I feel you're in danger of making things way too complicated, honestly. While game balance, mod randomisation and IC interest are all undoubtedly noble and important goals, they should not overshadow a Newbie Game's primary objective which is to teach newbies the fundamentals of playing Mafia.
Now I may be slightly biased as I personally really enjoy shorter games but, to my mind, C9 was perfect for this. Sure, it was imbalanced, but it introduced new players to the concept of informed minority vs uninformed majority, very basic power roles (and, indeed, the fact you don't know if you even have them) and the general flow of the game.
To my mind a Newbie Game should:
- Be relatively short. 150 page megathreads are only going to increase the flake rate from both newbies and ICs alike.
- Not include any roles which have an additional ability or varbiable on how they would normally be expected to work - variable sanities, investigation immunity, etc are all nice ways of tinkering with the balance of a game but also limit a newbie's ability to get into a game and go "right, cool, I get it."
- Linked to the above, the setup should require as little external reading of a new player as possible. While the best newbies will read the wiki or other games of their own accord, I don't think it should be required. A good Newbie Game should contain everything they need to know in the rules and setup posts from the mod.
The role tables and so on, while impressive and elegant, are perhaps a little complex for someone who's literally never played before. Knowing that you might have {Cop, Doc, RB, whatever} or none is fine. Anything that requires something like "we have a confirmed vig, therefore we can't have a cop but we may or may not have a doctor" naturally favours those with experience.
As for the true randomisation of the setups, I say just have the listmod assign it. When a mod comes to the top of the queue, the listmod can simply PM them with the specifics. Any bias toward particular setups will therefore be either the fault of the listmod or plain statistical variance.
As a final note, while I did say Newbie Games should limit any external reading requirements, I think something that might be interesting would be to have a Newbie Game played by volunteer ICs who, once the game was complete, would have editing powers wherein they can add their commentary inside spoiler tags on their own notable posts. Giving reasons for saying what they did, voting the way they did, etc might help a newbie understand better the mindset of more experienced players and give some insight into how the game works "under the hood" so to speak. Like how school textbooks often have a "model answers" section, this could be a "model game" of sorts. Just a thought.
Anyway, sorry to come across all negative on your thread, Misseur Flay - my intention is to be constructive so I hope I've come across as such
