This is a bit inaccurate, I think.In post 52, Mulch wrote:Town roleblocker is negative effect half the time
A town roleblocker blocking the other town role is some negative utility, but also has positive utility by role-confirming the town roleblocker, and by confirming that the target didn't make the kill that night. A mafia roleblocker will have a tough time claiming town roleblocker; there will always be a town roleblocker or tracker to counterclaim them. Which means that this:
isn't actually a big concern. If a roleblocker claims, confirms their role in one way or another (either by being the only source of a missed nightkill or by having a town PR claim they were blocked), and is un-counterclaimed, then they are town.Mulch wrote:Yeah I didn't even take into account the town rber could easily be a scum rber lmfao
I assume the argument here is that half the time the roleblocker's action matters, they'll hit a town PR, and the other half of the time they'll hit scum making the kill. Or maybe you just meant that in general it's weak. But the knowledge that a given player didn't make the kill is valuable, obviously especially so when there's only one scum left in which case it clears a player. Roleblocker and tracker are stereotypically weak roles, but they are significantly more powerful the fewer mafia are in the game because the probability that they hit the mafia that made the kill given that they hit some mafia goes up. This dynamic will play out a lot differently in a semi-open setup. For games that you point to where the roleblocker had a negative impact on the town, I can point you to games where they've largely won the town the game (the one time I drew town roleblocker I blocked the last scum and basically sealed a potentially shaky town win).
As for the specific setups you listed as sided one way or the other in post 48, I guess I just generally don't really agree that most of setups 5-8 are townsided. 5 probably is, and is probably the most of any of them. Regarding 6, Doctor + jailkeeper is a somewhat antisynergistic combination since they won't know which blocked the kill, and there's no investigative power, and the rolecop can find them if the pace of nights slows down. Regarding 7, the mafia get to "look at" two people a night via kill + rolecop and the town has no protective power, so as soon as they find a PR that PR is dead. So unless the PRs claim on d2, they're almost certainly not both making it to d3 to announce their results. Regarding 8, I'd be curious why you think it's townsided, since rolecop and jailkeeper are somewhat antisynergistic as well and the town rolecop can only find one scum, and jailkeeper only has one scum that they can target to get a "guilty" by blocking the kill.
Regarding the setups you think are scumsided i will maybe comment on those tomorrow. Also to be clear everything in this post might be wrong, these are just the reasons that I think those setups can be seen as balanced for the most part, and I'd love to hear more in-depth reasoning on why they aren't because balance is a very tricky thing to get right.
Also to be clear I was involved in the setup design and so I am looking at the setup through a somewhat biased lens. Which is why I/we really need as many people as possible to articulate the problems that they see in either the setup as a whole or individual setups in as much detail as they can - I'm curious if you think the roleblocker's inherent negative utility will necessarily have the same degree of impact in this situation as in those that you're comparing it to and why.