Datisi's Mini Normal Review, July 2021

[northsidegal]

(seems datisi misspelled "nsg" as "nrg" in the pm to me)

don't tell anyone implo, NSG is just my secret identity. by day, i'm just a mild mannered townie. by night, i am the masked hero normal review gal, bane of evil, destroyer of complex setups, sacred protector of the mini normal archives.

[northsidegal]

okay so i hate to do this but first things first: mafia babysitter is one of those roles that we haven't technically gotten around to saying isn't normal yet (and to be honest some people on the NRG might disagree with me on this one), but i basically consider it non-normal. given the potential as a mafia killing role—which i suppose you were going for—i take a pretty hardline stance that extra mafia kill power is basically not meant for normal games. it's also a

serious

amount of power for scum – even gated to them being shot, it's sort of a big deal, so normality concerns aside i would say the setup is probably far too scumsided.

[northsidegal]

i don't see why the extra babysitter shot is a big deal, maybe because i'm looking at it as "damage control" rather than "extra killing power". again, i felt it was more townsided than the "traditional" cop gets guilty claims guilty sequence, since the "cop" doesn't get outed and scum has to pick the extra nightkill with less information that they would otherwise. so, uh. not sure what to do, i didn't expect that the first thing i was gonna hear in review would be "hey, the main gimmick of your setup is not supposed to be normal".

so i wanted to talk a little bit about this. it may be true that, in complete isolation, the interaction between disloyal vig and mafia babysitter is somewhat more townsided than would be the interaction between a cop guiltying the same person the vig shoots. after all, as you say, the vig doesn't have to out like the cop does, and thus the mafia make their shot with less info. the problem, i think, is that in looking at this only in isolation, you miss how it interacts with the rest of the roles in the game. it's not similar to just "timeskip to next day" for town, it's actually a lot worse – mafia gets two kills, but every other town power role doesn't get a second chance to act. going back to the example of the cop, it would be a more accurate comparison to say that the night after the cop guilties scum, every town power role gets roleblocked that night.

there's also a subtler but still perhaps relevant point to consider – in "timeskipping", mafia gets a chance to silence someone before the day even begins. so, let's go back to the day after a cop guilty – if some other power role got a relevant result, they could also out it that day. compare with if the mafia babysitter targeted that role – the person never gets a chance to out. so, in the end, while the town gains the advantage that the person with the "guilty" (i.e. the cop or the vig) doesn't have to out, mafia gains a time advantage in silencing someone they wanted dead, and they also gain an extra kill without the corresponding night for town power roles to act. so that's sort of the gist of why i think that even this kind of gated scum kill power is probably still too much.

[northsidegal]

also, am i correct in thinking that a combined rolestopper roleblocker that targets a macho role would successfully perform the roleblock and wouldn't rolestop them?

my interpretation would be that the rolestop would happen for any non-killing action against that person. compare jailkeeping a macho player, where the roleblock happens but the protection wouldn't

[northsidegal]

also i think combined rb / rs is an alien?

[northsidegal]

my interpretation of macho is that it individually prevents you from being protected from a kill, not that it makes anything attached to a protective action fail. so i would say that the alien action would go through, that player would just still die if shot

[northsidegal]

i want to say that it's probably roughly balanced, within the 40-60% range. i was going to say that it falls on the scumsided end of this range because the only real town power is in one role (the mailman, i don't consider alien or BG that powerful) and a lot hinges around that role's survival and not being interfered with. i think i probably still think that, but also loyal mailman is sort of similar to loyal fruit vendor in that even if killed it gets one last action off which can be powerful, so it's better than i initially gave it credit for.

i think especially in the current meta it's probably passable, although only under the condition that you just call the combined RB/RC an alien.

[northsidegal]

if you did want to boost town power, though, making the n3 informed also into a checker might be a slight EV boost. there's a lot that can disrupt the checker and give false positives for when that player eventually does get informed, but even still it'd probably overall help town.

[northsidegal]

i think that we've already had this debate before in the nrg, let me check the thread

[northsidegal]

I despise the way the wiki is phrased on this but I’m pretty sure the answer should be that they’re blocked and rolestopped for everything but kills but not protected. At least that’s how I understand macho.

At least, that is what the answer ought to be since that’s the point of macho.

i also agree with you that this is how it should work but after having checked i actually think this would be a change of precedent. we ended the debate last time with one of the all-time great quotes from CFJ, which then turned into RC's signature for a while:

If you're Macho and someone tries to rolestop you, you never realise you're being targeted for a kill, so your machismo never gets challenged.

[northsidegal]

1x town 2-shot joat (neapolitan, rolecop, gunsmith)
1x town combined bodyguard tracker
1x town n3 informed (each member of the mafia is bulletproof)
1x town disloyal vigilante
6x vt

1x mafia bulletproof informed (there is a town n3 informed that will know that each member of the mafia is bulletproof)
2x mafia bulletproof

okay okey dokey let's take a look at this to stop forcing dats to wait in an endless line, so sorry about that.

uhhh, unfortunately i don't think i can really pass this. i think that too much of town power (if not all of it) rests on the JOAT, with the combined BG/tracker being like a three-step process for even getting any information. i think that the way this game would actually go down probably >50% of the time is that the JOAT gets results, the BG/tracker either dies early or just never gets any real results, and every TPR is basically just a named townie. probably some scum fakeclaim like bulletproof-finder gets believed 100% of the time; the mafia would probably end up claiming something like that even without the informed, but with the informed they get the entire game to come up with the perfect fakeclaim. looking purely at the actually relevant information town gets this game, basically all of it comes from the JOAT. so i think that this setup is probably in the unaccaptable ranges of both scumsidedness and high swing.

really sorry to come back to just say something like this but yeah.

suggestions: making the vigilante just a regular vigilante somewhat surprisingly i think actually does push the needle somewhat measurably closer towards balanced. it turns the process of getting information from the disloyal vig into one that only requires like one or two interactions (vig shoots someone, they don't die -> informed claims -> major suspicion on shot target). from there, i think i might also find a way to add some kind of complex role or vanilla cop into the setup – maybe a complex fruit vendor? just a regular VC might be stronger for town, but whatever. that would probably give town more of a fighting chance when it comes to massclaim. i might stick that role onto the n3 informed, but it's up to you.

[northsidegal]

i guess the tracker also is an information gathering role that i sort of glanced over, but without any scum night actions other than just the nightkill i don't think it warrants affecting the evaluation of the balance all that much.

[northsidegal]

so i think that the normal interpretation (or my interpretation at least) is that backup is actually a modifier attached to a role which says "you can't use your role until another player with the same role dies". i think that this actually allows for some stuff that probably doesn't have precedent and maybe should be more clearly standardized, but isn't

super

unintuitive.

for instance, i think that you could have a loyal backup cop which would become a loyal cop if a normal cop died. alternatively, you could have a backup loyal cop, which would only be able to use its role if another loyal cop died. does that make sense?

so, to answer your question more specifically, it depends on how you set the role up, but i think you could set it up that way of you want.

[northsidegal]

haha, mostly i just laugh a little when people go for unique interactions like that, they're sort of fun to work out. the truly eye rolling experience is seeing a setup that someone sent you where every single role has four prefixes and there are only three vanilla roles in the whole setup.

my answer to that i think would be no, because a backup ascetic would only active when an ascetic died, not when a backup ascetic died. so, to go back to my example, if you had a backup loyal cop and a cop died, it wouldn't activate, just the same as it wouldn't activate if you had a backup cop and a loyal cop died.

again, this is just my interpretation (cough cough

@implo

), but i'm decently sure that this is how it works?

[northsidegal]

Backups of a role, by default, become the base version of the role once any version of that role dies, even if that version of the role had modifiers the backup did not have. The backup does not inherit the modifiers of the role it is backing up. (A backup cop becomes a full cop if a 1x cop dies.)

yeah, i feel like under this interpretation a backup ascetic actually would become an ascetic upon the death of another ascetic? agree with dats that it seems arbitrary for it to not

[northsidegal]

so to be clear, you would say that if there was a backup cop and a 1-shot cop died, the backup cop would become a cop?

[northsidegal]

to sort of skip ahead to my actual argument, i think that it shouldn't because i think that then you would have to carve out an exception for dat's triple backup scenario. you probably also have to carve out an exception for enablers, sort of like you say – if a cop enabler dies, should a backup cop become a cop? (of course, that would be a really stupid/funny combination of roles, but still)

i just think the consistent thing to do is to make it so backups are modifier specific. i guess we can bring this to the standardization thread but yeah

[northsidegal]

that setup is probably like one power role short of being within the acceptable range of scumsided for me. i think that the wording on some of the info could be better (e.g. not too certain what "two same modifiers in their role" really means), but obviously that's something more for the role PMs stage than now.

as it stands i don't really have any issue with the setup's vision (actually i'm quite a fan), i just agree with you that as it stands it's probably a bit too weak for town. i don't think that the friendly neighbor is really "punishing scum", i think i might just call it sort of a natural counterbalance – after all, town is sort of punished for getting scum via the roleblocker and weak visitor no longer working (at least, if we go with the "backups activate other backups" interpretation). so i don't think it's a big deal.