NoPowerOverMe's Mini Normal Review, October 2020

[NoPowerOverMe]

Player X, Welcome to Mini Normal XXXX!

You are an

Town Odd Night Vanilla Cop

.

As a night action, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, you may determine if they are "vanilla" or "not vanilla". (Mafia Goon's will investigate as Vanilla.)

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.

[NoPowerOverMe]

Player X, Welcome to Mini Normal XXXX!

You are a

Mafia Goon

. Your partners are Player Y and Player Z. Your Private Topic is located here.

Your team has a factional kill that may be used to eliminate one player each night.

You investigate as vanilla to vanilla cops.

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

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

[Isis]

You don't want to put that in the Mafia Goon role PM.

if a Mafia Goon PMs you during the game to ask whether they investigate as vanilla to vanilla cops you can tell them yes, but you don't need to tell them in the role PM.

Putting it in the Vanilla Cop role PM is fine.

[NoPowerOverMe]

Player X, Welcome to Mini Normal XXXX!

You are a Mafia Goon. Your partners are Player Y and Player Z. Your Private Topic is located here.

Your team has a factional kill that may be used to eliminate one player each night.

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

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

[NoPowerOverMe]

Is this approved?

[mastina]

Unless I missed something not being Normal in the rules/roles (would appreciate Isis double-checking to make sure, I think everything's in order but I could miss something), then yes, it is approved.

[Isis]

Questions to the mod such as "if I do X will Y happen?" or "does role x produce Y result" will likely result in a non-response.

Maybe want to change this "Posting questions to the mod...". Banning all publicly posted mechanics questions is fine, but generally if a player wants to

privately

ask you something (because they genuinely don't understand) you want to be responsive about simple questions like "Are mafia allowed to just not kill anybody at night?"

That's the only thing I found to remark on the second pass that mastina requested.

[NoPowerOverMe]

What I'm trying to avoid is a player gaining an advantage by asking theory questions.

[Isis]

It's fine to just refuse to answer the question because it's essentially a strategy question, once you're asked. "Don't you dare even ask me" doesn't seem necessary.
You can write a rule that says you will answer some questions but not others, but the current rule is close enough to "don't ask the mod anything ever" that I'm not sure it's Normal.
I dunno, what do you think mastina

[NoPowerOverMe]

ok I will change it to. "Questions to mods may result in a non responce depending on the nature of the question."

[Isis]

Sure, that's ok. That leaves everything mastina delegated for checking approved by me so the setup is approved.

[NoPowerOverMe]

Awesome.

[mastina]

For the record.

I will be livid if the setup is 3 contradictory PRs, a red herring investigative, and all goons.

An important part of setup design is making it a puzzle for town to solve and to reward them for correctly getting info/flips. One red herring is fine, but a normal setup that is exclusively red herrings so that the setup designers can laugh at the town is not. I will 100% blame the design and feel 0 remorse about it, this hypothetical setup should not have passed.

You are mistaken; Normals are NOT MEANT TO BE PUZZLES for towns to solve. Normals being that is

explicitly bad design

that the NRG is actively trying to fix.

This setup was designed to be

solved by dayplay

, not designed to be solved by power roles; the town's power roles here are designed to exclusively force the emphasis to be on dayplay. One conftown, three killstoppers, one fairly useless but nominally-useful investigative (can catch scum fakeclaiming/can verify town claims, but explicitly cannot catch scum claiming vt). The town's roles, aside from the friendly neighbor, have nothing to confirm them as town and do little to confirm others as town and are overlapped by design.

It's a setup feature--not a setup flaw.
/rant

[mastina]

(I'll be reposting that when that game ends and elaborating on it, obv.)

[NoPowerOverMe]

Thanks for the support!

[mastina]

(I feel obligated to mention: standard game balance in NRG is 3-4 moderately strong PRs against all goons, approximately. This game had 5 PRs, but most of them are notably weak: odd-night vanilla cop is almost useless, basically being just an extra PR for the sake of having an extra PR. Friendly Neighbor can conftown themselves, but only themselves. Roleblocker requires god-tiered luck to block a kill unless two scum die, and in this setup there's no way to distinguish between an rb blocking the killer, doctor protecting the kill, jk blocking the killer, and jk blocking the kill. The only two strong roles in the game are the doctor and the jailkeeper, but due to the ambiguity of what causes a kill to fail, some of their innate power is removed. Which I again would like to emphasize: this is a setup feature, not a setup flaw.)

[Isis]

I think the setup is fine, but I close-to-designed-it and haven't been watching the game so that's as dubious a source as you get

[Isis]

Eh that's hyperbolic from like a creativity standpoint, just not from a calibration standpoint is what I meant to express I think.
I wouldn't have come up with the vanilla cop her but it ends being a good kind of nothingburger in this setup I think