Mini Normal 1951 [Game Over]

[mastina]

Also: If Town executes mechanics right, this setup is not balanced, even as a closed setup.

Nope!

[mastina]

Curious how you think Town should play with mechanics/claiming.

Depends on what you mean exactly. Town should truthfully claim when it is pertinent to do so. Mechanics-wise, the game was swingy, but balanced as could be. The mafia were never in a position where role-wise they held a superior advantage (the only reason they held that was play, in that competent scum + incompetent town = obvious result), nor did the town have a position where role-wise they would have held a superior advantage.

The game had a lot of possible outcomes, yet town and scum stood equal chances of winning. Scum didn't have counters to every town power role. In fact, the town power could fuck them over easily. (Watcher catching strongman, strongman failing to kill the commuter.) The town had significant help. The scum had just enough power to mitigate that. It overall from a balance perspective worked out to be loosely, when you counteract one side's extras with the others, to the formula all games adhere to:
Town having

some

base power when the scum have none. Then, simply making equivalent exchanges when adding to both sides. (Extra town power meant scum getting power, and/or scum getting power meant town got extra power.)

It's personally not my favorite type of setup. The more roles you introduce into a game, the more swingy it is. But it was still

balanced

. And since Mulch wanted the PR-heavy game, he had every right to run it so long as it was so.

[mastina]

mastina I feel like we didn't have enough power to counter power role but since it's mafia scum seeing how people play here it's not that hard to trick town

Scum do not, I repeat, do NOT need a counter to every town power role.
Towns need power roles to win. Because mountainous games are hilariously, hilariously scumsided.

So town get some level of base power. The general formula is somewhere around 3-4 reasonable-strength town PRs vs. all-goon scumteam, thereabouts. (Maybe one weak scum PR.) That is the golden balance standard of a mafiascum Mini Normal game.

This game had a (gated) Jailkeeper (Jailkeeper is one of the strongest town roles in Normals), ascetic Innocent Child, 2x Vigilante (second town-controlled kill, twice to get game back on odds, and is conftown because scum vigs are blacklisted), day-neighborizer (neighborizers are considered net-null balance wise: they add zero to the town and are thus balanced appropriately), 2x-commuter (commuters are immune to all actions, even strongmen, but otherwise add nothing), and an ungated Watcher (another power-town-role).

That is a lot of power, yes.
...BUT.
-All town roles worth anything save the watcher were gated.
-The jailkeeper has zero synergy with the Vigilante
-The jailkeeper and commute conflict with one another
-The jailkeeper has almost zero synergy with the Watcher
-The Innocent Child was easily killable
-Commuter is not a role which is likely to stop scum kills especially when gated
-The scum had a strongman, thereby effectively removing most of the utility in the jailkeeper which was already gated
-The scum had a neapolitan to identify roles, which also doubled as a safeclaim in that it fit neatly within the setup (given that the town had no investigatives this game, the neapolitan if claiming would be seen as town). Among other points.

So what you're effectively left with is three gated roles which have low synergy, one star role which can still be fucked with (Watcher), and one role which is only a marginal boost (Innocent Child). It's stronger than a typical town, but the lack of real combos is detrimental. The closest to a potential combo is the watcher watching either the vig or the jailkeeper. If the game were to lean

any

direction, it'd be towards scumsidedness. Not townsidedness.

[mastina]

Also you said it yourself: scum had a perfect victory this game.
That, in of itself, is pretty good evidence the setup wasn't stupendously townsided, no? Obviously town can win a scumsided game; scum can win a townsided game.
But people across many, many, many Normal games keep on complaining about balance in this same way. Complaining it's scumsided when town won, complaining it's townsided when scum won, and I'm just looking at it and going. "...Okayyyyyy."

[mastina]

also honestly that should probably be a rule but it's literally unenforcable

It

is

a rule. Subject: Forum Rules and Guidelines

Game Specific Rules

Mafia Rules

Breaking rules, not posting, or certain other behavior may result in a modkill or replacement in affected games; rules regarding this should be (and generally are) included up front by the Game Moderator. Some rules apply to most games, and should be assumed to hold unless the Game Moderator explicitly says otherwise. These are:

1. Do not bring outside influences into the game - this includes threats, bribes, wagers, promises, "trust tells", alliances, etc.

[mastina]

jailkeeper can be conf town and implicate scum
watcher can be conf town and implicate scum

Both of these are wrong.
Jailkeeper is not a role which is ever conftown this game--least of all, because of the commuter. The commuter introduces the level of doubt as to the source of any failed nightkill. Furthermore, the jailkeeper can falsely clear scum or falsely be framed as scum via the strongman.
Watcher might implicate scum, but the most obvious choice it fails on (no watching the innocent child), and it is also not a role immune to being thought of as scum.

commuter and JK can negate the wolves NK...

Exactly! There is an ambiguity involved. That's a NERF, not a boost. There's a reason that jailkeeper-bulletproof is one of the worse newbie setups. Newbies simply have no clue what the source of the failed kill is and thus no idea what to make of it. Same principle.

inno child, jailkeeper and watcher are not roles that are supposed to endgame as town and wolves need to get rid of the last 2 100%

The innocent child could be killed without consequence at any time. No watch. No track. No jailkeep. No nothing. The ascetic was there for good reason. Jailkeeper is a role which is only conditionally powerful, in particular, if there's only one scum left. Before then, it is virtually worthless because its ability to stop death is incredibly limited (especially with the strongman).

The one and only role which did have that need for death would be the watcher. The watcher was the strongest town role in this game, hands down, no questions asked...yet it was just about the ONLY significantly strong role town could make great use of. Again, role synergy or rather the lack thereof is a thing. Innocent child is strong on its own. Vig is strong on its own. Jailkeeper can be strong on its own. Watcher is strong on its own. Commuter is

okay

but not really strong. But with all the gates on them, and put together. You're left with a town where they don't have good odds of actually producing useful information. The jailkeeper is likely to be borderline negative utility for the town (blocking key town roles from performing actions, not stopping scum). The vig is disproportionately likely to hit town. The IC is likely to get promptly killed off, and if they fail to claim the ascetic, likely cause town to waste a jailkeep and/or watch attempting to save someone who can't be saved.

And so on and so forth.

all mafia had was checking TWICE if a player was a PR (which ofc can give mafia a nice little claim to go deep) and a non consecutive strongman to counter jailkeeper.

"All mafia had was this role which was a ridiculously good safeclaim yet which gave them info they desperately needed plus a role which shut down one of the roles I am griping about". Yeah seems about right!

town had 6 power roles (!) with 4 possibly or always conf town themselves in a 13er.

Not six. Five. Neighborizer is considered net-zero, net-null, absolutely worthless zero value for town. It is not factored into balance at all.

And scum had two decent/strong PRs of their own.
Strongman is the strongest scum role in existence, possible exception roleblocker but even then strongman likely wins out in terms of disproportionately damaging the town.
Neapolitan is effectively a rolecop, except one which was designed to mirror town roles (town roles were 2x this game, so too was the neapolitan to match the town roles) and give scum a safeclaim which fit well within the setup. (Because town lacked any real investigative power, a neapolitan would make sense as town because neapolitans are cop-lites.)

Two scum power roles.
Versus effectively five town power roles.

Given that normal balance standards for a 10-3 game would be 7-3-3 (or 6-4-3) VT-PR-scum, this is right in the zone.
Add two extra town roles, and you add in two scum roles. Equivalent exchange.

Is it how I would design a game, no. Is that level of swing in a game something I would prefer, also no. But it is definitively still

balanced

, because scum and town have equal odds at winning.

[mastina]

I don't have any numbers but this game you'll notice in this game every NK was based on somebody having a power role that cleared them.

And that is not a site standard. It is nonexistent outside the Normal Queue. (Well, virtually nonexistent.) Site standard is exactly what you mention: killing town players who are a combination of obvtown/charismatic/accurate in reads. (I call it the town triple threat.)

As the simplest example, I think that adding 1 town pr and 1 scum pr is town-sided - for example, the mafia ninja existed only as a counter to the Town Watcher, yet Town Watcher was still (theoretically) able to help Town.

Quite the opposite, actually. Adding mafia power equivalent to adding town power tips the scales in favor of scum unless you're very, very,

very

careful about it.

[mastina]

(Yes I know I said equivalent exchange but it's not an exact formula. It's not add one town PR then add a scum PR so much as it is that loosely if you have extras on one side you need extras on the other side. Extras on town side need extras on scum side; extras on scum side need STRONG extras on town side.)

[mastina]

(So it's not quite equivalent exchange per se so much as it is exchange "mediocre town<->weak scum", "strong town<->mediocre scum", "REALLY strong town<->strong scum" as far as extras go, thereabouts.)

[mastina]

jailkeeper wasn't lynched in this game because he claimed that role on d1.

And lol for that because that's an absolutely shitty reason to shut down the lynch of a player. Jailkeeper is an incredibly common scum role. It is also an incredibly common fakeclaim of a scum roleblocker. A town choosing to not lynch a jailkeeper claim is free to make that choice but they make it at their own discretion with a significant chance of having it bite them in the ass down the road.

and then at night the wolfteam killed him.

Which, again, is lol. Scum killing roles rather than threats isn't the setup's fault. It's the scum's fault for not shooting threats.

he would also not get lynched d2 regardless of how scummy people were reading him.

Again. Players. Not setup. The players choose not to lynch someone, they choose not to lynch that someone. Role, setup, has nothing to do with that.

he would conftown by either JKing the NK, or JKing the wolf that does the NK - yes, with the exception of the ascetic IC and the strongman - because there were no other protection roles in the game.

1: There was a commuter. The commuter introduces ambiguity.
2: You can't discard the existence of roles while simultaneously acknowledging the existence of those roles. In this case, you can't ignore that there was in fact a significant chance of wasting the jailkeep on the ascetic IC.
3: On that same line, you can't ignore that the strongman is a complete and total counter to the jailkeeper on both of its halves, bypassing BOTH the block AND the protect portions of the role.
4: The odds of hitting a player which causes a kill to fail from either method are incredibly low, especially with three scum alive.
5: Even if successful, the Jailkeeper has no proof they were the one to cause the failed kill.

he would also conftown as soon as wolf strongman flipped, because there were no other protection roles in the game.

That is a player assumption. Not a setup assumption.

all it takes for town is read into the mechanics, yes?

All it takes is for town to

correctly

read into the mechanics, sure. But I just showed you at least five ways where town is very likely to read into them WRONG. The number of ways setup spec could and would/does go wrong VASTLY outweighs/outnumbers the number of ways setup spec can go right. There's one way for the speculation to be right. There are dozens of ways for the speculation to be wrong, many of which are incredibly -EV for the town if they have those wrong ideas as their working theories.

watcher wouldn't watch the IC until after IC claims. in this game, jailkeeper claimed and got the n1 NK and the only reason scum wasn't outed by the watcher is because the watcher forgot he was that role.

And if that had happened, the scum would have had a two-for-one trade: jailkeeper dead, watcher dead, for the price of one scum dead. That's a trade which scum come out ahead in.

you seem to be downplaying just how many of these roles were claimable and could be mechanically confirmed.

Role != alignment. If you think it does you will lose game after game after game. Mechanically confirmed roles are not alignment confirmed roles. This is a guiding principle of play on mafiascum. If people want to incorrectly assume a role is town, they're free to make that mistake. But it is exactly that: a mistake. See also, the neapolitan scum had this game. That role was mechanically able to confirm itself fairly easily. By outing accurate results, its targets would confirm that yes it was saying, speaking, the truth. And mechanically a lack of investigatives this game outside the neapolitan would indicate the neapolitan would be town, yes? Except it WASN'T town.

Claimable roles mean shit. If you think they mean something, you will be burned. Time and time again, you will lose game after game. Because they aren't. It's a player-based decision to think so. Not a design-based perspective.