot town (roleblocking the vig, while it stops the vig from being conftown, is probably less of an asset than just letting the vig shoot town), preventing the weak neighborizer from targeting scum or even better cause the weak neighborizer to target scum N1 with NO BREADCRUMBS (or breadcrumbs leading to town).
I think you can understand what I'm getting at; the job of scum with their dayplay is to augment their night play, whereas inversely, the job of town with their nightplay is to augment their dayplay. Yes, vice-versa applies to some extent as well, but the primary directive of a town player is to first win by dayplay and then by nightplay; the primary directive of scum is to control the results of the game through nightplay (primarily, the nightkill) and only then manipulate dayplay.
Actually, the night phase is where scum are strongest--the power of the scum nightkill should NEVER be underestimated. The nightkill is singlehandedly the reason why mountainous games which are theoretically balanced pragmatically end up as scumsided; there's a good reason why one of the main ways to make mountainous games be balanced is simply removing the scum nightkill. Because the scum can kill the players they feel are most critical to leading the town to victory, and with said players absent, the town is put into a state more favorable to the scum.
That's why I said that if the scum let the town control the result of the night in spite of having a full roleblocker and their nightkill, they probably deserve to lose. Because during the night, they should absolutely NOT be letting themselves be outplayed by town, because night is where scum are naturally at their strongest.
You can be the best manipulative scum player in the world by dayplay--but because dayplay is the realm of town, you can still being that master manipulator lose by dismal nightplay, because while strong dayplay influences scum victories, it is not enough to hand them victory in of itself. (Most of the time, anyway.) The nightkill is singlehandedly the most important tool scum have; misusing it can and will cost scum the game. Utilizing it to its maximum utility, inversely, gives scum a near-guaranteed win.
(Incidentally, this is also one reason why dead townies in dead PTs rant about how obvious the scum are--of course the scum are obvious to the dead townies, that's why they're dead in the first place! Because the scum didn't want them alive to point out the obviousness of it; they wanted to leave only the townies too "stupid" to see it alive, more or less.)
Power roles
are
made to deliberately help town--they serve more or less as the counter to the scum's two main advantages. The nightkill first and foremost as scum's strongest weapon, and being informed as scum's second-strongest weapon. (The scum, knowing who is town, who is scum, and by their roles having some insight into the nature of the setup, have a better ability to manipulate the gamestate to their favor using this information alone. When you pair that ability to manipulate off of knowledge WITH said nightkill, it makes scum able to dominate a game unchallenged unless town PRs are in place which can provide a counter.)
Primarily, town's roles can be sorted into three categories, each serving as a counter to one of the scum's weapons. Investigative roles serve as a counter to the scum holding more information, by giving town a way to artificially boost the amount of information they possess. This game doubled up on these, at the cost of not only giving up protectives but also increasing the risk of losing information.
Killstopper roles (which protectives are a subset of) serve as a counter to the scum nightkill, by preventing the scum from eliminating the town player serving as the greatest obstacle to a scum win. This game had none.
And town killing roles serve as a source of an extra town-controlled death, to prevent the scum from having total control over who lives and who dies. Them being in the hand of a single player means there's no direct interference scum can give. Scum, simply by not bussing, can make lynching scum MUCH more difficult, but in contrast, scum can't so easily stop a vig bullet from shooting them. (And in Normals, even under the new guidelines, any killing role also doubles as a type of informative role because it is public knowledge that scum cannot hold extra killing roles.)
These are what the town's roles do to counter the scum's innate inherent natural advantages. The town is given boosts--significant boosts. But these boosts, if balance is at the level it should be at, don't inherently overwhelmingly give the town the advantage, so much as they do neuter the natural scum advantage.
The idea of town power roles is thus, the "necessary evil" of reducing the power scum naturally hold. Because scum do, by default, hold power.
The problem is that the more power you introduce, the greater the swing, so the harder it is to get an exact calculation. The night is then a delicate balance, so you have to take educated guesses on what the level of power each side has actually translates to. (And make no mistake, it's always an educated guess. Sometimes, we guess wrong. Other times, we guess that it's close enough, but close enough still ends up at being like 60% in that one side does overall hold a slight but not significant edge over the other. But it's always a guess. Never an exact science.)
In post 1527, Tchill13 wrote:basically i feel like the "pure luck" is more likely to happen to town in THIS scenario.
The more swingy the game, the more luck plays a part in the outcome, yes. That I can't deny, and with this game being very high in swing, it was very high in luck for the town/unluckiness for the scum.
However, I stand by the statistics that, statistically speaking, the town is actually less likely to luck out--I maintain that, by the odds, the town is most likely to have night action results which provide a minor boost but don't break the game in favor of the town. As far as luck in night actions go, the town got about as lucky as it could: the neighborizer neighborized one of the other two PRs, and the vig shooting said PR was prevented from shooting said PR, and then the neighborizer told said PR their target which landed on scum, giving town a guilty. You CAN find results better than that for the town, but not by much; the town got really, really, REALLY lucky, about as lucky as is possible without being the MOST lucky.
Like, in terms of luck. The outcome of this game is in the top-5 town-luck outcomes I'd estimate. Yes there are outcomes more lucky for the town, but not very many. This game had dozens, hundreds of possible iterations which could have played out, and of them only the smallest fraction favored town more than the outcome of this game did.
By the numbers, the vig is likely to shoot town. And did!
By the numbers, the rolecop is unlikely to produce a useful result. It can clear the weak neighborizer, it can clear the vig, it can catch the scum, but it can be roleblocked and it gets NAI results on half the players in the game (the 5 VTs) and critically above all else it doesn't
know
this going in so it has no idea what to aim for, how likely it is to get an innocent or a guilty.
By the numbers, the weak neighborizer is unlikely to produce a definitive guilty, can produce a FALSE guilty (imagine a vig shot going through, the weak neighborizer targeting town, and the scum nightkill going through, with one of the vig/scum targeting the neighborizer--OOPS LOOKS LIKE TOWN MISLYNCHES THE WEAK NEIGHBORIZER TARGET), can be prevented from giving a result beit roleblock, vig killing target, scum killing target, vig killing neighborizer, or scum killing neighborizer, and on top of that even if the neighborizer gets two innocents, by the time this happens the game is likely in lylo...a time where investigation results are likely to be doubted.
(Keep in mind that even if the vig holsters, with 10, D3 gives you six alive, mylo; with a vig shot, that's five alive, lylo. The neighborizer being a NEIGHBORIZER would be proven, but them being WEAK would not be proven, so there's room to lynch the neighborizer and/or a neighborized player if scum work up the paranoia to push that angle.)
When you look at it from that perspective. The vig likely to shoot town, the rolecop only having ~50% chance of producing a useful result and not knowing they even
can
produce a useful result (one of the things which weakens rolecops is that rolecops work with imperfect setup knowledge and thus don't know what they should be doing; you can't assume a rolecop operates with perfect setup knowledge when designing/reviewing a game because they never do), the neighborizer having multiple ways to fail including the ability to
falsely condemn an innocent town player
(THIS IS A MASSIVE ONE) and the ability for the game to end up in mylo on D2 when the town has basically no information at all.
The fact that most of this ended up not playing out is, statistically speaking. Quite improbable. The outcome of this game was not one of the more likely ones. It's not the luckiest town outcome, but it is still an incredibly lucky town outcome. One which I maintain wasn't as likely as you think it was.