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They visibly different in the game. The Mailman's role clearly states that they must be different.

I do not want to confirm this, because by doing that I will inadvertently confirm that there is a Mailman in the game, which I don't think I should be doing as a game mod.

Saying this here + via PM:

it doesn't confirm the existence of a mailman. If there was no mailman in this game, and a player asked you if the message from a friendly neighbor is different from the message a mailman would give, the answer would still be the same: "yes, they're different messages". Ergo, answering "yes, this message came from a friendly neighbor and a mailman's message wouldn't be different" doesn't confirm anything; you're basically saying "if there's a mailman in the game, then they couldn't have sent you this message" without confirming whether or not a mailman exists.

Saying this here and via PM:

Oh and also, I will add 36 hours to the Day 2 timer in case the players feel like they’ve wasted their time arguing about this. This will happen in about 8 hours as I am at work right now and posting this on my phone.

Thanks.

I do think it's worth it to figure out where the discrepancy in understanding is, though - why do you think players will assume that there's a mailman in the game?

Or put another way, what do you think would/should be different about this response if there was no mailman? I argue you can give the exact same response if there's no mailman, so giving that response can't possibly lead a player to validly conclude that there is a mailman. (They could conclude it, but they'd only be accidentally correct in this case.)

This is the PM that was sent out as a result of a FN action. The title was „Looks like you got a Message!”.

PM wrote:

You have received the following message:

Message

(redacted)

is aligned with the

town

.

Here is the role description from the wiki page, which I followed while designing the setup and making the roles.

Friendly Neighbor wrote:A Friendly Neighbor can target a player at Night to tell them that they are Town. The target will receive a message saying that the Friendly Neighbor is Town. This role does nothing else - the Friendly Neighbor does not know the alignment of the person who got the message.

I believe that the message sent out meets the wiki description quite literally. So if a player wants to know what a Friendly Neighbor does in a Normal Game they can open up the wiki page and check.

Which means that there is no deviation or ambiguity from what is expected in a Normal Game.

The Mailman, on the other hand, may be anonymous or not. I opted for a middle option which discloses the fact that the message is from a Mailman - this is stated in the role description.

The players are able to piece this information on their own if they choose to do so. The Mailman can literally just safely claim that he’s a Town Mailman and the ability would look exactly the same. As a matter of fact, the player who rolled Friendly Neighbor already caught on to this and pointed it out. Which is basically proof that mod intervention to solve this is unnecessary.

And I think that there is a lot of danger with these theoretical questions that on surface don’t reveal the setup, but the answered provides an outlook into technicalities which were left vague deliberately. The Friendly Neighbor is very obviously a counterweight to the Mafia Mailman. The message from the Friendly Neighbor has been created in such a way to give out less information in order to combat the fact that many players might think that it would be unlikely for both of these roles to appear in the same game as the same alignment.

Maybe I wasn’t 100% clear about what I meant and didn’t finish my train of thought here.

The setup has been designed in a way to both meet Normal Game standards and provide careful bits of information to everyone in order to make it balanced. So the similarities and differences between the FN and Mailman roles are intentional and a part of the game’s balanced mechanic. I feel that if, as a mod I start to disclose the way these roles work to players who do not have them, I am starting to give out information that may influence the balance of the game.

Also, I am not prepared to answer questions like „what if there is a Town Neapolitan in the game and does x”? The question is theoretical, but the answer may give out unnecessary information about the balance of the game and may lead the player to conclude that there isn’t, in fact, a Town Neapolitan in this game. And I think that if I start tampering with this then I’m interfering with the game.

Which is why my opinion stands, but you’re the listmod here and I am not going to argue with that.

It’s just I need my laptop to do all this and can’t do this at work because my activity on my work computer is monitored.

And also, if the person who rolled Friendly Neighbor chose to ask how the role works, I would have absolutely no problem in explaining it to them. And it’s their decision how to use this information, disclose it or not. But I received questions from players who did not get those roles.

Fyi it's done.

In post 50, Greeting wrote:They

are

visibly different in the game. The Mailman's role clearly states that they must be different.

I do not want to confirm this, because by doing that I will inadvertently confirm that there is a Mailman in the game, which I don't think I should be doing as a game mod.

That's the thing though.

A friendly neighbor, by design, NEEDS to be mod confirmed. It needs to be mod confirmed that it is NOT a mailman, that it IS a friendly neighbor.

Confirming that a friendly neighbor is a friendly neighbor and not a mailman does not imply one way or another the existence of a mailman. A mailman could exist, a mailman could not exist, it literally doesn't matter. The important thing is that a Friendly Neighbor result should never need to ask "hey is this from a mailman?" because they should know that, no, it is not, that yes, it is a mod confirmation that the player in question is town.

In post 59, mastina wrote:

In post 50, Greeting wrote:They

are

visibly different in the game. The Mailman's role clearly states that they must be different.

I do not want to confirm this, because by doing that I will inadvertently confirm that there is a Mailman in the game, which I don't think I should be doing as a game mod.

That's the thing though.

A friendly neighbor, by design, NEEDS to be mod confirmed. It needs to be mod confirmed that it is NOT a mailman, that it IS a friendly neighbor.

Confirming that a friendly neighbor is a friendly neighbor and not a mailman does not imply one way or another the existence of a mailman. A mailman could exist, a mailman could not exist, it literally doesn't matter. The important thing is that a Friendly Neighbor result should never need to ask "hey is this from a mailman?" because they should know that, no, it is not, that yes, it is a mod confirmation that the player in question is town.

It doesn't say so in the wiki nor does it say so in the Normal Game guidelines. I literally made a role and used it in accordance with the description provided on the wiki.

Which is why I think this was interference in the game.

We can drop this though. I did what you guys wanted and to be fair, being a good game mod is more important to me than forcing everyone to accept my views.

In my next game I think I will remove the alt rule and also the replacement rule. There will be no requirement for explanation past prod 2, I will just replace out players on the third strike automatically.

These rules have been unpopular and probably only caused unnecessary trouble for me.

But this game will continue as it is, rules will not change unless it is absolutely necessary.