NoPowerOverMe's Mini Normal Review, October 2020

[mastina]

Still way way way scumsided--hider as a Normal role is not an investigative; it is a much much weaker version of a commuter. The game with a 2x hider and a roleblocker barely has kill denial at all, has an incredibly weak investigative role (a full vanilla cop for the town would still be a C-tier investigation role, at best; I'd rate vanilla cop in this setup as even worse, a D-tier town investigative that does almost nothing), and the visitor doesn't give the town any value.

Basically the town PRs don't actually give them any advantage; it'd still be scumsided even against an all-goon scumteam.

[mastina]

I'd say it's in the balanced realm. The town has incredibly strong kill-denial potential (the scum won't have the best of times until 2/3 of those prs are dead with less scum deaths), but they've got only one conftown player and their investigative does nothing to catch scum, aside from verifying or disproving claims. It's a good way to force the game to revolve around dayplay--the scum's only night power is somewhat limited due to the town PRs, but they won't be caught by the town PRs, so I quite like it. It feels like a fairly low swing setup overall, all things considered.

I do need to see the role PMs and result PMs before passing it tho.

[mastina]

Unless I missed something not being Normal in the rules/roles (would appreciate Isis double-checking to make sure, I think everything's in order but I could miss something), then yes, it is approved.

[mastina]

For the record.

I will be livid if the setup is 3 contradictory PRs, a red herring investigative, and all goons.

An important part of setup design is making it a puzzle for town to solve and to reward them for correctly getting info/flips. One red herring is fine, but a normal setup that is exclusively red herrings so that the setup designers can laugh at the town is not. I will 100% blame the design and feel 0 remorse about it, this hypothetical setup should not have passed.

You are mistaken; Normals are NOT MEANT TO BE PUZZLES for towns to solve. Normals being that is

explicitly bad design

that the NRG is actively trying to fix.

This setup was designed to be

solved by dayplay

, not designed to be solved by power roles; the town's power roles here are designed to exclusively force the emphasis to be on dayplay. One conftown, three killstoppers, one fairly useless but nominally-useful investigative (can catch scum fakeclaiming/can verify town claims, but explicitly cannot catch scum claiming vt). The town's roles, aside from the friendly neighbor, have nothing to confirm them as town and do little to confirm others as town and are overlapped by design.

It's a setup feature--not a setup flaw.
/rant

[mastina]

(I'll be reposting that when that game ends and elaborating on it, obv.)

[mastina]

(I feel obligated to mention: standard game balance in NRG is 3-4 moderately strong PRs against all goons, approximately. This game had 5 PRs, but most of them are notably weak: odd-night vanilla cop is almost useless, basically being just an extra PR for the sake of having an extra PR. Friendly Neighbor can conftown themselves, but only themselves. Roleblocker requires god-tiered luck to block a kill unless two scum die, and in this setup there's no way to distinguish between an rb blocking the killer, doctor protecting the kill, jk blocking the killer, and jk blocking the kill. The only two strong roles in the game are the doctor and the jailkeeper, but due to the ambiguity of what causes a kill to fail, some of their innate power is removed. Which I again would like to emphasize: this is a setup feature, not a setup flaw.)