@schadd_
Just wanted to apologize that I feel like I started my discussion about the design harsher then I should have. I was preemptively frustrated with the dismissal that I felt like I knew was coming, and that was included in that message when it should not have been.
I am going to try again, with a more concrete game design thought:
Scum should be able to punish town for claiming for no reason.
In this set up, the town novice disloyal vigilante could claim on day 2, and there is absolutely nothing that the scum team can do to punish that. They cannot stop the vigilante because they do not have any kind of role block / redirect. They cannot kill the vigilante, because the town has a doc while the scum team had no strong man. They cannot even try to outsmart the vigilante with a less direct action PR. They had nothing.
I think that it would be a benefit to the design process to ask "what can the scum team do if the most powerful town PR claims for no reason" and make sure that there is a satisfactory answer.
You can kind of extrapolate from my earlier point, that there are lots of different answers:
-NO town doc in the set up (so they can just kill)
-1-shot strong man (or more I guess, but a single shot fulfils this need)
-Role block (and variants like jailkeeper, alien or even the newer addition to the normal list, "shield" )
-Redirecter / busdriver
-or the weakest option, which is "now that you know who is targeting the PR, try to out guess them" with something like a scum doc or rolestopper
So there are plenty of different avenues to answer this question, and the answer is likely different based on many other factors surrounding the set up like:
-How much power does this give the scum team even if the claim does not happen
-What *is* the strongest role, because obviously a scum doc does not help if the strongest role is a cop for example
-What other design choices are in the game, like in this game "scum roles look good to a role cop" seemed to be a factor, so it might make sense to lean into an answer that looks good to a role cop, or possibly the fact that there was a lot of role doubling, so maybe it should be a role that was doubled with the town.
But, if the answer to the question ""what can the scum team do if the most powerful town PR claims for no reason" is "nothing," then the scum team *will* feel powerless, and I think that that is flaw that could be fixed in game designs moving forward.
