Changes to Normal Games (update September 2022)

[Plum]

A role being Normal has little to do with its power level. The impact on play across games based on a consistent limited set of roles and interactions is very important to Normalcy as a body, and callforjudgement's answer is basically what I think is the correct answer for why Supersaint is not an appropriate choice for a Normal role.

That said Vengeful itself is kind of a strange Normal role - not because it's too powerful, but because it acts in Twilight, a game phase that otherwise doesn't formally exist in Normal games at all.

Edit: I do get what you're saying - isn't Supersaint a strict subset of Vengeful? But really the fact that it interacts with a part of the game that no other Normal roles interact with - previous placement of votes - that makes it questionable for inclusion as a Normal Role. Some Normal modifiers key off of alignment and Vanilla/not-Vanilla status, but nothing keys off of discrete typical dayplay interactions like whom a player voted and whether they placed the hammer vote.

[Plum]

No, those roles should not be Normal. Normals have not included reflexive roles, so that players of either alignment take risks only related to active or passive abilities. The general rule of thumb is that if it exists as an active ability it should be present only in active form unless the passive form is a personal immunity. This preserves an environment of direct player agency which is prioritised in the current approach to Normal games.

[Plum]

The general rule of thumb is that if it exists as an active ability it should be present only in active form unless the passive form is a personal immunity. This preserves an environment of direct player agency which is prioritised in the current approach to Normal games.

What about the Compulsively Reflexively Self Targeting Framers in Normal Queue? Based on this rule, Framer ought to be normal and Miller ought to be nonnormal. Cops worrying about the risk that the person they're thinking of checking would be targeted by the framer is a risk based on player agency. Cops worrying that the person they're targeting was randomly given the Miller role by the mod isn't based on agency. And I wouldn't really consider inverting the result "immunity", the outcome in practice definitely isn't the same as if the cop never did the check at all.

I actually think it's a good rule of thumb and want to take the edgy position that Miller is a bad role. In cop check scenario doesn't happen due to Day 1 Miller claims, but the game play of Day 1 Miller claims themselves are pretty yucky to me. It can't be meaningfully different from day 1 IC unless scum day 1 Miller fakeclaims are an option, and regardless of whether you want to argue it's a good or bad play in your next normal the amount of success to that is -random-. You see your role and the other scum roles and you do it or don't do it and then if the setup isn't amenable to a Miller fakeclaim you're in trouble.

On the one hand, Normal games don't parse passive abilities as either Reflexive or Self-Targeting, neither of which actually exist in Normal roles. I think the existence of Miller is technically fine based on the ability to claim,

but

actually I overall agree, Miller is a bad role for Normal Games. Miller exists to help solve the problem of the unlimited guaranteed Sane Cop in Normal games. The thing is that Normal Games support multiple better overlapping and non-overlapping setup solutions to the presence of a Cop. Limited-shot/limited-Night Cops and Weak Cops exist. Loyal and Disloyal roles exist. Vanilla Cop and Neapolitan exist. All of these serve as checks on or alternatives to the investigative power of a Full Cop that do not rely on making a loophole that allows directly lying to the Cop about investigation results. The Miller is the last clumsy leftover role with this type of clause after the removal of investigation-immune Godfather from the Normal role list. I think Wake88's idea to make a "Tracker/Watcher Miller" goes in exactly the wrong direction (and is even worse than Miller because at least there's a specific "guilty" result a Cop gets on Miller and Mafia; there's no one "positive" result a Tracker or Watcher can get automatically - what happens if a Tracker targets this role on a Night when the Mafia choose not to kill, for instance?) - but I'll go further and say that as-is, Ninja is a role that should not be Normal. Ninja

and

Miller can both be excluded and Ascetic (plus Rolestopper) can serve those functions where necessary, and is highly preferable because it only creates "no result" results and not false results. Miller and Ninja only serve to give

direct false results

to Cops and Watchers respectively and are bad ways of limiting the power of these two powerful roles. The NRG has and should continue to make sure that setups that pass review do not have ungated full Cops or Watchers without mitigation and counterplay built into the setup - but they don't need Millers or Ninjas to do this.

[Plum]

Idk I just feel like if you track X to nowhere in a normal you shouldn’t have to speculate “but what if they’re a ninja?”

That’s for themes.

Oh shoot I forgot and I thought that Ninja works like Ascetic for Tracker results, I forgot that it actually gives direct false information for both. Yeah I agree screw that, Ninja is just not good for Normals.

I've brought up the idea of a Watcher variant that doesn't see factional kill actions, and I've also seen the "Personal" modifier proposed as for a generic "your investigative action does not see factional actions" which in Normal Games means specifically factional kill options. I like Watcher's potential outside the area of getting a hard guilty on an observed kill, and a role with a built-in limitation seems better than a role which introduces false information into the equation. The more I think about it, the more I think the rule for Normals should be "informational roles with known, built-in limitations" not "informational roles but other roles can cause information generated to be actually false" across the board.

[Plum]

I do not believe Cop will be broken in Normals if Miller is removed from the Normal whitelist because it is not one of the main mechanisms keeping Cop in check in the current Normal Game environment. I can look over the last 1.5 years of Normal Games or whatever but my impression is that Cop is used sparingly already because it is a powerful role (the same is true of Watcher). Gating the Cop as limited-shot or limited-Night or using alternative alignment-related investigation roles like Neapolitan and/or modifiers like Weak, Loyal, and Disloyal, are far more common and I would argue effective ways to include Cop and Cop-like roles in Normal games without making the role broken than the mere fact that Miller is a legal role.

[Plum]

I think that inherent multitasking as an option the moderator has to declare like inherent daytalk is probably fine to replace current rules. I'd probably even prefer "one action per Night limit unless Multitasking but factional kill doesn't count towards this limit".

Also while we're here can we standardize some things about backups? It's not clear rules as written if (or when) a Backup of a role inherits the modifiers of the role it backs up.

[Plum]

Backup to me doesn't inherit modifiers e.g. if a 1-shot Cop dies, a Backup Cop just becomes an ungated Cop.

That's what I would say too, but it's not made clear in the Wiki.

[Plum]

There was a bizarre frustrating conversation in the open forums about whether "backup" is a modifier or a role itself the verdict being that universal backup is a role but backup applied to a specific role is a modifier (?).

That's how I wrote the Backup Tracker Role PM in my recently completed Micro Normal game (of course, there was no actual Tracker in the game so etc.).

[Plum]

No I think Personal should only apply to direct action investigations.

[Plum]

Gunsmith doesn't give untrustworthy results

The results are very trustworthy they just mean gun vs no gun

+1

When you think about it, vanillaizer is just a persistent roleblocker that doesn't affect the mafia kill

Passive abilities.

[Plum]

Having to worry about uncommon roles that place a lot of undue influence on a Normal just by possibly existing is not Normal.

Agreed, and Ninja should be removed from the whitelist and Miller has less direct need for that but probably should as well.

[Plum]

Would a modifier where you could only target any given player once per game be useful?

personally I like that modifier, I wouldn't know what to call it.

Maybe Overconfident might work, as they're sure their ability worked fine and that they don't need to try again? Though an Overconfident investigative role might be confusing flavor-wise.

Non-repeating?