Changes to Normal Games (update September 2022)

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Is [Ability]-Immune (e.g. Track-Immune) a normal modifier? If not, should it be?

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This thread and the wiki are out of sync regarding Detectives in Normal games.

According to this thread:

Detective: target a player to investigate them and determine if they have attempted to kill someone, successful or not. Resolves after kills.

According to the wiki: "A negative result is returned from players that have never actively killed another player (including players who cannot kill, players who can kill but chose not to, and players who attempted to kill but have had all their attempts blocked or protected against)."

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Having now put a game through the new normal review process:

It's

so much better.

My last two normal reviews before this felt like they were never going to end and I considered at points just withdrawing because I was tired of waiting. Didn't feel like that at all with this game. None of the too-many-cooks feeling of the three-reviewer process, none of the delays of two reviewers agreeing and the third disappearing for a week, and I felt like the game that came out the other end of it was essentially

my

game, as opposed to say my first review where I kind of ended up running a game designed by the review team.

So, whatever my thoughts on the changes to the meaning of Normal itself, I 100% approve of the changes to the review process.

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According to the thread, a player who tried to kill but was blocked would give a positive result to the Detective ("they have attempted to kill someone, successful or not"); according to the wiki it would return a negative ("A negative result is returned from ... players who attempted to kill but have had all their attempts blocked or protected against").

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Actually, should there be a standard place to suggest roles and modifiers for whitelist?

In addition to the [Role]-Immune modifier I suggested before, I can easily think of several other roles and modifiers that I don't believe would be out of place in a Normal game in that they have been used before, don't require any non-normal mechanics, and can be reasonably accounted for in balancing a setup. I'm sure others can think of even more. Instead of keeping this thread going forever and mixing those suggestions in with general critiques of the new normal, it would be nice to have a place to post them and guarantee they'd at least be considered.

I can create a thread for this purpose but I'd prefer to see something with an official stamp of officialness. Also if I want to get a role whitelisted it may be because I want to use it in a game and don't necessarily want to tip my hand to that, so designating someone to accept whitelist suggestions via PM would be nice as well. (And I would be willing to volunteer for that job, as long as it's limited to pre-screening out obviously-not-normal suggestions and posting the rest somewhere for further review.)

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Additional suggestion: have an explicit greylist for experimental purposes, where suggested roles that "could be normal" but that we're unsure how to balance or are otherwise undecided on whitelisting can be included with a restriction of one greylisted role per game,

a la

the old rules. After sufficient playtesting (say, after occurring in

n

completed games), greylisted roles can be reviewed and either promoted to the whitelist or removed. Encourage the NRG to include greylisted roles in NRG-designed setups so that they can be tested.

I think this might actually speed up the adoption of new roles, compared to the pre-change situation of lone mods coming up with their own roles and ideas spreading through word-of-mouth, since anyone who wants to try "something different" but doesn't have an idea can just pick some little-used greylist role. It will add some novelty to normal games since there will be an ever-changing list of new stuff that may appear. And it shouldn't complicate reviews since any given role is still either on the list or it isn't.

Since it's rude to suggest other people take on a bunch of extra work on one's behalf, I also volunteer to do the custodial work of curating such a greylist: reviewing suggestions for

prima facie

viability, adding them, writing standardized role descriptions, tracking their use to determine when they're up for review, and keeping the list up to date.

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I think standardised rulesets should be mandatory for new mods - if someone has successfully modded before and their ruleset has not been a problem, then let them keep it.

This would in practice be a grandfather clause, since no new mods would ever have the opportunity to use their own ruleset and have it not be a problem. Unless you want to include theme game rulesets that have "not been a problem," but those would still have to be reviewed for normality. I don't really like the idea of creating a permanent old-guard class that gets to do things new people don't.

A longer-term way to allow variety without undue extra burden on the reviewer would be to allow itemized changes to a standard template ruleset, so that reviewers can see the changes at a glance instead of digging through the whole text (most of which is boilerplate "how Mafia works" stuff) and can give clear instructions like "1 is good, 2 should be struck, 3 should be worded in this different way."

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Question: I'm thinking about diving into modding my first normal, and the idea of making a custom setup is appealing.
But so is the possibility of tweaking a premade one, or at least choosing from among several so that I'm at least somewhat involved in the setup.

Have you considered looking in the archive of completed normal games for a setup that seems appealing, and tweaking or riffing on that? Many of them would no longer be normal under the new whitelist-only rules and so would need some tweaking to pass review anyway.

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Since this was bumped again I'll point out that, as I mentioned elsewhere, named townies don't appear to be explicitly whitelisted.

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I don't know if this is still the place to suggest roles that could be normal, but I feel there's a place for a role that targets another player and is informed only of whether their action successfully took place or not -- a bit like a visitor except that they are told whether they successfully visited. (I'm open to ideas on what this ought to be called.)

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Actually, I think I like Tagger. With results of form "You tagged [player]" or "You failed to tag [player]".

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I actually agree with conceptualizing Tagger as an investigative role: it's the simplest or least discerning possible investigative, with only one possible result (not counting "no result" as a result).

I'm second-guessing the name though, because it's a bit too close to Tracker and because tagging sounds like doing something

to

the tagged player, marking them or something. I don't love the Fruit names either because they imply a relationship to Fruit Vendor that I don't think is really there (how can I connoiter fruit from someone who doesn't have any?). I'd want something that implies a sort of "checking-in" that just verifies the person could be found. Spotter?

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Checker is good too. The PM results of "You spotted/failed to spot X" are a bit more natural and flavorful than "You checked/failed to check X" but that's a minor thing.

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Thanks for the updates!

Would a Tracker-Finder (for example) get a positive result on a JOAT one of whose abilities is tracking, or only on someone whose role name includes the word "Tracker"?

If someone is targeted twice by the same player at night (say there's a Mafia Multitasking Roleblocker who both roleblocks and kills them) will that player's role appear once or twice in the Role Watcher's results?

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"Yo dawg, I heard you like Finder-Finders so I made you a Finder-Finder-Finder so you can find your Finder-Finders while they're finding your Finders."
^ role PM for my next game

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This still seems to be the usual thread for general questions about Normal rules, so here's a general question.

If a Traffic Analyst targets a Night 2 Mailman on Night 1, or an X-Shot Mailman who has used all their shots, my understanding is they should get a negative result. Is this understanding correct?

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I doubt that redirection of any kind will ever be normal.

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If Superstar announces the full role it's actually pretty cool. You could have e.g. a Cop who can mod-confirm themselves to be a Cop (but not necessarily Town).

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Does a Mafia Nurse have a gun? If not, should this be specified on the Gunsmith page?

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The only roles on the no-gun list for Mafia are Traitor and Doctor, and I don't think anyone's likely to include a Backup Traitor in a game¹, so just adding Nurse explicitly ought to be fine if it's supposed to be there.

1. Though now that I've thought of it I kind of want to.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Another example:

• It seems mostly agreed that e.g. a Mafia Loyal Rolestopper can still carry out the factional kill against town, mostly because that's how everyone wants it to work. This means the Loyal modifier attaches only to the abilities of the role it modifies.
  
• There is precedent that Mafia Loud Goon is an acceptable normal role and that it will commit the factional kill loudly, implying the Loud modifier attaches to all active abilities including factional ones.

Is this a contradiction? Only under an overly formalistic interpretation where each modifier must fall into one of a number of categories and all modifiers in that category have to have the same scope. In practice no one cares, and this is just resolved by the obvious intent of the setup designer.

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this is all just semantics

Yes, the process of assigning meaning to syntactically well-formed expressions literally is semantics

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Actually the comment about modifiers that should be roles is a good excuse for me to segue into the point that Enabler is almost certainly misclassified as a modifier rather than a modular role. In particular I think most people would agree that e.g. a Cop-Enabler should not be considered a kind of Cop, for the purpose of questions like "do they have a gun?" or "what result will they return to a Cop-Finder?" or "should a Deputy become a (disabled) Cop if they die?"

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The wiki page Normal Game lists it as a modifier.

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It's interesting that these would elevate the concepts of elo/melo into actual "rules of the game" territory, rather than being derived concepts emerging from the rules as I have always considered them to be.

I'm worried that any attempt to define precisely when a game is in ELo/MeLo is likely to have annoyingly counterintuitive edge cases. For example it could occur that Mafia would choose to no-kill in a situation where any kill would win them the game because they are worried about some possible combination of roles getting them in trouble if they kill the wrong person (even though that combination of roles doesn't actually exist in the setup, they might think it does). In that case has the Mafia already won or not? We can give general guidelines but in the end it is always a moderator judgment call, which means that whether the game was in ELo/MeLo the day before is a judgment call too, which means that as it stands the operation of a role with a ELo/MeLo modifier is subjective.

(Also ELo and MeLo are usually descriptions of a day phase whereas most roles function at night)

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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?

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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)?

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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.”

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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.

Enabler is currently listed as a modifier on the Normal Game page, but I think it's generally agreed this is just incorrect and Enabler is actually a modular role like Finder.

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speaking about base roles:

Am I right in thinking a Jack-of-all-trades (Cop, Doctor) can activate a Deputy, gives a positive result to a Cop-Finder and Gunsmith, and can lose their Cop shot from a dead Cop-Enabler?

This question is more complicated than I expected on reading it.

At first glance it is tempting to say that "Jack-of-All-Trades (Cop, Doctor)" and "1-Shot Cop 1-Shot Doctor" either are or should be synonyms, in the same way that "Deputy" and "Backup Cop" are synonyms. However, this cannot actually be the case, because the two roles function differently in a setup with implicit multitasking. In such a setup, a 1-Shot Cop 1-Shot Doctor may decide to use both their actions on the same night, whereas a JoAT may not. Since to my knowledge there is no normal "Non-Multitasking" modifier, there is no other Normally definable role that works identically to a JoAT (Cop, Doctor) in all circumstances.

Because of that, the question of whether the JoAT “is” a cop, for purposes of gunsmithing/finders/etc., is something that as far as I can see is not explicitly answered in the written rules and would need an explicit ruling from implo and/or the NRG.

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Given that both game review precedent and the Normal listmod's opinion have come down in favor of Backups not backing up Backups, I've just gone ahead and edited the role page and role fragments on the wiki to correctly reflect the status quo.