Alarmist

Alarmist Alias: none Alignment: Town Role type: Protective Choice: Night Status: Known

An Alarmist is a form of protective role designed to counteract a Cult Recruiter. The Alarmist targets a player at Night, and if someone else attempts to recruit that player that Night, the recruitment will fail.

The existence of a Cult requires declaring the game to be mechanically bastard.

Standard version

An Alarmist can target one player (other than themself) every Night. This protects them from a Cult Recruiter's recruitment actions (the action will happen, but to no effect, the same way that a Doctor can stop a kill without the kill being blocked). Alarmist also protects against recruitment to the "Cult" alignment from sources other than a Cult Recruiter.

Variations

A few moderators make Alarmists' protection permanent. However, this effectively confirms the player as non-Cult for the rest of the game if they were not Cult-aligned to begin with.

A generalised version of Alarmist prevents its target from having its win condition changed in any way that Night (as opposed to merely preventing Cult recruitment). This is typically used interchangeably with the faction-specific version; you may need to check with your moderator what variant of Alarmist is in use, unless clearly specified. In practice, the two variants are almost the same because alignment-changing effects are rare, and effects that change to a non-Cult alignment even rarer.

A plausible variant of Alarmist would also protect players from, e.g., Masonizers (and maybe even Neighbourizers), but this is not commonly seen in practice, and would be somewhat of a two-edged sword.

A Deprogrammer is a player who can undo a Cult recruitment (and thus has the same relation to Alarmist as Reviver does to Doctor).

Use & Balance

In a Cult game, an Alarmist is effectively the equivalent of a Doctor, and balances much the same way. However, Cults gain control over the town's voting via recruitment faster than the Mafia do so with their nightkill, and thus preventing a recruitment will buy town twice as much time as preventing a nightkill would. Nonetheless, the role's power is typically tempered by the fact that the Town have no idea whether it worked or not.

Beyond making it evident to the game that a Cult exists in the game, the Alarmist's actions are generally only useful late in the game when process of elimination is being used to determine who was recruited into the Cult and when.

Alarmists are almost always pro-Town, as Cults generally cannot recruit anti-Town players anyway.

Play Advice

Unlike with a Doctor, you won't typically know whether your protection has worked or not. If the setup contains a strong pro-Town player, you may therefore want to protect them repeatedly in order to remove almost any doubt about their alignment.

The Alarmist role's existence is often used to warn the town that a Cult exists. It's helpful to let them know about this, but ideally you should aim to disguise this as setup speculation rather than power role information (if the Cult know you're a power role, you're likely to end up getting recruited, and the Town are likely to guess this, so it's fairly hard to aim for the Cult victory).

Besides that, the role plays very similarly to a Doctor; you should target power roles and/or strong pro-town players.

Sample Role PMs

The standardized Role PM for "Alarmist" describes the action as follows:

• As a targeted action: that player will be protected from being recruited into Cults that night. (edit)

Example (simplest form)

Welcome to game! You are a Town Alarmist.

You have the following active ability:

• Each Night, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, that player will be protected from being recruited into Cults that night.

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

Example (with modifiers)

Welcome to game! You are a Town 1-shot Loud Alarmist.

You have the following active ability:

• Once in the game at Night, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, that player will be protected from being recruited into Cults that night. Your target will learn that you targeted them (but not what action you targeted them with).

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.