In post 9, Poyzin wrote:As an example, in a game where the only PR is a town cop, yet they play poorly and find themselves at the end of a wagon, would it be the setup's fault for that?
arguably yes. in micro games this is sometimes avoidable, but in mini games it
is
, in my opinion, an instance of a weakness of a setup if a single persons stands as a crucial pillar of the setup.
an argument could be made that town is weaker if the strongest role in any setup claims day one, yes. the point i was attempting to make was not that town is just weaker (true in basically any setup), but that it swings the game to an unacceptable amount.
i didn't say that the setup was scumsided (although i do probably think that). my main problem with this setup is the amount of power stacked onto the masons. i honestly consider it unacceptable.
I'll elaborate a little more. I'm looking at this setup with three elements of setup design: balance, swing, and skew. You certainly already know what balance and swing are. Skew is the tendency for one faction to be able to make massive gains if they play well or get lucky. This is a rare example of a normal game which is skewed in
scum's
favor rather than towns, and
very heavily
at that. Scum don't even have to be perfect to almost entirely negate town's power – using a Ninja shot each night already renders the mason active abilities useless until Night 4 (most masons die before this point). Basically, I think that for town to make any gains with their PRs in this setup they would need to make exceptionally good shots AND scum would have to misplay, whereas I think that scum would see a lot of benefits even without perfect mechanical play. This isn't how setups tend to be balanced.
As for swing, I've already said how much I dislike the amount of power stacked onto the masons. A setup this swingy can just create a lot of potential avenues where something goes wrong early and the rest of the game is basically a foregone conclusion. Finally, balance wise, I do think that this is probably scumsided, although it's an incredibly high power setup on both sides. Ungated roleblocker and rolecop are both super high power for scum, you don't tend to see both of them in a single game. A watcher and masons in the same setup is generally not something that I'd want to allow even if the ninja shots basically negate it. Neapolitan is also incredibly anti-synergy with the masons because even if they're doing a good job of hiding themselves the neapolitan could out the masons and out themselves and basically single-handedly lose the game for town with a single claim.
It might seem like I'm focusing too much on these random ways that things could go wrong, and that that isn't really a fair way to look at things. To that I would say that this setup has a lot more ways that things could go wrong than most setups, and that at least one of them happening is basically a certainty.
