Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Game Over!

[mastina]

And yeah idk what the setup reviewers were smoking

Hi that would be me; I reviewed this game.

To my eyes, balanced enough. Alien is a good role for the town here with strong kill-denial and some denial of info to the scum PRs, but does have some anti-synergy with the town's power roles; pt cop is a reasonably strong investigative, but has some anti-synergy with the friendly neighbor neighbors (who're, essentially, masons); the friendly neighbor neighbors are, essentially, masons; the scum PRs don't give them any hard-counters to the town PRs but give them extra information to work with.

But I'm the secondary reviewer here so it's more Nexus's call here.

This is what I said about the game and by and large, I stand by it:
The town's roles were strong, but had significant anti-synergy, and scum had reasonable safeclaims to claim that also gave them a significant edge in terms of information gained.

It wasn't noted in the review, but it should be noted, that obviously when the town has a jailkeeper-type role and scum die early, the jailkeeper role becomes disproportionately powerful, more powerful than would be reasonably anticipated--a D1 scum lynch in this game puts them pretty far behind, admittedly, but that's true for just about any setup and goes without saying because of how obvious it is: if scum die early, town get a large advantage, as they

should

. (Scum getting eliminated early

should

give the town a big advantage; I'd even go so far as to say that almost any game where scum getting eliminated early doesn't give the town a massive edge is poorly designed.)

With three scum alive past D1, this game was probably going to be much harder for the town. Alien is a very strong town role, but it cannot differentiate between a successfully-blocked-scum and a successfully-protected-town. So with more scum, the role is less powerful. With less scum, it is more powerful.

[mastina]

2× Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour + a full Town PT Cop + Town Alien + Town Tracker isn't balanced opposite any reasonable scumteam. Change the Town Tracker to a Town Watcher, and it's even less balanced. So what you considered to be a scum safeclaim wasn't safe at all; making that claim is inevitably going to lead to a 1v1 at massclaim time, and possibly sooner. Evidence for this is that Gamma did indeed claim Tracker, and I correctly read him as scum based on the 1v1.

When I say a claim is a safeclaim, what I mean by it is that the town has no inherent way off of the claim itself to know that the claimer, and only the claimer, could be scum--for instance, sure, while the town would "know" (never underestimate town stupidity when it comes to setup spec, thus the quotation marks) 2x friendly neighbor + pt cop + alien + tracker is presumably too much town power, what makes it inherent that the tracker is scum? It could also be the PT Cop or Alien, both of which make sense as scum roles here just as much as they do town roles, if not more. With the PT cop dead and you being the Alien, obviously

you

would know the tracker was suspect, but it's not something that the town in general would be able to reasonably deduce accurately. (Especially since tracker is not a common scum role; both a PT cop in a mason game and an alien-type role

are

common scum roles.)

Also, scum can also modify their claims by claiming nonexistent modifiers to their claims (admittedly, I don't consider it optimal setup design in most cases for scum to be forced to modify their real role, but if they feel their real role is unsafe to claim as-is, they can weaken their role by modifying it with them).
Full friendly neighborx2/pt cop/alien/tracker might be unbelievable, but friendly neighborx2/pt cop/alien/gated tracker isn't inherently overwhelming. It's five town power roles, which is still within the bounds of reason, even with most of them being strong power roles, if the scum has sufficiently strong counters in the scum power roles.

To a lesser extent, this applies to the watcher as well.
There's also the fact that if the town lynches one of the tracker/watcher when both have claimed, they're less likely to think both are scumclaims, because generally when you give scum one investigative of that sort, the other is, generally speaking, a town role. (I admit that this is a bit of a generic meta-wifom of setups tho.)

[mastina]

Basically, my definition of a scum safeclaim is that scum can claim their real role, and have that role be plausibly town in the setup, meaning they aren't instantly voted out for having claimed it.

Tracker/Watcher both fit the bill for that--they are both claims that could plausibly be town in the setup, meaning claiming them isn't inherently an instant death-sentence.

Given specific circumstances (where the town decides that the town has too much power and has confirmed the alignments of the PT Cop/Alien and the game contains a prolific nrg reviewer that knows how to break down setup balance), those claims do stop being safe, sure, where given those circumstances they could become incriminating...

...But those specific circumstances are not something that can be anticipated as going to occur when reviewing.

I'd have no way of knowing the town alien would be a nrg reviewer who, with the death of the PT cop, and knowledge of their own role plus the friendly neighbors, would be able to deduce a tracker claim was a scumclaim and via their knowledge convince the town of this. Who could?

[mastina]

Generally speaking, longer deadlines are protown if the town is actively using the time for constructive play where they are trying to progress the game and there is good reason to.

If the game stalls, but the town wants to drag things out to that longer deadline, that's when longer deadlines stop being protown, because if the game has stalled, then the day SHOULD end. If no progress is being made, if there's a stalemate, if there's no new information to be shared, if stances aren't progressing, etc. then waiting for a deadline rush will kill a town's momentum. Shorter deadlines help prevent this, and this is probably the reason why people think shorter deadlines are protown; because they think towns will, by default, use all of their allotted time and if there's less allotted time, there's less stalling in the game.

But say the game isn't stalling yet you run into the deadline--having longer deadlines would help the town there and not having them forces them to make plays that are rushed and more often than not, mistakes, because they needed more time than they had available to reach the right conclusion.