Gypyx's Mini Normal Review, October 2020

[Isis]

Flavor Leaf, the information he listed under "Information is:" is supposed to be the information that the mafia receives if they choose for the JOAT to spend a night performing Activated Informed, I believe, not setup information given to the entire town. So it shouldn't create massclaim issues.

cfj told me in a recent thread that Backups do not inherit modifiers, only Universal Backups do.

Personal Rolestopper is not redundant, it can be used to sort of grant Strongman to a teammate in a way a general rolestopper cannot. You can rolestop a town player, and have another mafiosi target that player with the factional nightkill, babysitter actions fail, but allowing the nightkill to go through, because it is factional. An unmodified rolestopper would block the factional nightkill itself also.

I think Disloyal Hider and Roaming Detective are both interesting workable roles that make your setup plenty interesting already, and there should be two replacements for the Babysitter slots that bring the setup closer to true neutral on balance.

[Isis]

I meant, there are probably other roles you could come up with to change the Babysitter and Backup Babysitter that could put the setup at balanced. You already expressed openness to messing with the babysitter (and if the Babysitter is changed as much as mutating to a completely different role, the backup babysitter would likely also have to change, since backups without the primary role present are weak for town)

[Isis]

The third thing Personal can do is make "visit based investigatives" like tracker or watcher stop seeing the factional kill, and then I think that's the only three things it can do.

[Isis]

Personal Psychologist and personal detective too, I guess. Good point.

[Isis]

I think it's a lot more interesting than it is fun. I don't consider myself a great judge of that, but I'll give my opinion since asked. It has lots of lottery ticket roles and it's so many of them the setup is balanced or getting there and it has a complexity to it that the town can probably get some clearing off of setup spec even if they whiff all their lottery tickets but I think I'd enjoy a setup with a smaller number of more reliable roles, most of the time. I've played like a tenth as many normals as FL though and have more confidence speaking to balance/breaks than being reflective of Normal community tastes

[Isis]

I'll reiterate a lack of confidence in my answer

[Isis]

One minor misaligned incentives interaction in this setup is that if scum use activated informed and discover there are two disloyal players, they might prioritize night killing players who have good reads, and that will backfire if the disloyal hider is selected.
This goes away anyway if the disloyal babysitter isn't kept but is maybe worth thinking about that slot is kept disloyal.

Oh, it actually backfires on a disloyal babysitter too. Whack. I think most people are going to see disloyal and think about disloyal roleblockers or disloyal NX vigs or disloyal investigatives (which are basically cops and they shouldn't expect that if they metagamed design but I don't think the normal philosophy should ask for that level of analysis, they should be able to operate from "disloyal is a modifier that means your power works better against scum" and work from that without a paradoxical effect)

If it goes down to one disloyal in the setup, I think it's fine.

[Isis]

I find 24 kind of appealing actually

[Isis]

Multiple roles that punish solo scum is kind of swingy, but disloyal hider and Lazy are both comeback mechanisms for town. The backup roleblocker probably gets specced town pretty reliably so combined with the FN that is two clears which stabilizes this a lot compared to the original setup which doesn't clear much of anything if everyone misses and where everything sounds dubious (I think backup babysitter will get specced town less than backup roleblocker because backup roleblocker is a more helpful design building block).
I think this is a little more powerful for town than the original setup which FL said he was already coming around to. So I think it's fine? I'm somewhat accepting of somewhat scumsided stuff sometimes as a predisposition.

Some bitsy things: it's impossible for the Lazy player to run out of shots in games that don't have a bloodless night, I counted that up when I first saw the setup. When the two roles each had distinct strengths and weaknesses I thought that was fine since the shots still meaningfully restricted how much each ability gets used, but Motion Detector is inferior [most of the time, enough of the time round it up to all of the time] to tracker so it'd be preferable to gate only the more powerful role. So Town Lazy Motion Detector 2-shot Tracker.

Other bitsy thing: Two instances of informed on the JOAT is going to let imaginations run wild when the explanation is more pedestrian than it seems. I think it'd be preferable to move the informed modifier over to one of the other two mafia slots, preferably the rolestopper.

What makes you feel it "doesn't really work"?

pedit: Um, I'm not sure what's particularly wrong with the rolestopper, but I think a watcher is ok too.

[Isis]

Ah, right

[Isis]

yea /pass 30

A couple of these role PM may need some attention to precision with how they're written.

[Isis]

Without calling one spelling more correct than another, since the mafiascum wiki uses the American spelling for neighbour/neighbor, you should use the American spelling, because if an American player draws the role and claims using the British spelling and players find places Gypyx used the British spelling it confirms the FN town in a way that isn't particularly based on mafia.

[Isis]

The wiki for detective seems contradictory about how results should go for a player who attempted to perform a kill, but was unsuccessful. This setup has the possibility of a mafiosi trying to kill a hider but failing, and also getting roleblocked and failing, and I'm not sure those are treated the same actually, it maybe like how a tracker sees a doctor visiting an ascetic but failing to grant any blessings, but a tracker does not see a doctor who was roleblocked go anywhere. Your role PM contradicts the wiki but the wiki is contradicting itself so therefore any role PM would contradict the wiki and I need to ask FL, and if FL doesn't know we need to ask implo. And like maybe the wiki page could use an edit.

Sample role PM in the wiki: "you may investigate a player each night and discern whether that player has killed another player"
Also the wiki: "A positive result is returned from players that have actively killed another player, or attempted to kill another player but failed."
The answer very well might be that Gypyx's role PM is badass and needs to be pasted into the wiki over the wiki's previous one.

"Eliminate" is misspelled in the win condition of each town role PM, minor thing but good to clean up (anyone mentioning the misspelling as town is knowingly doing modkill-eligible behavior, but the british spelling thing can be unconscious which is why I'm more concerned about it)

The description for "Watch" suggests it could learn everyone who visited a target the entire game instead of just that night. Something that could only pose any issue for newbies.

Mafia Informed PM needs to say that the informed ability will tell "that player" or at least "them" what modifiers are in the game. Women and nonbinaries can roll scum.

There's a couple mispellings and typos in the scum role PMs but those are pretty immaterial.

pedit: Looks like I have quite a few more remarks than FL, but I'll take that to mean he understands your version of Detective to be most correct, which is fine.

[Isis]

yeah I think I will log into the wiki and change the sample role PM to be closer to Gypyx. I agree with that interpretation.

A detective would want to throw someone in jail if there's evidence the cultprit shot someone who got medical attention before bleeding out, right?

[Isis]

Changed the wiki

[Isis]

Mafia Informed PM is still wrong, everything else seems accounted for.

[Isis]

And it's doubly passed. It's hard to find time for spectating, but I might be tempted to glance at how this one plays out; it's an exciting setup.

[Isis]

Mafia.