The presence of town power roles makes this inevitable--there will never be a setup where town have power roles where scum have unlimited control during the night, unless the scum have perfect counters to every scum role--which is inherently bad design and hugely scumsided.
In post 5525, borkjerfkin wrote:you deliberately jerked town around and gave scum nothing to interfere with them with, just their own interference and not realizing that's what it was
To the contrary: that's exactly what we realized it was.
In post 5525, borkjerfkin wrote:like this is obviously nonsense, if you really want what you say you want just give scum an NK only on odd nights or some crap
Not gonna lie: pretty sure that a mountainous game where scum could only nightkill every other night? Which you're saying is comparable to this game? Probably close to the balanced range. So I don't see a problem with that.
In post 5526, borkjerfkin wrote: In post 5522, mastina wrote:The town had five power roles, but aside from the fairly-well-protected friendly neighbor, the town had no conftowns. Any of the town's roles could've been scum roles, and DGB's elimination was proof enough of that.
who gives a fuck? it's entirely in town's hands and that's the whole point
Because it's an important centerstone of balance: if the town's power roles when claiming become unlynchable, it's bad design. Scum's agency shouldn't be exclusively in the night--they should have agency during the day to push players and have the ability to eliminate them. The ability to eliminate town PRs during the day during the night is something which
should
be possible for the scum to do in any given mafia game; this game gave a particularly strong ability for scum to do exactly that.
In post 5529, Prism wrote:I saw
5521 coming from a mile away. The only reason I even considered two goons was that I saw you were the primary reviewer, and instead I chose to place my hope that Isis would object.
Isis was the one who did the heavylifting in the review, not me--this was Isis's balance-zone, with Isis expecting that I'd want more town power.
In post 5529, Prism wrote: It did so by being swingy as hell, by balancing around deliberately misleading town in multiple ways and punishing them for correctly utilizing their night actions, and giving scum no active mechanical counterplay. Red herrings are inherently bad design but one is acceptable. The entire setup being comprised of them is not.
The setup has no true red herring. A red herring would be something like a ninja with no action-investigation, or a nurse with no doctor. All the roles here functioned exactly as advertised, indicating their purpose: vanilla cop is a role designed to check for fakeclaims OR to check for scum PRs claiming VT. In this setup, it could not do the latter, but it explicitly was designed to do the former. The doctor can stop a kill; the jailkeeper can stop a kill; the roleblocker can stop a kill. None of them were saying they'd do something they wouldn't be able to do.
The town's power roles have extreme anti-synergy from blocking each other to not being able to discern for sure how a successfully-foiled kill was foiled, but that ambiguity gives scum counterplay, yes, mostly in the day but it's still possible to use mechanical counterplay in the night. The town isn't punished for using their roles correctly here, it just takes them two successes to be rewarded.
The scum have three universal factional powers:
They are informed, having information the town does not.
They are the minority, being statistically less likely to be eliminated.
And they have a nightkill, to remove the largest threats to the scumteam.
There's no such thing as a non-mountainous game where the largest threats to the scumteam do not include power roles. (Heck even in a role madness game, some roles are larger threats than others.) Inherent to the game of mafia is the need to remove power roles, and the requirement that this removal being at least partially from nightkills.
The three kill-denial power roles limit the scum's ability to kill the power-town players and the friendly neighbor is conftown that ideally needs to die before lylo (but is not technically mandatory because even in a worst case scenario of it living into lylo it just produces a 50/50 at worst), but while killing the town power roles makes this game much easier for the scum, it is not strictly speaking necessary, especially if the town eliminates them instead of the scum.
If the scum were to have any role here, it'd have been Informed, something along the lines of, "there are multiple kill-stopping roles in this game". Something that'd keep them as effectively goons, but increase their information. So in hindsight, that's a possible way to let the scum have some compensation for their weakened nightkill (tho an Informed for scum would if claiming VT be a guilty to DGB so less sure), by strengthening their information.
But in a game meant to revolve around dayplay, I would not give the scum a role allowing them to overwhelm the town here.
I will acknowledge that the game might not have been FUN to play--but the game was balanced.
Fun is not something we're required to review for.
