My idea to rectify this, then, is to make some kind of standard for how to classify a role in Grand Idea as “ridiculous” vs “playable.”
First, I think you should randomize for alignments and roles separately in this setup. Depending on the number of players this could be anything, but in a mini I think 9 - 4 might be appropriate because of the strength of the roles in Grand Idea, or you could even make it multiball if you wanted to.
Next, we define a role to be "normalizable" if it can be expressed as a combination of the roles and modifiers found below (this list is a WIP, feel free to make suggestions for additions):
Roles:
Spoiler: Normal roles
Spoiler: Extra Roles WIP
Modifiers:
Spoiler: Normal Modifiers
Spoiler: Extra Modifiers WIP
Examples:
Bland would become a Neapolitan-Immune, Vanilla Cop-Immune Vanilla. Note that I didn’t include an alignment because this setup will be generated with roles and alignments separately.
Chessmaster is not normalizable.
Anonymous would become a Compulsive Death Self-Targeting-Only Janitor.
Private Investigator would be normalizable as either Vanilla, Visitor, Private Investigator, or Cop. What to do with roles that act on alignments not in the game is something that needs to be standardized and I’m not sure what the solution is quite yet.
Caveats:
I think that you could run this setup in a bunch of different ways depending on your feelings of setup design. For instance, I would be likely to remove any type of redirection role (busdriver, etc.) because I just don’t like them typically. But when running the setup the full list of allowed modifiers and roles does need to be made public. You would also need to make a decision when running this whether or not “meta cards” would be allowed (ex: Grandest Idea could be either accepted as allowing a player to pick between three roles, or discarded).
I also think that it should be publicly or privately answerable whether the mod believes a role is normalizable and what that normalization would look like as this process is still slightly subjective in nature. This would include answering these questions in a scum thread for the purpose of fake claiming.
There should also be some kind of balance review, or process to remove roles that are game-breaking. For example, an infinite shot day vigilante would of course be game-breaking regardless of the player’s alignment, and should be discarded by some kind of “common sense” metric. Perhaps part of the balance could be choosing the scum to town ratio after the role generation, but that makes the process more subjective which is not ideal.
There also should be some decision made about what to do with scum vigilantes. I think my first thought is simply removing any vigilante abilities from scum, but I think this could also be left to mod discretion when announcing a run of this setup.
Overall: this is for sure a work in progress but I’d like to hear any suggestions for making this into something runnable. I think you could do something similar to Murdercat’s Open Draft to make “expansion packs” of modifiers/roles that could be included based on mod preference. This could mean something like a redirector/deception pack of roles that mess up investigation results, a cult pack, or really anything you want.
I realize this is very open-ended but I wanted to generate discussion with a minimum viable product instead of trying to stress over all the details before sharing the idea.