chilledtea's Mini Normal Review

[Ether]

The tags in places like how to vote and unvote in your ruleset aren't bolded properly. 8 days is a pretty quick deadline--you'll want to acknowledge that up front in signups.

2) It is guaranteed that at least one player is initially aligned with the Mafia, and more than half the players are initially aligned with the Town.

This, uh...this would make me more suspicious that you were up to something weird than if you'd said nothing at all. The NRG isn't going to pass a setup where the town isn't even a proper uninformed majority, or where there's no mafia. (Barring werewolves with the exact same mechanics, obviously.)

I mean, there are plenty of good reasons to give actual concrete information about the setup pre-game. There are lots of people (including me) who already know they don't want to deal with serial killers and/or multiball and prefer games that offer them that peace of mind up front. And giving faction numbers means that you can publicly acknowledge things like when it's LyLo in cutscenes. But this rule as it stands isn't saying anything at all, it's just taking up space.

One piece of setup information you

should

be giving up front is whether a single mafiate can take an action and carry out the mafia kill on the same night.

---

So, rules aside, the main thing that bothers me with this setup is the sheer number of power roles. (Although I also question whether the mafia really needs a doctor. A two-shot vig and a one-shot gunsmith aren't really powerful enough to need a counter.) Having four vanilla townies instead of the usual 6-7 raises the risk that the daygame is going to boil down to setup speculation and whether the town can successfully outguess the way you think as a mod, which makes me uncomfortable as a feature of a normal game.

I'm just...I'm just having flashbacks to this awful game I played as scum where we had to wagon half the goddamn town because there weren't any vanillas to lynch. And this is a much better setup than that, because this setup does not contain a full tracker, watcher and gunsmith along with a bunch of other crap, but sometimes I just want to settle down with a nice lynchable vanilla townie and go to night already, you know?

[Ether]

Setup speculation is more likely in games with the powers all scattered, not less. If most players are vanilla, the town will be assessing them based on whether their play is scummy or not. If the power roles are scattered, then each of their individual claims also become a factor.

You can rule whatever you want on how many actions mafia can take, as long as it's posted up-front.

[Ether]

I...have misgivings about this, there's potential for a lot of clears by the gunsmith while the bodyguard slows down the scum's ability to take them out and the vig winnows down the pool of mislynches even if it doesn't hit scum. I think the scum are kind of relying on faux godfather paranoia with their doctor. In a mini, there isn't a ton of difference between a full role and a 3-shot one. The tracker can potentially catch scum in a lie, too, since all of them will be taking actions every night. It's not a guarantee--it's not likely to out the mafia doctor or vanilla cop unless it lives long enough to see them claim vanilla, but...

I dunno. I know scum are favored in minis, but I'm worried about how little breathing room they have here.

[Ether]

Not exactly.

Think of it this way. The town has 4 mislynches, right? That's 4 town-controlled kills. If the vig kills one person, then that's still 4-controlled kills in total; the vig basically just hijacked a future lynch. But if a vig gets both shots in, then that's 5 total town-controlled kills. If town is working from a narrow pool in the first place and the vig is basically acting on that consensus, then that helps it even if both of the vig-controlled kills are on town, as long as it's likely that town would have mislynched them otherwise.

(Or...think of a day with 7 players, one of whom is scum. A townie gets lynched, so six players go to night. If the vig doesn't shoot and scum does, then tomorrow has 5 players, which is two lynches left. If the vig

does

shoot, then tomorrow has 4 players left and that would normally be LyLo--except that if they mislynch town at that point, and the vig is still alive, then it gets to shoot from whoever's left now. In the end, scum have fewer places to hide this way. This example isn't great because that last shot has to hit scum or the town loses, but it applies in situations that aren't LyLo too.)

I mean, there are ways for a vig to make things worse. It could get paranoid about an experienced player who's actually totally on-point, or it could shoot someone without a claim and hit a power role. I'm not, like, anti-vig, I'm just saying that it isn't a net zero on the town, vigs actually do things.

there should always be a little room, minis are sometimes too predictable from balance perspective.

Elaborate?