a 7p BNL pre-designed

[callforjudgement]

/egosearch

Not much else I can do until the setup is posted.

[callforjudgement]

OK, so if scum are lynched D1, we're at 5:1 going into night with two confirmed townies and a chance for scum to instalose if they kill an unconfirmed player and town guesses who it is. Town are overwhelmingly likely to win in this branch, but that's pretty much what we want after a D1 scum lynch in a 7p game. However, if a Mason was outed D1, the resulting setup is only 50% for town to win if the other Mason is also outed, higher if the other Mason manages to survive until D3.

More likely is that town will be lynched D1 (possibly after running up one or both Masons and forcing them to claim as a result). If a Mason has claimed, scum is highly likely to kill them (and town won't be able to catch them doing so), meaning that we'll be at 3:2 with one confirmed townie going into D2, which is only 16.7% for town to win. (Actually, if the Ascetic Mason is run up D1, it might be better for them to just allow themself to be lynched rather than out themself and give scum a safe kill, but town are unlikely to try that.) With no Mason claims, there will be two confirmed innocents going into N1 and a chance (20% with random play, probably higher given knowledge of player's metas) of catching scum overnight; due to the likeliness of a D2 massclaim, catching scum overnight would bring town's win rate in the mislynch case up to 50%, and town's win rate is only 33% if both Masons survive but with no useful information.

It's clear that there's a lot of swing in this setup. Town badly need to keep their power roles hidden, and badly need to find scum quickly. There's a bit of symmetry in the setup; there are three scenarios after a D1 scumlynch (mason catches scum, masons survive, mason dies), and the same three scenarios after a D1 townlynch, with the win rates for the best and worst scenarios for town averaging around 50% (likewise the second-best and second-worst, third-best and third-worst). Unfortunately, the scenarios which are bad for town seem rather more likely than the scenarios that are good for town, so I suspect the EV here is considerably lower than 50%.

Town do have a few things going for them. In particular, scum don't have a huge choice of kill (they may be forced into killing a Mason, and if the Masons are hidden, making a predictable kill will go really badly for them). This means that town should be able to keep more competent players around than normal. Scum also have a huge claiming problem; claiming a role with any sort of utility will pretty much instantly mark them as scum, as the claimed role wouldn't be balanced opposite the town roles; normally in a Micro with two town power roles, you get two town power role claims and one scum power role claim and it's unclear which is which, but in this case, it'll be obvious which claim is the odd one out. (That said, if the presence of the Masons becomes obvious early, you'd think that most scumteams would be intelligent enough to realise that the only plausible claims are VT, inadvertent-VT, or negative utility.)

All in all, this seems like a bit of a risky setup to run. It's a 7P, what's new :-) It's clearly going to hinge on a few main events (who claims and/or gets lynched D1, whether scum manage to kill a Mason N1, what scum claim during a massclaim); and the EV is fairly poor for town but the chance of scum massively screwing up, and the possible inability of scum to get rid of strong town players, may outweigh that somewhat.

I don't think the balance would be easy to improve with minor changes to the setup, and although I suspect it's scumsided, it's so swingy that the swing will likely outweigh the balance considerations; and yet it doesn't seem so far from balanced that I'd reject it. As such, I guess I'm approving this as-is, but with somewhat large reservations; if you can think of improvements to address the points I mention, feel free to propose them.

(It also strikes me that this might work better as an Open than as a Closed game. Scum would probably get more of an advantage from knowing the setup than town would, but it would help to reduce some of the swing, and also help discourage players from signing up if they didn't want a game of this nature.)

[callforjudgement]

I don't think the Backup Watcher would help that much. It's mildly helpful to town but only in a situation where they're badly losing anyway, and there's still no particular reason to think it'll hit.

Psychologist would probably be worse for town? It's harder to hit with than the Watcher is (both can get a result on only one player).

[callforjudgement]

It doesn't make the setup worse balance-wise. The main issue is that it makes claiming anything other than VT pretty much suicidal, so a lot of the setup's balance will depend on what scum choose to claim.

[callforjudgement]

Informed would serve that purpose more directly ("This setup contains a Mason Backup Watcher"), without the risk of them actually hitting N1 and using the information to aim the N2 kill.

[callforjudgement]

The Backup Watcher needs to be a Mason too, if you're doing things that way. (And Ascetic Town Backup Watcher Mason is getting pretty complex as roles go, although I think it's still within Normal bounds.)

Upon correcting that, I think this is more balanced than the original setup, but it's still highly swingy (and probably mildly scumsided, but in highly swingy games, the balance tends not to matter much).

[callforjudgement]

Ah right, a Mason

flip

would have the Watcher in there, so that would be fine.

The problem would be if the Masons claimed as Mason (without the rest of the role) and somehow survived the kill, but scum are likely to just kill them in that case. So a vanilla scumteam probably does work here.

[callforjudgement]

Given the new site rules, the role PMs above are going to need term replacement to be usable.

[callforjudgement]

It's rare for daytalk to make a significant enough difference to a setup to adjust the balance – I think this one is fine either with or without daytalk.