Best Role Ideas?

[callforjudgement]

you are an

anchor

. You pick a player at any point of the game and win with that player. If you die before picking, you lose.

And here's a version of the above that allows for nicely self-balancing policy vigging:

You are an

Assimilator

. You can kill one player each night. When you succeed at killing a player, you lose this role and instead gain that player's role (including factional kills, QT access, and win condition). You cannot win before you gain a win condition via this role's ability.

Optimal play is to shoot bad players, as you end up strengthening that player's faction (which is the faction you end up on) by replacing a bad player with yourself (who is, statistically, likely to be better). And it's also pretty much self-balancing, as the town:scum ratio stays the same regardless of who you aim at. (The major issue is shooting something like a Cop; you won't find out their previous results in the process. Perhaps the rule should be changed so that you do.)

[callforjudgement]

You are a

Stealth Governor

. As long as you are alive, no number of votes is sufficient to lynch a player other than you unless you are voting for that player. You win with the town.

Governor modified to avoid the need for extended twilights, while staying true to the original role; it should play the same way apart from that, except that the governor is probably going to have to claim if they want to stop a lynch. This variant doesn't work as scum, for obvious reasons.

[callforjudgement]

What is Cobalt's Law? I can't find it on the wiki.

EDIT: Oh right, an achievement, "be on every lynch and L-1 wagon in a game, except against yourself".

[callforjudgement]

With a roleblocker it'd still be quite obvious, because it's very rare for a lynch to be entirely towndriven. (The godfather would work, though.)

[callforjudgement]

Thanks for putting Sequential JOAT in the thread! I suggested that as a fakeclaim to a scumbuddy during Worst Roles Mafia, now it'll be more believable in future games. (We were going to suggest it as a nerf of some other role in here, which would have been overpowered without a nerf.)

Bonus points if the first couple of sequential JOAT abilities are highly counterproductive for the person using them.

[callforjudgement]

That's just third party redirector, right? (Also, you cribbed it from SC2 Mafia, which is full of mindboggingly bad roles, mostly because they're all overpowered.)

[callforjudgement]

Self-Watcher's kind of a weak role. (Unless they're also bulletproof; then, it's massively overpowered.) It might work better in scum hands; it'd let you be proactive in counterclaiming cops with a guilty, for instance.

[callforjudgement]

I've seriously considered a cult that starts with 3 members, but upon successfully recruiting, whoever performed the recruit dies.

This is mathematically similar to a standard 3-man scumteam (e.g. in terms of EV), but more powerful because it screws both with ability to scumhunt, and with power roles.

[callforjudgement]

You are an Infiltrator.

If you are recruited into a cult, your wincondition does not change, but all other effects apply.

Wrong thread. Worst Role Ideas exists. And giving town access to the list of scum is always a bad idea. Even when you think you've tried triple-sure to make sure it isn't.

[callforjudgement]

Let's make an Even More Unstoppable Cop. Fantastic!

I think a 1-shot Inno child maker is just as balanced as a fulltime cop???? Maybe just me

It would also add an interesting layer if the player didn't auto-inno child confirm because the cop would have no way of knowing their result and a player doesn't exactly want to confirm inno child unless they have to

Yeah, a shot of innocent child making is considerably better than a shot of cop if it doesn't auto-reveal. If it does, I suspect it's at least marginally better, but not by much.

In an offsite game I helped design, there's the opposite, a role that publicly confirms someone as scum if they are (and otherwise does nothing). The complication is that the players know (were told by the mod at the start of the game) that it exists in both Sane and Paranoid versions (i.e. the Paranoid version just causes anyone it targets to be announced as being scum), so the results are potentially hard to rely on.

[callforjudgement]

That's bastard. So nbd :P

I'm of the opinion that it's very hard to be bastard in an Open. Dethy is not a bastard setup.

[callforjudgement]

I'm of the opinion that it's very hard to be bastard in an Open.

I disagree. Just run a different setup to the one in the OP!

Then it isn't an Open; you just lied when you said it was an Open. (Which is, I agree, pretty bastard.)

[callforjudgement]

Can we just merge the threads? They're being used for the same purpose anyway. Any new roles which are

actually

good tend to come up in Open Setup Discussion, or in an actual game.

[callforjudgement]

Ascetic would work as a universal miller equivalent, while being much easier to mod.

[callforjudgement]

You are an

Easily Discouraged Cop

Each night, you may investigate one player to determine if they are town or anti-town. However, if you ever target a pro-town player, you become discouraged with your own abilities and cease investigating.

That's much swingier than Cop normally is. It's 1-shot Cop, except more townsided if it gets the most townsided random result (hitting scum). Given how many people think that Cop is excessively swingy anyway, I'm not sure if it can count as Best.

[callforjudgement]

Being able to UPick an entire role is typically a bad idea, because there are no resources subsequently left to the mod to balance the game.

This is why most UPicks are based on flavour.