As the person on this site who enforces the Normal Game definition on a regular basis, I should chip in with my thoughts.
I have always understood the principal rationale for enforcing the definition to be to make the games about real scumhunting and avoiding the use of the theme to find scum. As mith and Kelly have put it:
mith wrote:c. This doesn't apply to open/semi-open games, but adding flavor to a closed game, even if it's just surface element over a normal role, adds something extra to the gameplay (and no, adding something to the gameplay is not always a good thing). It adds role names - generally more confirmable than generic names. It adds a level of outguessing-the-mod ("Would the mod make X a Doc?"). It adds complexity to the fake-claim-game. And all of that is fine in some games; otherwise, we wouldn't have theme games at all. But it shouldn't be in all (or even most) of our games.
Kelly Chen wrote:I'm saying it doesn't matter what flavor you give to a scum role; that won't break anything. But if you give flavor to town roles you run the risk that the town may be able to find scum just by scum's inability to make believable claims. In my opinion there should never be any risk of this happening in a "normal" game.
This is why my policy is much more relaxed in fully open games, where this sort of thing can't happen however highly flavoured the role PMs/deathscenese etc.
But even with mild flavour, if the role PMs aren't open then there will always be an element of trying to check claims against believability of their flavour - which whould be no part of a Normal Game.
I think a different, stricter policy should apply to Newbie Games. I completely agree with this:
mith wrote:d. Minor, but I feel that new players learn better in a more "standard" environment. In part, because it avoids the confusion thing in (b) but also because it gives everyone common ground for discussion. If a player's first experiences are as Townies, Mafia, Cop, Doc, it will be easier for them to discuss those roles, and they have a solid foundation for handling more complicated things in future games. I don't think that foundation would be as solid for someone whose first few roles were "Hotdog", "The Color Green", and "Jellyfish".
I can vividly recall being in a "flavoured" Newbie Game, in which I had trouble working out what my role was (eventually I decided that I must be a Townie) - and that was when I was very IC. I strongly support a strict rule that Newbie games should be as simple and mafia flavoured as possible.
