Mini Normal 2119 [game over]

[Menalque]

I just don’t really buy that when you have a full:

Roleblocker — able to soft guilty and later on hard guilty
Rolestopper — full protective
Cop — snm fam
Tracker/follower — potentially able to hard
Ascetic — weak negative utility

Vs

Activated ascetic doctor — doctor bit does nothing, activated ascetic makes more susp than not
Encryptor — hard negative utility
1s strongman — only strongly positive scum role

[Alisae]

mena read my comments on the setup in the dead PT

[Menalque]

There are two roles there able to hard guilty from N1 and another role able to soft guilty and potentially hard guilty if they survive long enough

AND a full protective for those roles, should they out bit by bit

[Menalque]

Subject: Mini Normal 2119 [dead pt]

Alisae I will be interested in hearing your thoughts about the setup after the game.

pedit: Datisi your conclusion I think was the whole point of the setup. "So town sided as to be balanced".

town informed cop [there is a doctor]
town odd night roleblocker
town rolestopper
7 VTs

vs.

scum ascetic informed doctor [there is a cop]
informed goon [there is an odd night roleblocker]
even night strongman

that was deemed to be to scumsided so we adjusted the ascetic to be activatable, made the goon an ecrypter, and made the strongman 1-shot.
We then ungated the roleblocker, added a combined tracker/follower.

this leaves us with

Town Informed Cop (there's a doctor)
Town Roleblocker
Town Rolestopper
Town Combined Follower/Tracker
Town Ascetic

vs.
Scum Informed Doctor Activated Ascetic (there is a cop)
Informed Encrypter (there's a roleblocker)
1s Strongman

The idea was that scum's strength was the information it had and to adjust their strategy going into the day with that information.
The 1-shot strongman was supposed to go first. Bussing that gives scum a lot of room to discredit claims.
Apparently, according to NRG, this is 50/50 balanced but swingy and I don't mind swing so...

This one?

[Alisae]

Alisae I will be interested in hearing your thoughts about the setup after the game.

pedit: Datisi your conclusion I think was the whole point of the setup. "So town sided as to be balanced".

town informed cop [there is a doctor]
town odd night roleblocker
town rolestopper
7 VTs

vs.

scum ascetic informed doctor [there is a cop]
informed goon [there is an odd night roleblocker]
even night strongman

that was deemed to be to scumsided so we adjusted the ascetic to be activatable, made the goon an ecrypter, and made the strongman 1-shot.
We then ungated the roleblocker, added a combined tracker/follower.

this leaves us with

Town Informed Cop (there's a doctor)
Town Roleblocker
Town Rolestopper
Town Combined Follower/Tracker
Town Ascetic

vs.
Scum Informed Doctor Activated Ascetic (there is a cop)
Informed Encrypter (there's a roleblocker)
1s Strongman

The idea was that scum's strength was the information it had and to adjust their strategy going into the day with that information.
The 1-shot strongman was supposed to go first. Bussing that gives scum a lot of room to discredit claims.
Apparently, according to NRG, this is 50/50 balanced but swingy and I don't mind swing so...

OK so now all the roles are out there. So yeah my partner 1 shotted the cop through both a roleblock and rolestop. After that we had no more power left to do anything except hope and pray that town lynched their rolestopper so that we wouldn't be left with cop #2 (follower/tracker) plus doctor #2 (rolestopper) plus a roleblocker.

pedit: Looker like I said we had to kill you because we feared you most.

I mean, if you flip a 1-SHOT Strongman first, this becomes a lot easier, the investigatives don't have macho, you argue that the setup was designed around FTC as all well designed setups are.

Unfortunately that happens.
Yes this is how I wanted you to play, but by making you guys informed of what town has in store, these are things you can reasonably conclude yourself.

telling Chemist to claim Cop is another thing.
If you can get the cop outed, then you have an easy strongman on the Cop. You know you're getting value out of it.

the 1-shot strongman here was designed around being lynched.
Playing scum in this setup means you're going to learn something from this game about how you play around roles and thinking about that. Its supposed to teach you how to play around setups that seem really townsided.

I gave you the tools you needed, you just need to think about what the best way of using them is.

[Menalque]

What does FTC mean in this context btw?

[Alisae]

you have 2 ways of playing this
A. getting chemist to out the cop early by claiming cop
B. Using the fact that the doctor looks good within the setup and lynching the strongman, and using the strongman to discredit claims.

pedit: Follow the Cop

[Menalque]

Oh, follow the cop

I couldn’t stop thinking final tribal council for some reason

[Menalque]

you have 2 ways of playing this
A. getting chemist to out the cop early by claiming cop
B. Using the fact that the doctor looks good within the setup and lynching the strongman, and using the strongman to discredit claims.

pedit: Follow the Cop

I mean, I did tell chem to do that he just saw it too late RIP

The reason I think it’s townsided is that even considering it a swingy setup, I nailed it in terms of when to use my strongman shot, and we played a solid scumgame but still it came down to the line and was somewhat dependent on luck (icon fluffing his result, slaxx self hammering, one slot being absent for most of the game) to make it that far, and while the nightkills being fairly dictated helped to an extent bc of it meaning a lack of a need to explain my aliveness it also severely limited options in terms of what to do bc town power simply HAD to be dealt with all the time. Like yes, D1 was bad for us, but I don’t think it should have felt like we were on the back foot for quite so much of the game considering that we played pretty well for that 1 day going badly

[Alisae]

Okay but you can deal with the town power.
You have the information, you need to be smart about it.

Your biggest tool when it comes to dealing with the amount of town power is to discredit it using information that was previously flipped.
For example, if you commit to a strongman bus, you can use that flip to discredit the roleblocker. You can use Chemist claiming doctor to discredit the rolestopper

[Alyssa The Lamb]

you have 2 ways of playing this
A. getting chemist to out the cop early by claiming cop

Unless the idea is to identify the cop by how people respond to the claim, I'd be very wary about this strategy.

From an outsider's perspective, the idea of FTC from the Cop's point of view is so obvious that it feels like a setup in the first place considering how strong that strategy is in the average game. Someone out of nowhere claiming cop, unless it's really carefully done, runs the risk of making it obvious to the cop that the doctor probably also knows they are in the game and are probably also scum just by how they're playing it.

At that point, there's no real reason to out at all, since if you can get another guilty, you get 2 scum for your own death.

This isn't going to be every scenario where this strategy is used, but I can see especially mechanically-minded players running through this type of thought process in response to it.

[mastina]

I agree it’s swingy and I think part of the reason I thought it was so townsided was because of the wrong power dying on D1 but I don’t think that should be enough to doom your game in any circumstance and it very nearly did.

Well to be blunt--if the strongest role for a faction dies in the first phase, the other faction should be rewarded for eliminating the strongest threat to their faction. (Or maybe, if the strongest role for a faction dies in the first phase, that faction should be punished for allowing that loss to happen, but I realize that this definition is less optimal because sometimes it's out of your hands. Scum three-man scumblocking, pushing hard, trying to throw everything and the kitchen sink, and yet somehow the town gets a D1 scumlynch on the strongest PR anyway? Not much they can do about that. Scum nightkill the strongest town PR N1? Not much the town can do about that. Which is why I favor the 'reward opposite faction' definition over the 'punish the faction' definition.)

If the town eliminates the strongest scum PR on D1, the town should be rewarded for having done so. Most mini normals only have an average of one scum power role; if two goons decide to let their only scum PR die D1, then no duh they are going to have a much harder, rougher time? Because the game wasn't balanced around that abnormality happening. If something has a 1/13 chance at happening, then 12/13 times, it doesn't happen, which means in 12/13 situations, the town isn't rewarded and the scum aren't punished.

So if a statistical fluke, a statistical abnormality, happens, it is going to skew the balance of the rest of the game.

[Alisae]

you have 2 ways of playing this
A. getting chemist to out the cop early by claiming cop

Unless the idea is to identify the cop by how people respond to the claim, I'd be very wary about this strategy.

From an outsider's perspective, the idea of FTC from the Cop's point of view is so obvious that it feels like a setup in the first place considering how strong that strategy is in the average game. Someone out of nowhere claiming cop, unless it's really carefully done, runs the risk of making it obvious to the cop that the doctor probably also knows they are in the game and are probably also scum just by how they're playing it.

At that point, there's no real reason to out at all, since if you can get another guilty, you get 2 scum for your own death.

This isn't going to be every scenario where this strategy is used, but I can see especially mechanically-minded players running through this type of thought process in response to it.

oh me and duckie agreed that no one would actually go out of their way to try and persue FTC as an actual strategy

[Alisae]

also chemist WAS the doctor in that situation and was the person holding hte information that there was a cop, so I'm not sure how you get 2 scum from that.

[mastina]

Activated ascetic doctor — doctor bit does nothing, activated ascetic makes more susp than not

Don't forget that the doctor had information about the cop and the cop had information about the doctor--check out Mystery Box of Silver 4 (I think it was 4 anyway) for how that dynamic plays out. The mafia role instantly pegged the town investigative and N1 nightkilled them, with the town being completely and entirely blindsided 100% unaware of this dynamic with no possible way of having caught it. The town had no way of having figured it out, but the scum did.

The weapons of the scum faction are:
Information and their Nightkill.
The Information of the doctor, and with the ability to easily peg the cop with that information, with the cop thinking that the doctor is town, are strongly advantageous to the doctor.

Additionally, so long as there isn't only one scum alive (and to reiterate--if there's only one scum left alive, the town SHOULD be rewarded for this!), the mafia doctor should never be making the nightkill. Thus, the mafia doctor should be using either their ascetic or their doctor action every single night.

If the doctor uses their ascetic, they are investigation-immune to both the cop and the tracker, and the town doesn't have a way to figure out the source of the failure. (Keep in mind, with both a roleblocker and a rolestopper, there's any number of possible failure causes.)
If the doctor uses their doctor action, they are creating a false innocent for the tracker/follower. This means that if the tracker/follower track/follows the mafia doctor, they will falsely clear the mafia doctor--this is, effectively, a GODFATHER CLEAR.

The Mafia Doctor had a way to make themselves town to BOTH town investigatives--you're dismissing the power of what was essentially a full godfather in a Normal game. It could become town to the cop simply by the cop knowing there's a doctor in the game and the doctor knowing there's a cop in the game so communicating this to each other results in them mutually self-clearing each other; it could become town to the tracker/follower simply by using the protection action on any player the mafia weren't nightkilling that was a plausible protection coming from them.

The strongest role wasn't your strongman; it was your doctor.

[Alisae]

1-shot strongman isn't enough
its better to bus it and use that flip to discredit prs

[mastina]

Scum ascetic is one of the strongest roles scum can have.
Scum are already the informed minority--giving them additional information increases the odds they will win.
The play on information is likely to falsely conftown a scumslot or falsely damn a town slot, either of which vastly increases the odds the scum will win.
Strongman is one of the strongest scum roles possible, especially in a game where the majority of the town's strength comes from a role the strongman punctures (the rolestopper).
Town roles have incredible anti-synergy. Roleblocker and rolestopper very easily can interfere with each other, roleblocker can block the cop, rolestopper can rolestop the cop's target, and these outcomes make the cop less able to generate reliable results--in a setup where one scum already has immunity to the cop (ascetic).

Literally everything in this setup stacks things in the scum's favor and the town has literally nothing going for it.
Plus, MBoS 4 should be a fair indication of what happens when scum are informed of a town role that is informed of the existence of a role in the game but not what alignment said role was.

You know what happened that game?
The town cop role successfully 'crumbed to the scum role, and vice-versa...allowing the scum to make a N1 nightkill on the cop role without any consequence because nobody in the town had the information to pick up on the 'crumb and the information per Normal standards doesn't flip with them so they had no way of gaining said info.

^This is what I said in the review thread. This was about the originally-proposed setup, sure, but even in the changed-into-final version, my comments here are still applicable for where the scum's strength lies and where the weaknesses in the town's strength lied.

You always have to remember that for every perfect storm of how things could go well for a faction there's also a perfect storm of how things could go disastrously for a faction, and how likely each is to happen.

The chances of the town roleblocker/rolestopper fucking with the town's other power is fairly high. (And, sure enough, Datisi blocked town!)
The chances of the scum identifying the cop early and eliminating them are very high. (Ehhh, not going to say this happened in the way which it'd have been most likely to have.)
The chances of the scum's strongest role being lynched on D1 are very, very low. (And yet it happened.)

[Alisae]

People should really consider player's roles when bussing

[Alisae]

again, my only real regret was maybe adding the town ascetic was too much

[mastina]

Chemist1422 (7)

: Iconeum, GuiltyLion, bji, bob3141, Menalque, Datisi, Looker

Looker (4)

: Chemist1422, wilky, emps, AaronFrost
not voting: Pine, Tchill13

(To illustrate what I mean here--both scum were on Chemist here. If both scum were instead on Looker, then Looker would've been at L-1 with Tchill being a player who probably would hammer him, and Chemist would've peaked at at-most 5 votes and wouldn't have even needed to claim. Or if he did need to claim, your team would've had more time to discuss what the claim should've been, how to claim, when to do it, etc. The double-bus on the scum's strongest PR directly led to the death of said strongest PR, which was easily 'avoidable'*. Avoid the double-bus of the scum's godfatheresque role, and the town has a much, much harder time getting a lynch on scum and a harder time throughout the game.)

*As I said, a town

can

get seven votes onto scum, even the scum's strongest power role! Can. In very, very rare cases. Statistically speaking, it has happened before but it is a statistical abnormality. First off, games where towns lynch scum on D1 are in the minority. Say the town lynches scum 30% of the time. Then you need to,

of that 30%

, analyze how many have no scum on the lynchwagon. Of the, in this hypothetical 30%, say only 30% of those games have no scum on the lynchwagon.

30% of 30% of games played, is 9% of games played, where town would have a D1 lynch on scum without the help of scum. I'm totally pulling these statistics out of thin air since I'm not going to go through 2000 games' worth of data to find how many games had a D1 scumlynch and how many of said D1 scumlynches were all town, but you get the idea.

And then, you could go one step further--there's a 1/3 chance that a D1 scumlynch is on the scumteam's strongest power role. (This is an exact statistic due to three scum in a game, obviously. So, this one's not pulled out of my ass and is for sure 33.33% without any shadow of a doubt.) 33% of the hypothetical 9%, is 2.97%.

If there were only a 2.97% chance of the strongest scum PR being lynched on D1 in an all-town wagon...

...Yeah, that's a statistical abnormality; that's something the town absolutely should be rewarded for.
So, like. When I say "avoidable", it's not 100% avoidable. But it'd be something like 97.03% avoidable. A 97.03% chance, you could avoid the lynch of your strongest scum PR on D1.

If there's a 97.03% chance the lynch of the strongest scum PR is avoidable on D1...then uhhhhhhh...what does it say when the strongest scum PR is lynched on D1?

[Chemist1422]

it says that it is definitely not the fault of the person who subbed into that scum PR slot at L-2

[mastina]

While I'm not going to do 2k games' worth of research, I did research comparable-sized games that have not been archived:
2085*--no scum lynched D1 (12p, three groupscum)
2088*--no scum lynched D1 (12p, three groupscum)
2092--no scum lynched D1
2076--scum lynched D1; double-bus (hard to say if strongest)
2117--no scum lynched D1
2115--scum lynched D1; one scum bussed (strongest role)
2113--no scum lynched D1
2111--no scum lynched D1
2114--scum lynched D1; no scum bussed (strongest role*; scum had UB so losing their role D1 didn't hurt them)
2121--no scum lynched D1
2124--scum lynched D1; one scum bussed (negative-utility scum role; scum wanted it dead)
2122--no scum lynched D1

So, of 12 other completed mini normals beyond this one, four have had D1 scum lynches. In this small, 12-game, sample size, that's 25% of games having a D1 scum lynch.

Of those D1 scum lynches, only one had it be the strongest scum role, but with the caveat of scum having a Universal Backup and thus, not having lost anything. (And another one of those games had the scum lynch a tracker-enabler buddy, thus, disabling the tracker for that game.)

Of the 25% of D1 scum lynches, only one had no scum involved. 25% of 25%. In our sample size of 12 games, only 6.25% of them had a D1 scum lynch that scum could NOT avoid. Only 6.25% of them had a D1 scum lynch that scum had no contributions towards.
It happens that of that 6.25%, 100% of it just so happens to have been the scum's strongest scum PR, albeit with that caveat that when the scum have a Universal Backup, that's the one time losing their strongest scum PR immediately isn't inherently necessarily detrimental. (And could be, maybe, potentially, theoretically, possibly advantageous if the town thinks that due to the scum PR being dead that with it out of the game scum couldn't be using its powers anymore.)

Like I said, very small sample size, too lazy to dig up statistic beyond this, but this should give you a basic idea of how much of a statistical abnormality it is for the town to lynch the scum's strongest PR without it basically being hand-fed to them.

Town's are, by and large, not as smart as scum think they are. Scum have this weird tendency to bus scumbuddies on D1 far more often than what would actually be necessary since the town on D1 has a much much much harder time than people think of lynching scum.

[Looker]

it says that it is definitely not the fault of the person who subbed into that scum PR slot at L-2

I was rooting for you

[Menalque]

I think this is almost changing from one question into two. The main issue at stake is whether the setup was townsided in and of itself, which I think it was. How much of this comes from a personal opinion that town should rarely, if ever, be able to win through relying on PRs is probably up for debate, but that is the POV I’m coming at it from. I also don’t disagree that there should be negatives for a scum team to losing

any

member on D1 and positives for town for lynching scum on D1.

However, the question is how long those things should last before good

play

comes back into things. Why was that slot caught in the first place? GL and icon doing an excellent job of scumhunting on D1, purely based on play and before PRs came into things. It was very well played by town and deserved to confer advantages. But after that lynch we were on the back foot for most of the game, and if slaxx hadn’t self voted then winning would have been significantly harder regardless of how well we were playing and how well what we had was used. If the game can go, with one role out of 13 being lynched on D1, to the point of being unwinnable without significant luck and regardless of play on behalf of one side then I’m sorry, but it’s unbalanced in favour of whichever side has that advantage. Like imagine a world in which icon doesn’t misunderstand his result, Aaron doesn’t out, and/or slaxx doesn’t self hammer. Bji and I played well here, I used my role basically perfectly, and we would still have been absolutely losing an overwhelming amount of the time. I don’t see how that’s balanced. If the argument is that we should just have played better or harder — okay, maybe, but at what point do you get to an unrealistic expectation of your scum!players? Again, bji and I played pretty damn well here but those flukes of chance were still NECESSARY for us to turn this from a loss to a win.

Putting us at a major disadvantage for a couple of days? Sure, that seems fair. But by D4 the game still felt stacked in favour of town and that’s after we’d had great strokes of luck regarding early mass claim and lynching a PR. We also managed to get TR throughout most of the game, so if the answer is “scum should just have played better” — okay, how? What could we have done to be playing better here? I’m sure there are things, but fundamentally our play was sound.

Taking all that into account, I think it’s very fair to say the setup was townsided. If town gain an advantage only reconcilable through luck or unreasonable expectations of skill from the scumteam based on one particular scumlynch on D1 then you’re beyond swing and into imbalance. Just what I think, and to be clear I still very much enjoyed the game and did enjoy the setup.

*****

Also, the chemist lynch was not avoidable from a gamestate pov, which is the other issue to be addressed. The slot was intensely scummy, and was always going to be tarnished by ceejay and bugs regardless of how towny Chem started playing, in the same way that emps was always the thorn in micc’s side despite him towning it UP after he got into the game. But I digress — chemist was always going to be looked at with suspicion, and that means that saving him would have meant that everyone in that wagon was going to be much harder to kill and suspicion would have been a lot harder on me and bji.

That bus won us the game by allowing the narratives of “bussing was unlikely” and “there can’t have been a double bus” to be created and to dictate the progression of the game from that point onwards. The question of the double bus was

still

being brought up in lylo, and icon can tell us if not, but I suspect that was one factor that played into his micc vote.

[Menalque]

Town's are, by and large, not as smart as scum think they are. Scum have this weird tendency to bus scumbuddies on D1 far more often than what would actually be necessary since the town on D1 has a much much much harder time than people think of lynching scum.

I don’t think this is wrong, per se, but I do think it’s looking at things too much in the short term. The question is not “can we, as scum, prevent the scum lynch on D1?” The question is “does bussing or not bussing do the best job of setting us up for a victory by lylo, and what will the consequences be for the rest of the team if this slot does flip scum?”

I think a looker lynch into a likely chemist!lynch D2 where bji and I were on looker not on Chem is losing in this game.