Changes to Normal Games (update September 2022)

[Frogsterking]

Hello everyone! For the first time in years, I'm updating the rules and guidelines for normal games. Feel free to discuss any of it in this thread.

Is it possible to elaborate any more on the tier list, like the process of making it and the rationale or statistics on some of the placements? Having played lots of strategy games, I think interest in tier lists is fairly widespread (there was a whole fad recently on Youtube where chess GMs would upload videos placing chess openings on a tier list) and I'm probably not the only person who read the update and was interested in reading more about the tier list.

[Frogsterking]

Mild: these roles can have impact, but it's expected that in many games, their impact will be incidental, they require interactions with other roles to be useful, or they provide just a small amount of insight into the game. Reviewers will sometimes suggest adding one of them to tip the balance slightly, and you can usually add them to setups without them changing much.

Motion Detector, Shield, Role cop, Hider, Commuter, Vanilla Cop, Security Guard, Finder, Role Watcher, Voyeur, Inspector

Nil: these roles are typically not expected to help the town, unless there is some specific setup aspect that is designed to make them useful. They may still be powerful if given certain modifiers (for example, "loyal neighborizer" would probably be fit to place in the highest tier).

Neighborizer, Visionary, Fruit Vendor, Checker, Mailman, Neighbor, Encryptor, Miller, Visitor

How strong could a role cop, hider, checker or visionary with no modifiers become if you built a setup around them?

[Frogsterking]

Role cop can be almost as powerful as a cop, for instance if you give the mafia 3 mafia-exclusive (or at least shady) roles and ideally town some that they can find. Still won't be as powerful because they can't clear vanilla players.

Unmodified hider is ultimately strictly weaker than a bulletproof, which itself is a very swingy role that depends on how townread the player who gets it is. It's hard to make it have much power without modifiers, and I can't think of much you could do to build around it.

Checker has the potential to be powerful but only if the setup is built *heavily* around it and it's given some way to know how powerful it is. For instance, you could make some of the mafia ascetic and make some player informed of that.

Visionary is hard to make particularly powerful; you'd want lots of scum with active roles that are hard to claim and town with active roles that are easy to claim, or something like that, but I'm not certain. Maybe someone else has a better idea, there could be some way.

Thank you! I was afraid I wasn't that clear.

I have a follow up question:

Mild: these roles can have impact, but it's expected that in many games, their impact will be incidental, they require interactions with other roles to be useful, or they provide just a small amount of insight into the game. Reviewers will sometimes suggest adding one of them to tip the balance slightly, and you can usually add them to setups without them changing much.

Motion Detector, Shield, Role cop, Hider, Commuter, Vanilla Cop, Security Guard, Finder, Role Watcher, Voyeur, Inspector

Nil: these roles are typically not expected to help the town, unless there is some specific setup aspect that is designed to make them useful. They may still be powerful if given certain modifiers (for example, "loyal neighborizer" would probably be fit to place in the highest tier).

Neighborizer, Visionary, Fruit Vendor, Checker, Mailman, Neighbor, Encryptor, Miller, Visitor

Based also on your earlier comments about the potential power of shield, I take it that the shield, motion detector and rolecop are placed toward the top of mild because that tier shift between mild and moderate indicates a turning point where roles start to have a more significant impact. Likewise, an unmodified Hider and below are roles that aren't really expected to be able to achieve a similar magnitude of impact that the moderate and sometimes the top of mild tier can achieve. Am I interpreting it correctly?

Also, what factors were taken into account which caused the visionary to be placed at the top of nill tier and above the checker?

[Frogsterking]

Shield and motion detector both have the ability to impact the game significantly (by catching a scum); it's just that both of them require very precise circumstances for that to happen. Role cop is near the top because it's pretty typical for it to have something useful that it can find, be it a scummy-looking mafia role or some townie with a role that can't belong to mafia. And yeah, the things below role cop on the mild list are increasingly less and less likely to have that kind of material impact on the game, or require more and more of the setup to be designed around them in order for them to be useful.

That placement with this explanation really clicks with me.

don't think there's a particularly cogent reason that visionary was put above checker in the nil list;

probably just that visionary *can* "generate its own information"

and checker is useful only in the context of setup that's built around it (or some modifier like loyal).

LOL @ the bolded.

I was thinking a setup where PRs have the loud modifier might be good with a visionary.

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Thank you for answering all my questions! The tier list is a cool idea and it's helped me a lot already with understanding night play. I don't have any more questions about it now but I'm sure one will pop into my head soonish.