Changes to Normal Games (update September 2022)

[Jake The Wolfie]

What would a backup Traitor even be? The word backup means that if a traitor dies, it will become the next traitor, which means that whatever alignment the traitor is must necessarily be mafia aligned (to avoid alignment changing) but how does a backup traitor differ from an actual traitor?

[Ythan]

It sounds like it would be a goon that becomes a traitor when the traitor dies, which, lol.

[Jake The Wolfie]

So a goon that loses communication with their teammates when the traitor (that they know if they exist or not) dies?

[Ythan]

That's my interpretation of the interaction.

[TemporalLich]

Where I think my role proposals go on the "NAR ladder":

IC Land - Superstar, Moonlight Dancer
Blocking - Shield
Kill - VIP
Role Investigation - Modifier Cop, [modifier]-Finder
Action Investigation - Reporter, Inspector, Security Guard, Visionary, Role Guard

---

Backup Traitor would have to be treated as a non-Traitor for the purposes of role PMs - the Traitor-notifying ability never gets a chance to fire as a Backup Traitor is not a Traitor in the setup phase. It still could work as expected for the other abilities: Backup Traitors when a Traitor dies would lose access to the scum PT, not be able to send in factional nightkills at all, and get endgamed if an "active" Backup Traitor is the only scum left.

A Backup Traitor would immediately know if they are a red herring or not because of the Traitor-notifying ability of the regular Traitor though.

My intuition would say that a Backup Traitor would not have a gun (unless it was like a Backup Traitor with a Cop ability or something).

[Jake The Wolfie]

Suggestion:

Split Weak off into 2 different categories

Loyal Weak - You will die if you target a member of a differing faction
Disloyal Weak - You will die if you target a member of your faction

[T3]

Is vain normal? I don't see it on the page but it seems like a logical next step from weak.

[TemporalLich]

Vain isn't normal but I feel like it should be.

I would prefer having Weak and Vain instead of LoyalWeak and DisloyalWeak

[Gamma Emerald]

Weak’s usage is “dies if it targets scum” not “dies to an alignment the same/different to itself”
I’d suggest Desperate for a “Disloyal Weak” modifier

[Dunnstral]

Is Moonlight Dancer a town only role, or does it only confirm its own flavor?

[TemporalLich]

Is Moonlight Dancer a town only role, or does it only confirm its own flavor?

Moonlight Dancer is a null IC, it only confirms its own flavor... an Innocent Child is a town only role that confirms they are Town, and Innocent Child is already Normal.

[Umlaut]

I can't conceive of a normal setup in which Moonlight Dancer is a useful role that couldn't equally be filled by some other role.

[TemporalLich]

I can't conceive of a normal setup in which Moonlight Dancer is a useful role that couldn't equally be filled by some other role.

yeah, it's similar to Named, though Moonlight Dancer can confirm themselves as such.

I don't think Moonlight Dancer is likely to be Normal unless Named becomes Normal.

also, setup WIFOM is very likely the reason Moonlight Dancer gets added.

[Cook]

isn't moonlight dancer just a superstar?

can you even attach modifiers to roles that have no powers (e.g. vanillas)?

[Gypyx]

can you even attach modifiers to roles that have no powers (e.g. vanillas)?

well, yeah

Mafia Multitasking is a legit role for instance

[TemporalLich]

isn't moonlight dancer just a superstar?

can you even attach modifiers to roles that have no powers (e.g. vanillas)?

Nope, Moonlight Dancer gives no clues to its role, Superstar (with no other roles) on the other hand can reveal as being effectively Vanilla.

[Umlaut]

isn't moonlight dancer just a superstar?

can you even attach modifiers to roles that have no powers (e.g. vanillas)?

Bulletproof Townie, Ascetic Townie, and Macho Townie are all uncontroversially normal.

Which I suppose means we can also have:
Multitasking Townie
Lazy Townie
Personal Townie
2-Shot Townie

[Gamma Emerald]

X-Shot Townie should not be allowed since in Great Idea it just becomes a Survivor after all the "shots" are expired

[Gypyx]

X-Shot Townie should not be allowed since in Great Idea it just becomes a Survivor after all the "shots" are expired

normals don't follow the same rules are great idea

a Town 2-shot would be able to perform his non-existant ability twice basically

[Kerset]

I don't think that increasing number of possible roles will make normal games more fun.

[implosion]

I don't think something like x-shot townie is normal; there are

a lot

of implied semantics that exist in normal roles and modifiers. The point of this post will be to argue just that; that there are many semantics that people generally don't think about when designing roles because we usually don't need to, but that we have to respect those semantics. You can think of them like a programming language; the modifier "x-shot" expects to be modifying an active role, so something like 2-shot townie or 2-shot ascetic (without the word "activated" between them) would be like a syntax error. The semantics of a normal role are not "any number of modifiers, then either an active role or vanilla"; they have to fit together.

There are a lot of things like this that at minimum I would never pass as a reviewer and at most should never exist in a normal game. I think backup traitor also fits somewhere in there. Some other examples:


-Novice Macho Townie, Loyal Innocent Child, 3-shot Vengeful, etc. These modifiers are all supposed to modify roles that have an active ability; they're not allowed to modify a passive. There can be exceptions; a modifier like night 2 can apply to a passive role like innocent child or informed, for which there is a clear meaning and useful design space. This has precedent. But you can't just slap a modifier like loyal on a role that it has no meaning on.

-Combined cop. Combined is supposed to have two or more roles. I could probably make like a dozen different extremely specific ways to misuse combined. Like, combined even-night cop odd-night doctor. Good luck trying to figure out what that role is supposed to do. One example of a semantic at play here is that a role that is put into a "combined" clause cannot have targeting-specific modifiers attached (e.g. night-specific modifiers, indecisive, roaming, etc). It wouldn't make sense for you to have a targeting restriction on two different abilities that differ if the abilities are combined. But those abilities could have other modifiers! Combined Loyal Doctor Disloyal Roleblocker, for example, is a perfectly valid role that protects allies and blocks enemies, though probably pretty strong in the hands of town for various reasons.

-Serial killer enabler. What would it even mean for a serial killer to not be enabled? That's their alignment, not their role; their kill is essentially factional.

-Jack of all trades (Watcher, Bodyguard, Bulletproof Doctor). Jack of all trades is supposed to have active roles as its shots; it doesn't make sense for it to have a 1-shot "bulletproof doctor". Though you could do this by changing Bulletproof Doctor to Combined Doctor Activated Bulletproof (it's just that the complexity cost here would only rarely justify including so much verbiage).

I could rattle off a list of things that are ambiguously valid as well. Can you have a night 1-2 universal backup? What happens if a role dies during the day? Can you have a compulsive vengeful? Compulsive is supposed to modify activated roles, but it's obvious what is meant here, and while it's probably valid i can't think of a good reason to take that choice away from the vengeful. Even like, novice macho townie that I mentioned earlier could be considered valid. The point here isn't whether any of these is valid, the point is that there's such a combinatorially large number of ways to combine these words that we can't possibly decide all of them in advance. And also that I disagree with Umlaut's 666, and I think it gets at the heart of it: not all modifiers are the same in terms of how they can be used semantically, and one modifier being valid to attach to a vanilla townie doesn't mean all modifiers are. This ambiguity is also why there's reviewer discretion.

[TemporalLich]

Novice Macho Townie would parse correctly - they can be protected from kills on Night 1 but not after that.

Loyal Innocent Child would be needlessly applying a modifier at best if you consider Innocent Child to self-target. On the same note, Disloyal Innocent Child would be a red herring. The Normal design space for (Dis)Loyal requires a targeted ability (merely asking for an active ability means Loyal Activated passive role is Normal), though in Themes there's nothing stopping you from having a Disloyal Ascetic or Loyal Bulletproof.

3-shot Vengeful would be a pointless modifier and I'd question if you meant to use Day 1-3 instead, though Day-specific is technically not Normal.

Combined Cop would technically be correct but also is wrong - You're meant to put at least two things in a Combined container but it's not like you're going to crash the game if Combined has 1 or 0 things in it.

Combined Even-Night Cop Odd-Night Doctor would be a red flag saying "the setup designer likely meant Even-Night Cop Odd-Night Doctor" as the two combined abilities have scheduling restrictions that

never coincide

. Combined Odd-Night Cop Novice Role Cop would parse correctly, and would be a lot cleaner than "Night 1 Cop Even-Night Role Cop Novice Odd-Night Combined Cop Role Cop" which is what you seem to want people to use.

A Combined role that looks like "Combined Fruit Vendor Non-Consecutive Doctor" would be the hardest to parse of combined roles with mismatched targeting limiters. But it still can be parsed in my mind, if the role acted on both N1 and N2 the Doctor would not work on N2.

Serial Killer Enabler would be like having a Goon Enabler. I am pretty sure messing with a factional kill like that is not Normal.

Joat makes the most sense with active abilities and the wiki page for Joat should be updated so that a Joat (BP, Doc) isn't Normal. 1s BP 1s Doc will mean the same thing as Joat (BP, Doc) though. "BP Doc" in a Joat would have to be Combined Doctor Activated Bulletproof, it wouldn't make much sense even if Joat (BP, Doc) did.

and yeah unusual combinations like Neighbor Enabler (this one did actually appear in a Normal game) should be decided by reviewer fiat - it might be Normal one game and Themey the next.

[Umlaut]

I agree with Implo's disagreement with me, actually, and I certainly wasn't advocating in 666 that "2-Shot Townie" should ever be something allowed in a normal game, but more to illustrate by

reductio ad absurdum

exactly what he is saying: that we don't actually have, nor do we need, a perfectly precise definition of 'normal' that decides all cases unambiguously. I don't much like the analogy to thinking of it as a programming language since that IMO is exactly what could lead to the kind of conceptual error that makes something like 2-Shot Townie sound plausible: how exactly would you program a machine to reject that while accepting Bulletproof Townie? You would need a classification system more intricate than what is actually specified in the wiki, at least. But this is not a real problem except for a handful of pedants, because we have human reviewers who are able to apply common sense to cases like this, and "normal" means in practice "whatever normal reviewers will accept, as determined by a combination of legislation (the wiki) and case law (past reviews)"

Case in point: One of my recent normal setups included a Day 4 Innocent Child. "Day-specific" does not appear anywhere in the list of normal modifiers. This point did not even come up as a concern during review, nor did anyone playing the game express any disbelief that the role was normal. I think this decision was exactly correct on the reviewers' part even though I could never possibly have gotten that setup through some "tell me if my setup is normal" algorithm.

[TemporalLich]

2-Shot Townie would be an example of a red herring modifier - do you really think "Twice in the game during night, you have no special abilities." makes sense?

I can't tell if that would crash or not. I'm not a programmer. But you're basically adding a Named Townie and Named isn't Normal.

[Gypyx]

Combined Cop would technically be correct but also is wrong - You're meant to put at least two things in a Combined container but it's not like you're going to crash the game if Combined has 1 or 0 things in it.

well, a Mafia combined cop would be forced to have the same target for a Factional Kill and Cop action right?