The Bulge's Large Normal Review, October 2020

[schadd_]

ooohmhhmm. this is scumsided.

i would say that i'm bad at evaluating traitors, i dogmatically never put them in my games and rarely see them in other people's games. i would approximate each traitor to be about 3/4 of a mafia goon, maybe slightly less: they can't make endgame, they might get killed by accident, they can't talk to the main team. the latter two of these three i would say are actually quite minor - you can probably do pretty well without talking to the main team (some people more than others surely, but in practice i think that not a lot happens in the scum PT that is earth-shatteringly important, it just makes the players more comfortable. being in a neighborhood helps) and it is pretty easy for the traitors to simply not get nightkilled (after all there is no reason for them to try to put forth good reads. also the cop helps).

so they can't make endgame. it's a pretty strong drawback - it makes things harder for the type who likes to sit back and get townread as scum. in this game they would lose when they would outlive the scumteam - for either of them individually that would be 1/5 of the time, maybe since there's two of them that changes the math. i dont know. you get where i'm coming from though - i think they are at least most of the way to the strength of a normal mafia member

so considering this to be a 5ish against 15 player game. i would say it's somewhat weak for town: there are two roles that really do anything for town to begin with, which are the gunsmith and the babysitter. neither of those is very good though. there's a lot that messes with the gunsmith - getting innocent results on half of the mafia team is pretty brutal (in fact even not considering balance, i would not like a game to be like that). the universal backups are brutal too. there's really only like, 2 and a half roles worth of town power - this would make me uneasy in a 10:3 game against goons, so in a 15:5ish game against a roleblocker that's really scary. i think if you added, like, two full vigilantes to town it would be probably fine. maybe slightly strong for town in that case. i would definitely like it if you took the doctor away from the roleblocker.

[schadd_]

traities are informed abt the whole mafia team which should include other traitors

[schadd_]

ok so now that the gunsmith is a good role it is actually kind of worrisome. in particular it is kind of centralizing to what mafia has to do here. the bulletproof makes me go like "waah!" because if they just claim "gunsmith :^)" which they ought to do, i envision this outcome where they claim, get shot and protected, then somehow wolves find the babysitter (n.b.: this is very hard) (n.b.: the babysitter is at liberty to babysit other people during this time) and then after it all scum shoots gunsmith again, finds that they didnt die, and goes ok so what the fuck

in general i think putting bulletproof on gunsmith is just a very scary thing with a lot of severe feel bad outcomes for wolves. i would take kt off and probably go so far as to add macho to it

[schadd_]

oh there's a roleblocker. emm

[schadd_]

something that also just occurs to me is that both universal backups get whatever the first death is which means the gunsmith dying first is like this game-losingly bad outcome so i am not passing it like that

[schadd_]

in general ungated strong investigatives are a bit of a high chaos move in large games, especially Large large. gunsmith is obviously innately a little bit gated by being a gunsmith but those results still really add up. i think the no-gun results on the traitors don't actually hurt so much since they can't make endgame anyway (they have to try to leverage their position rather than coasting which is a kind of weird task)

[schadd_]

what would make most sense to me is "mafia team" = "mafia faction" = incl. the traitors

[schadd_]

the problem with the flexible interpretation of it is that i would say the wording that currently exists on the wording is within the bounds that somebody could see it and confidently assume that it means including other traitors without feeling the need to ask

you'd have to come up with a wording for the traitors' PM that clearly indicates that it doesn't include traitors and yet doesn't suggest that There Might Be Another One

[schadd_]

• you would have a nearly impossible time selling me on two UBs being normal - scum are punished if they kill a good PR first, this makes people very very upset in post game
  
• i'm fine with traitors not knowing about each other, though i will be paying attention to your role PMs that the wording couldn't be parsed as ruling out other traitors. something i don't know if i ever voiced is that i think the neighborhood would be very fun and i'm interested to see how it goes
  
• support gating the gunsmith. though i would be really uneasy from bulletproofing it, i don't think gating the protective as well is necessary because of the roleblocker (i think setups where a certain member of the scumteam must be kept alive are good, and i think this is more actionable for the scumteam in a large game - maybe informing the one or both of the traitors that "x is a mafia roleblocker" is worthwhile)

here is a setup i would be down with:

Spoiler:

Mafia Cop
Mafia Roleblocker
Mafia Goon
Mafia Goon

Mafia

informed (x is mafia cop)

Traitor Neighbour
Mafia

informed (x is mafia roleblocker)

Traitor Neighbour

Town

bulletproof

Miller
Town Simple Fruit Vendor
Town

odd-night

Gunsmith
Town

babysitter

Town 3-shot Vigilante
Town Universal Backup
Town

odd-night jailkeeper

Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie
Vanilla Townie

[schadd_]

you could soften the weirdness of the traitor thing further by letting one of them know that there's another traitor

[schadd_]

tangible reward for solving each other: sure, although not having to perform in the neighborhood anymore is sweet (imagining a world where they spend the whole game having like a vibrant conversation trying to buddy the other one and then they both roar out in agony once they find out what the situation is)

lazy babysiter: ok!

3 shot vig + UB: yeah that's all well and good, vig is one of those roles that's friends with UB since there isn't really any info loss when the role transfers from one person to the next

why jk: i like jail keepr

[schadd_]

ope sorry

interested why theres the three asterisks in the babysitter PM

"The full members of the Mafia are xxxxxx." <- this bugs me, when i read that i interpret it like "the full list of members of the mafia team are ...". honestly i think "the non-traitor members of the mafia team" would be fine - we had been worried about that communicating "there is another traitor" but i think someone would just assume that means "the team not including you"

[schadd_]

mafiawiki says one kill

[schadd_]

all good

[schadd_]

its fine