Can this ever work in town's favor?

[shortaru]

Similar strategies are often used in Open/Semi-open setups where there is a known role like Hider. Mastina's analysis of the drawbacks is spot on, but in games with more known roles/setup that strategy can potentially be very strong, especially if you limit it down to one role. e.g. if you have a set-up that definitely has a Cop, having each player claim who they'd be copping each night if they were the Cop is potentially valuable. Of course, this does still allow the mafia to narrow it down, as if you claim you'd be copping them and then don't claim a guilty the next day, you probably are not the Cop.

TBF, there's a decent chance the Mafia will just kill the person targeting them unless there's a number of players that just happen to be targeting Mafia.

Idk about forum Mafia, but those kills tend to be WIFOMed away in the app version.

[shortaru]

Oh, I like the "hypotarget for each role" method. It'd be useful for scumhunting even beyond trying to make fakeclaiming harder, in that it'd give you a good view of people's reads.

One issue is that it might make it easier for scum to determine which players are least likely to be lynched (to aim the kill), but they can often do that anyway, especially in smaller games, and if the game does have a doctor they have to trade off between killing a universally townread player and running into the doctor.

The problem with hypoclaiming each role is that the strategy is only advantageous in a known setup, beit Open or Semiopen.

In a closed, even a Normal, the original problem still exists. Town doesn't know what roles/modifiers (the latter is especially important) are in the game, and it's literally impossible to list them all because there are millions of role combinations possible even on just the whitelist, with more added each time the list is expanded.

Neglecting to mention a specific detail, or mentioning a detail you shouldn't know, gives info on roles to the scum, who start with a better idea of what to look for.

Building on call's idea, what about for games in the Newbie Queue, to hypoclaim like this:

If I'm protective, I'm targeting A
If I'm investigative, I'm targeting B

Would that be good town utility?