Normal Game Balance

[skitter30]

I agree with mena that people can feel normals are townsided even if the hard numbers of win-loss ratios dont support that

I havent played that many normals recently, tho, so i'm not sure i have an opinion

[skitter30]

If a game is balanced that doesnt inherently make it fun to play

Thinking back i think i've more often felt as scum that town was stacked than vice versa

It feels like you sometimes have to be ~very strong scum~ to supersede decent town play + prs, whereas town can usually count on the prs to give themselves a boost

Or, another way of saying it: scum often have to play the setup nearly flawlessly, whereas it's a lot more forgiving for town

[skitter30]

That's fair

[skitter30]

While we're at it something that bugs me that is actually kinda common is when scum prs have very little relationship to town prs. So when you're scum playing such a setup you really have no idea what you're going up against whatsoever. So you'll make an educated guess what the town prs are based on what you have, but it turns out you were barking up a totally wrong tree (and may have made a fatal misstep taking that educated guess ... )

Things like scum getting a ninja when there arent any tracker/watcher type roles in the setup, that sort of thing

This is one of my biggest pet peeves wrt setup-spec and balance ^

[skitter30]

I occasionally float the idea of a universe where the scum always know the entire setup (not who the cop is, but that there's a cop) while town has to figure it out.

I am intrigued

[skitter30]

I feel like town-me would want to know that scum had such knowledge
(Like i wouldnt want to /in for what i believed to be a regular normal game and actually play against scum who knew the whole setup. If i signed up for a game knowing that that would be the case i'd be fine with it)

And scum-me would enjoy the heck out of abusing that knowledge

I like this notion of letting scum be as informed as possible - i think what i dont like about the sort of setups i described above is that i think scum should fundamentally be at an information-advantage compared to town, and 'red-herring' scum roles handicap and hobble that advantage