[MECHANIC] Guns

[callforjudgement]

There badly needs to be a way to find the Inventor via associative tells; otherwise the game will be mostly random, based on who gets the power roles. That implies there should probably be a scumteam who knows who the Inventor is (although not vice versa), who the Inventor is trying to help to win.

However, it's important to avoid scum being able to break the setup via claiming once they get a gun (thus being given the gun every night from then on). Preventing the Inventor repeating targets is an obvious start, in that it means that scum can't endgame the town even by claiming the entire scumteam unless it'd get down to an endgame situation in a more normal game. It's probably good to have some sort of endgaming ability that works like that, as otherwise scum will have huge trouble getting over the finish line even when they're winning.

New mechanics are often more interesting to test in a vanilla setup first, unless they need power roles to balance. I have a suspicion that you need a large scumteam to balance it (this mechanic is comparable to Nightless except that scum have multiple disadvantages, as one member of the scumteam loses them the game if "lynched", and Nightless is pretty townsided as it is). An EV calculation is nontrivial, though, as there are three variables (number of living town, number of living scum, how many of the living scum are eligible to receive the gun).

You can make it a bit less scumsided by making the gunholder secret, and allowing them to shoot via PM. That way, scum have the option of not claiming and immediately shooting a townie when they get the gun, preventing town from directing the kill. (The downside is that it may make their identity clear later in the game, by elimination from the people who have claimed to receive the gun.)