Changes to Normal Games (update September 2022)

[Umlaut]

I've been kinda, out of it lately, mostly because, well, covid world does that to you. I just finished my last quarter of the school year though and summer should afford me a fair amount more mental space to allocate, I should be able to throw a new batch of roles out at some point.

Looks like summer has come and gone, which is fine -- we're not owed new roles at any particular rate -- but I'm wondering if any progress was ever made on this?

[implosion]

Alas, yeah...... this still nags my brain from time to time but i'm doing a poor enough job at focusing on RL tasks right now that I don't really have strong intentions to do it soon. I made some progress behind the scenes back then in soliciting feedback from NRG folks but never really crystallized that into the actual update. That said: I have not forgotten about it.

[TemporalLich]

I've been adding quite a bit of roles to the wiki, let me know if you want me to pick out some ones that could be worthy of being Normal

[TemporalLich]

How do post limiting rules fall under Normality?

Those like no tiny text or no black box spoiler tags (or no provable randomness before it became a site rule) should be Normal even if unannounced.

I'd assume innocuous post limiting rules such as no triple posting or Geriatric Ruleset or an absolute limit such as no more than 100 posts per 24 hours are Normal only if they are announced in signups.

As for post limiting rules that unduly change the meta such as relative posting limits (e.g. limiting posts if you have more than twice the median number of posts) or actual baked in post restrictions (e.g. you can't use the word "town") or collective limits (limits on the entire player list), those should not be Normal.

[victor11]

Looking for feedback, all.

If one were to make a single-ball with 34 players, what's the highest number of Mafia members you would include while keeping it balanced?

Somewhere around 5-6. Depends upon the PRS though

[Umlaut]

Ridiculous questions about backups that will probably never come up in practice but that made me say "hmmm":

If a 1-Shot Backup Tracker tries to track someone before a Tracker has died (who knows why, maybe they misunderstood the role PM), does this failed attempt use up their one shot?

If there are two Backup Trackers, does one dying activate the other one (since a Backup Tracker is a Tracker with a modifier)?

[Ythan]

If a 1-Shot Backup Tracker tries to track someone before a Tracker has died (who knows why, maybe they misunderstood the role PM), does this failed attempt use up their one shot?

One shot backup or backup one shot? I'm joking but also maybe.

[Cook]

Ridiculous questions about backups that will probably never come up in practice but that made me say "hmmm":

If a 1-Shot Backup Tracker tries to track someone before a Tracker has died (who knows why, maybe they misunderstood the role PM), does this failed attempt use up their one shot?

If there are two Backup Trackers, does one dying activate the other one (since a Backup Tracker is a Tracker with a modifier)?

i would resolve the targeting issue as if a backup was a scheduling restriction ("cannot target until someone of this role is dead") and thus the target is wholly invalid. no shot is taken.

the second, under your logic would result in the backup tracker's scheduling restriction being cleared. i'm not sure if this is Role As Intended, though.

[Datisi]

If there are two Backup Trackers, does one dying activate the other one (since a Backup Tracker is a Tracker with a modifier)?

i asked a similar question in one review for a completed normal (only with mafia backup ascetics instead), and i believe the answer is no.

[Not Known 15]

If there are two Backup Trackers, does one dying activate the other one (since a Backup Tracker is a Tracker with a modifier)?

i asked a similar question in one review for a completed normal (only with mafia backup ascetics instead), and i believe the answer is no.

I believe the answer is yes.
Backup is a modifier. The backup tracker is still a tracker.
A Night 50 Vigilante dying would activate a backup Vig regardless of night.

[TemporalLich]

yeah, I believe backup is a modifier instead of a derived role, so two backups of the same role and no non-backups of that role is not a red herring setup. Dual backups are a clear example of Negative Feedback however (unless the backup is for a negative utility role)

and yeah I'd treat backup as a scheduling restriction - which means you could have backup informed to get information when an informed player dies (which does not need to be the same info)

[Datisi]

I believe the answer is yes.
Backup is a modifier. The backup tracker is still a tracker.

okay, but consider this:

Spoiler:

so if i had three mafia backup ascetics, and one of them died, the other two would become full ascetics, right?

my answer to that i think would be no, because a backup ascetic would only active when an ascetic died, not when a backup ascetic died.

again, this is just my interpretation (cough cough

@implo

), but i'm decently sure that this is how it works?

Pretty sure you got it right.

I believe nsg/mastina are right. I think "backup" is sort of a special exception in a sense that a "backup cop" isn't actually a cop yet. Similar to "enabler" which while technically a cop enabler is a modifier applied to a cop, it's not really a cop.

[TemporalLich]

from the wiki page for Backup, emphasis mine: Backup is treated as a

modifier to a role

, causing the role to be unusable and do nothing until another player with the same role (regardless of alignment) has died.

that means dual backups are not red herrings, so if one deputy dies the other deputy becomes a cop

backup would need to be a derived role for dual backups to be red herrings (unless the role exists in the setup otherwise)

cop enabler and cop-finder don't activate a deputy as those are roles derived from cop (also a cop enabler dying would disable a deputy anyway) - deputy would activate a deputy as backup is a modifier for cop

Also consider that Backup is categorized as a schedule restriction (s) in the RolePage template. Schedule restrictions are always modifiers. Backup is explicitly not a derived role for RolePage categories.

Also also consider that Normal Game lists Backup as a modifier and not a role.

[TemporalLich]

The other way to make backups not backup backups is to rewrite the standard role PM for backup to explicitly disallow it (instead of "Each night, but only once a P1 has died,", write "Each night, but only once a non-Backup P1 has died,"), but that would go against NRG consensus - this is easier to do however

note that this shouldn't make dual backups with the actual role more complex than it already is - if there are two deputies and the non-backup cop dies, both deputies become able to cop check

[TemporalLich]

In short: Backup as written can backup backups - removing Backup's ability to do this would shrink Normal design space (which is a bad thing) for no good reason and require making the exception clear in the standard Role PM

[Ircher]

I believe the answer is yes.
Backup is a modifier. The backup tracker is still a tracker.

okay, but consider this:

Spoiler:

so if i had three mafia backup ascetics, and one of them died, the other two would become full ascetics, right?

my answer to that i think would be no, because a backup ascetic would only active when an ascetic died, not when a backup ascetic died.

again, this is just my interpretation (cough cough

@implo

), but i'm decently sure that this is how it works?

Pretty sure you got it right.

I believe nsg/mastina are right. I think "backup" is sort of a special exception in a sense that a "backup cop" isn't actually a cop yet. Similar to "enabler" which while technically a cop enabler is a modifier applied to a cop, it's not really a cop.

It's possible we would revisit this, but I'm inclined to agree with the interpretation given by the NRG reviewers here. (Please note I am not speaking in an official capacity by any means.) It would defy my expectation as a player for there to be two backup cops and for one to suddenly become a cop when the other dies.

Backups are a source of quite a few confusing interactions.

[Gamma Emerald]

From my experience if there’s a Tracker and two Backup Trackers the ruling seems to be the Tracker dying activates both backups

[TemporalLich]

If a Cop-Finder gets a positive result from a Deputy, a Deputy should be able to activate from a Deputy.

[Ythan]

The question of how abilities that effect or detect certain roles react to to modifiers is an interesting one.

[implosion]

I have thought for a long time that backups, if you go down the rabbit hole, are an absolutely endless quagmire of edge cases and contradictions. (Basically what Ircher said, but more strongly)

I think that the answer in this thread, that two backups of the same role should lead to one being activated if the other dies, is the more principled answer. And I definitely was at least partially wrong in my justification in the review Datisi quoted. But at the same time, I think the idea that two backups but no main role means that one backup becomes active if the other dies is deeply unintuitive to someone who does not understand the nuance of the formalization of "backup" that is being used. And one purpose that normal games are supposed to serve is as a mechanical middleground between newbies and themes. Like Ircher said it defies expectations, and the problem with this is that a player with no experience in playing normals should not be at a major mechanical disadvantage to someone who understands the nuances of every role on the whitelist.

[TemporalLich]

I will concede that a backup activating from a backup doesn't sound right with an intuitive understanding of backup (how are you backing up from something that isn't actually what you're backing up from?).

However, as written, a Deputy is still considered to be a Cop for the roles that care about Cops (Deputy, Cop Enabler, and Cop-Finder are the ones I can list off the top of my head).

Backup seems to have a lot of deceptive complexity: for something that literally is just "You can start using your role once someone with your role dies" there are a lot of minutiae (two backups with no primary, multiple backups and the primary dies, depleted x-shots, other modifiers, and JOATs are some minutiae concerning Backup)

Personally I value roles acting consistently rather than intuitively in Normals, and making backup gain "a backup role isn't actually the role until it is active" only makes the role more confusing.

[Ythan]

Ideally there would be a better name for backup that would make the principled answer less unintuitive.

@Imp

[TemporalLich]

Ideally there would be a better name for backup that would make the principled answer less unintuitive.

@Imp

I think the name works well for what it does and I think changing a role's name because of one controversial interaction is undue.

The only name I can think up to replace Backup is pretty much a synonym anyway, and that is

Reserve

.

[Umlaut]

I think it would make more sense to amend the definition of the modifier than to change its name; and I think if the official ruling is that a Backup [Role] ‘should’ only activate when a non-Backup [Role] dies, the definition should in fact be amended to state that explicitly, so that we don’t have the opposite scenario of what implo described: players being at a

disadvantage

because they carefully read and interpreted the rules according to their literal meaning. It would really suck for a player like me or TemporalLich to discover and tease out the implications of some surprising interaction like this in a game we were playing, only to be wrong not because we misread but only because “oh everyone knows what that’s

supposed

to mean.”

[Ythan]

Are there any other modifiers we don't want triggering a backup? If it can just require a non-backup that would be a pretty simple solution.