Wake88's Large Normal Review, December 2019

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Primary: PenguinPower

Secondary: Ircher, Flavor Leaf

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Semi-closed isn't a term afaik; semi-open means typically either that the setup is one of a number of publicly possible setups, or that the possible roles in the game are chosen from a relatively small public list. Making the ratio of players in different alignments public info is perfectly fine, though does not make the game semi-open.

Also FYI no hydras is required of all normals now so needn't be listed.

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A smattering of comments:

I would err very strongly against including the "neighborhood: ____" line in role PMs. It's not the way that the neighbor role is conceptualized in normals, typically, and it could have implications about the game especially for players that aren't familiar with site meta or normal game meta.

The standard way to resolve something like a backup (usually universal backup) that could inherit multiple roles is just to have a pre-defined ordered list of what role they will inherit, I believe.

Standard for rb/jk afaik is that they mutually block and neither one does anything, so no protection.

Modifiers shouldn't transfer to a backup; keep in mind that the standardizations of normal roles are standardized absoltuely, and anything in the setup that bends them could come back to bite you extremely hard if someone notices it and says "oh, the backup cop is claiming something inconsistent with normal guidelines, they must be scum".

There's some formatting inconsistency between role PMs. For instance, in the loud roles, some of the loud modifier descriptions have a paragraph break and others don't.

I think the copy pasting from the wiki to explain roles like loud and psychologist (at least I think this is what you did with a bunch of them) is another thing you may want to change. I could imagine that phrasing being very confusing to a new player, because the writing on the wiki was not written to be a summary of how to use a role, it was written as detailed explanations and examples of how they work. For example, if I'm a mafia loud psychologist, and I see a role PM that says "for example, a loud psychologist would..." and I were a new player, I would probably be confused why my role PM says "for example" and is written in the third person when it's talking about my own role. There are other examples of things written in the third person that could be confusing in a role pm, like "The target's night action will not be performed -- that is, the Roleblocker blocks the target's role from working." The mailman PM is phrased weirdly for a role PM. Novice should, instead of being phrased as "A role modifier that doesn't allow power roles to use their ability Night 1/Day 1", be phrased as something like "You cannot act on night 1." There are various other examples as well.

Neighbors' rolenames should simply be "neighbor", rather than "citizen/neighbor". This isn't like, critical, I think, but it's more standard I think. Also has some relevance for e.g. rolecops who would simply see "neighbor" and should not get "citizen/neighbor" which would give away alignment. Similarly 1-shot bulletproof citizen and vengeful citizen and so on should just return "1-shot bulletproof" and "vengeful" though it's fine for them to have those role names since e.g. "vengeful townie" is standard.

Serial killer probably doesn't need the word "purple" in its role name? it's already distinguished from the others by virtue of being a serial killer. Though it's probably fine.

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(to be clear, penguin has final power, so if there's anything in the above that he doesn't care about that's fine - it's pretty much just suggestions)

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One tiny note - the two lines in rules:

There may be duplicate roles.
Any role may be Town or Scum.

should probably be omitted or rewritten. The first is implicitly always true for normals; the latter is explicitly not true for normals, as certain roles (e.g., miller, vigilante, strongman) are alignment-locked.


When I put the game into signups, I'll make the faction ratio public since it is public - anything else I should make public then?

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Game is in signups.

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Oh yeah, I like *always* forget this rule; you need a backup or co-mod for a large. I won't pull it from signups or anything but you should try to find one ideally before it fills.

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A player (Something_Smart) pointed out that "roleblockers cannot be roleblocked" is technically not normal - this is a rule that's typically in newbie games to make them simpler but in NAR, if a roleblocker blocks another roleblocker and the first one isn't interfered with, they should successfully stop the other roleblocker from blocking.

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Yes, you are in fact correct; I'll let him know

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No, no need to change it if you don't want to - you can if you'd like to follow NAR exactly, but you don't *have* to.

Flavor as you describe it is I think *technically* not normal - see the section on flavor, where flavor not based on mafia shouldn't be based on source material. But I don't really have an issue with it if it's just adding pictures to VCs; if you were e.g. writing LoZ-based death scenes or stuff like that it'd probably be theme territory but also shrug. What you've described is fine by me.