Radical Rat's Mini Normal Review, June 2023 (Released)

[Datisi]

while i cannot outright veto it due to being a secondary, i would... strongly advise against having two millers in the game.

i played in a normal like that a bit ago (viewtopic.php?t=82764) and what ended up happening was - one miller claims, the second miller counterclaims, day 1 becomes solely about which miller is lying, the first one gets yeeted, scum gets a free yeet. also, this was incredibly unfun for everyone - town was locked into a town elimination from the very start, scum was completely demotivated on d1. and since the meta around early miller claims hasn't changed yet from what i know, i reckon this is gonna play out the exact same way.

if you want a gimmick of "town investigative + 2 town red herrings", there are ways to do it that don't cause that ^^ to happen.

oh, and i just realized this is a 3v8, not 2v9 like i originally thought. not that it changes much wrt the above, but noted.

[Datisi]

i'm not sure i understand why mafia would ever claim miller here?

[Datisi]

well, first - an existence of a miller does not imply a cop. there have been a bunch of setup red herrings recently, and anyone who's aware of the current state of normal games will know that.

but even if it was 100% sure there's a cop in the game - it still makes it a horrible idea to claim miller. scum would go from "maybe getting guiltied by a cop, IF the don't find the cop and shoot them before that" to "having a 50/50 chance of getting eliminated day 1", they're not gonna do it.

[Datisi]

Why is having two real Millers a free mislim then? If it's unthinkable that scum would claim Miller, why would the Town assume there must be scum in the Miller claims, especially if red herrings are so common lately?

I can of course see that this did happen in the example you gave, but I don't really understand how that Town making a mistake means there shouldn't be a setup where that mistake is possible at all.

because town isn't going to think that way. they're going to think "oh look, a counter claim." even if an individual townie might recognize that there is something fishy going on, it's extremely likely that it won't be listened to and that town is just gonna blindly yeet a miller.

because it's really not fun. i know i came away from that day 1 frustrated as all hell that we misyeeted a miller. and we likely would've CONTINUED and killed the second miller, had there not been a rolecop that confirmed them as town. and then i got even more frustrated because i realized day 1 was a complete and utter waste of time. and i think i recall reading that scum was also really bored as well on that d1. it's not fun for anyone.

of course, normals aren't balanced for fun, they're balanced for balance, but. this is a big "please reconsider".

[Datisi]

like, there's mistakes town can make that aren't detrimental to fun. there are mistakes that ARE detrimental to fun, but would boil down to what i would professionally call a "skill issue", and thus aren't the reviewer's/designer's problem. but here there's nothing they can do, because figuring it out is not about knowledge or skill, it's about outguessing the mod. kind of like what people do with neighbourhoods, except... worse.

[Datisi]

if we were to go that route, i'd give scum an actual piece of info that there's a metric shit ton of millers in play, so that they're not locked into claiming late/last if they end up wanting to do that

[Datisi]

also, is there a specific reason why this setup is a 11p instead of 13p?

[Datisi]

Because of the experimental nature of the setup I want to make Datisi's public info suggestion obligatory. Or something in that range.

what do you mean by my public info suggestion? i suggested for scum's info to know about the millers.

the setup in #21 seems fine? i was wondering if it's too weak for scum, since they're up against a cop for much longer than they'll think, and the invest pool is likely going to be so narrow (unless all scum claim miller i guess, which would be very funny and maybe not even that bad of an idea) but that is the only actual power town has going for it, and scum is going to know by claims alone 4/10 townies that aren't TPRs so i guess it's fine.

[Datisi]

one idea is to make the backup cop 1-shot or some other gate, so that scum actually gets rewarded for sniping the cop early

[Datisi]

cop getting clears is not useless