The Bulge's Large Normal Review, October 2020

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Subject: Normal Queue Thread (Players and Mods)

/in to mod large

Mafia Cop
Mafia Roleblocker 1-Shot Doctor
Mafia Goon
Mafia Goon

Mafia Traitor Neighbour
Mafia Traitor Neighbour

Town Miller
Town Loud Fruit Vendor
Town Simple Fruit Vendor
Town Gunsmith
Town Lazy Babysitter
Town Universal Backup
Town Universal Backup
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie

[implosion]

Primary: schadd_
Secondary: Ircher

[schadd_]

ooohmhhmm. this is scumsided.

i would say that i'm bad at evaluating traitors, i dogmatically never put them in my games and rarely see them in other people's games. i would approximate each traitor to be about 3/4 of a mafia goon, maybe slightly less: they can't make endgame, they might get killed by accident, they can't talk to the main team. the latter two of these three i would say are actually quite minor - you can probably do pretty well without talking to the main team (some people more than others surely, but in practice i think that not a lot happens in the scum PT that is earth-shatteringly important, it just makes the players more comfortable. being in a neighborhood helps) and it is pretty easy for the traitors to simply not get nightkilled (after all there is no reason for them to try to put forth good reads. also the cop helps).

so they can't make endgame. it's a pretty strong drawback - it makes things harder for the type who likes to sit back and get townread as scum. in this game they would lose when they would outlive the scumteam - for either of them individually that would be 1/5 of the time, maybe since there's two of them that changes the math. i dont know. you get where i'm coming from though - i think they are at least most of the way to the strength of a normal mafia member

so considering this to be a 5ish against 15 player game. i would say it's somewhat weak for town: there are two roles that really do anything for town to begin with, which are the gunsmith and the babysitter. neither of those is very good though. there's a lot that messes with the gunsmith - getting innocent results on half of the mafia team is pretty brutal (in fact even not considering balance, i would not like a game to be like that). the universal backups are brutal too. there's really only like, 2 and a half roles worth of town power - this would make me uneasy in a 10:3 game against goons, so in a 15:5ish game against a roleblocker that's really scary. i think if you added, like, two full vigilantes to town it would be probably fine. maybe slightly strong for town in that case. i would definitely like it if you took the doctor away from the roleblocker.

[The Bulge]

The purpose of the traitor neighbours is to try to make the game more fun for them. I've never rolled traitor myself but I know people often find the role boring to play. This adds a very dynamic sort of sidequest, which can end up being a drawback or an advantage depending on where the hood discussion goes. This setup was submitted under the assumption that the two would not be informed of each other's roles, making for a potentially very interesting post-game read. If this is not considered Normal please let me know but I see nothing in the Rules explicitly against this.

I'll definitely take away the 1-shot doc. I'm curious though, under Normal guidelines would they still return inno to a gunsmith after using the shot?

I'm not married to those fruit vendor modifiers, I just liked the idea of two town-aligned fruit vendors with slightly different utilities. We could possibly give the town more power with different modifiers? Make one weak or loyal?

The double universal backup gives two copies of whichever town pr dies first (unless that's not actually how it works under Normal guidelines but I don't see why it work any differently!). Worst case scenario is double millers, which in this setup actually hurts scum and not town. I'm worried about what throwing a vig into the mix for that reason. Obviously the setup is [very intentionally] swingy as is but I tried to not give too much power to either side, so as to not let the swinginess be too detrimental, if that makes sense.

[The Bulge]

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Zoologic

featuring photos curated by Peter Uetz

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Playerlist

First Player
Second Player
Third Player
Fourth Player
Fifth Player
Sixth Player
Seventh Player
Eighth Player
Ninth Player
Tenth Player
Eleventh Player
Twelfth Player
Thirteenth Player
Fourteenth Player
Fifteenth Player
Sixteenth Player
Seventeenth Player
Eighteenth Player
Nineteenth Player
Twentieth Player
Twenty-first Player

Replaced

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Links

Forum Rules & Guidelines ::
Important Announcements ::
Normal Game Rules ::
Sample Role PM ::
Votecounts ::
Most recent votecount [post=::]::[/post]

Game Events

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Game Rules

i.

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ii.

I am the Bulge thy Mod. My word is law. Hex colour

#44A04A

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@Bulge

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iii.

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iv.

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v.

Do not harass any other player or try to ruin the fun of the game for anyone.

vi.

Do not play against your Win Condition. You may privately request replacement at any time.

vii.

Do not use encrypted, invisible, or ridiculously tiny text. I may edit your posts if you do. This is a social game with no place for cryptography.

viii.

Do not use provable randomness. You are allowed to say, for example, that you rolled a die to arrive at a particular conclusion, but you cannot use the tag.

ix.

Do not quote or copy+paste any text from any game-related private threads or personal messages, real or fabricated. You may not claim to be mafia partners with another player.

x.

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unvote

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xii.

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xiii.

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xiv.

If you do not post for 36 hours in a row, you will receive a prod. Failing to respond to a prod after 24 hours or accumulating four prods may result in your replacement.

xv.

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xvi.

This game uses a closed Normal setup, designed following the Normal Game Rules, linked above. The following is a Role PM template that at least one player this game will receive:

Spoiler: VT Sample Role PM

[The Bulge]

I'm reworking the formatting of Role PMs I'll post em when I can. Although I might hold off until we get a little deeper into setup modifications, if that's alright. Let me know if there are any specifics I should be going out of my way to include.

[The Bulge]

Mafia Cop
Mafia Roleblocker
Mafia Goon
Mafia Goon

Mafia Traitor Neighbour
Mafia Traitor Neighbour

Town Miller
Town Simple Fruit Vendor
Town 1-shot Bulletproof Gunsmith
Town Protective? could keep the babysitter or do jk? stuck here
Town 3-shot Vigilante
Town Universal Backup
Town Universal Backup
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie


how is this looking

[The Bulge]

should the traitors be informed of each others' alignment?

[Ircher]

should the traitors be informed of each others' alignment?

As simple neighbors, no, but it may be more interesting if they were. (You would have to tack on an informed modifier for them to know each other's alignment.)

[schadd_]

traities are informed abt the whole mafia team which should include other traitors

[schadd_]

ok so now that the gunsmith is a good role it is actually kind of worrisome. in particular it is kind of centralizing to what mafia has to do here. the bulletproof makes me go like "waah!" because if they just claim "gunsmith :^)" which they ought to do, i envision this outcome where they claim, get shot and protected, then somehow wolves find the babysitter (n.b.: this is very hard) (n.b.: the babysitter is at liberty to babysit other people during this time) and then after it all scum shoots gunsmith again, finds that they didnt die, and goes ok so what the fuck

in general i think putting bulletproof on gunsmith is just a very scary thing with a lot of severe feel bad outcomes for wolves. i would take kt off and probably go so far as to add macho to it

[schadd_]

oh there's a roleblocker. emm

[schadd_]

something that also just occurs to me is that both universal backups get whatever the first death is which means the gunsmith dying first is like this game-losingly bad outcome so i am not passing it like that

[The Bulge]

hmmmmm yup i didnt reevaluate the gunsmith's potential power with the backups now that their invest is more reliable and less uhh bastardy

will get to it after a nap!

[schadd_]

in general ungated strong investigatives are a bit of a high chaos move in large games, especially Large large. gunsmith is obviously innately a little bit gated by being a gunsmith but those results still really add up. i think the no-gun results on the traitors don't actually hurt so much since they can't make endgame anyway (they have to try to leverage their position rather than coasting which is a kind of weird task)

[The Bulge]

would it be enough to make the gunsmith even-night? maybe with an odd-night doc as the town protective?

[The Bulge]

no bulletproof

[The Bulge]

can I get a final ruling on whether the traitors are informed of each other? I like both ways conceptually so just whatever the guidelines dictate

[implosion]

This is like, very ambiguous. Like, more ambiguous and impactful than most normal game rule edge cases. The wiki article refers to the "Mafia team" and I think it's ambiguous if it's referring to just people with PT access or the whole team. I'm not sure if it should be the case that traitors are informed of the whole team including the other traitor, or if they're informed of just the non-traitor members but that another traitor exists, or if they're not even told of the other traitor.

If I were to give a definite ruling I'd probably say the 1st, as Ircher said, because I think that's what I get from the closest reading of the wiki page (and it's also the most flexible since you can informed-modifier them to get the other versions as he said) but tbh I don't think there is a "correct" call here, so if the reviewers agree on something else then that's fine. But if not I'll say that's the version you should use.

[schadd_]

what would make most sense to me is "mafia team" = "mafia faction" = incl. the traitors

[schadd_]

the problem with the flexible interpretation of it is that i would say the wording that currently exists on the wording is within the bounds that somebody could see it and confidently assume that it means including other traitors without feeling the need to ask

you'd have to come up with a wording for the traitors' PM that clearly indicates that it doesn't include traitors and yet doesn't suggest that There Might Be Another One

[Ircher]

I largely agree with schadd_ in this instance. My earlier interpretation was in part because I forgot that traitors know the main team. In terms of the wording ambiguity, if we look at the wiki page, it goes on to say, "cannot be recruited to join the

rest

of the Mafia team". The word "rest" here implies that the page is including the traitors when we see the words "Mafia team". In addition, as schadd_ points out, not including traitors in the identities given does lead to a very tricky wording to ensure it is correct and not misleading.

[The Bulge]

I would go a step further and argue that the rules are not only ambiguous but contradictory in the case of two traitors

•knows the identities of all of the Mafia team
•identity is not known by the Mafia team, although they should know a Traitor exists

hopefully I'm not just making a case here for "double traitors are not Normal" lol but I think it does demonstrate that the wording of the wiki, as is, does not adequately account for two traitors and thus shouldn't be a reliable basis for this ruling.

I do agree however that the tricky wording that would be required is perhaps a point against leaving them uninformed. but if I can come up with something that works and that we all agree on, isn't this point purely hypothetical?

given only four names and no further information, that should be a tip off at the very least that something is up (unless that's not the only info a normal single traitor gets, if they learn roles or whatever as well then pretend I'm talking about all that). all it takes is for one of them to connect the dots and take the gambit of claiming or otherwise heavily hinting. the neighbourhood resolves itself and stabilizes, or doesn't and is hilarious in retrospect. it plays nicely into the idea of a neighbourhood with two uninformed scum and an additional traitor sidequest.

[implosion]

Whatever it is, it's ugly. Remind me to fix it when this game is done (I really hate things like this because if I fix it now it's possible that it'd tip someone off that there's a normal game being run with two traitors). For now, there is no standard, meaning really it's up to us to just decide what is the most reasonable temporary standard to have, and ofc if a player asks you about this you answer based on that standard.

[implosion]

(The ugliness being the lack of a standard I mean, not intending to comment on the double-traitor in and of itself)