osuka's Mini Normal Review, June 2021

[northsidegal]

ego

[northsidegal]

I think that traitor disloyal neighborizer is both a really negative utility role for scum as well as just a really bad feeling role to have, both for the traitor and the scumteam at large. Optimal play there is probably just never to use the role, which I think probably indicates something should change.

[northsidegal]

Yeah, and even without the TA interaction you don't want to clear the people in your neighborhood after your death

[northsidegal]

I'm not sure if cop traitor is something that would be considered normal or not. A mafia cop would make more sense.

I think some players consider roles that cannot do anything bastard, at least in some contexts, and I think that'd be one of those contexts.

disagree, i think that traitor cop is normal and i even think it's been done before

i think i've lost track a bit of the setup as it stands but i'm a decent enough fan of traitor cop. i even think traitor combined cop neighborizer is kind of interesting

[northsidegal]

definitely agree with isis that you should keep in mind that having a traitor is actually a pretty serious downside to the scumteam, and historically has a tendency to produce a lot of resentment towards the setup

so how about

Code: Select all

1x odd-night traffic analyst
1x non-consecutive 2-shot town jailkeeper
1x town weak visitor
1x town even-night gunsmith
1x town neighbor
5x vanilla townies

1x traitor combined cop neighborizer
1x mafia even night commuter
1x mafia odd-night rolecop

the town neighbor here is stranded, there isn't any other corresponding neighbor (the neighborizer doesn't start in a neighborhood with the neighbor by default, that's not how it works)

i personally would remove the scum commuter—seems somewhat out of place with the "core" of the setup and doesn't seem to provide a lot of utility, so i default towards less complexity. i'd also agree with isis in cutting the weak visitor.

[northsidegal]

wait, sorry, i have been completely reversing the idea of what a traitor is – in a normal, the traitor knows the scumteam, and the scumteam doesn't know the traitor. up until just now i was thinking that it was vice versa, that the traitor didn't know the team but the team knew the traitor, but that isn't how it works.

in terms of balance i don't think that this actually changes a

ton

, although it does make the traitor neighborizer better, and it does actually make the traitor cop a bit more of a role likely to cause some anger. in terms of a setup "vision" or the sort of idea i had of how that person might use their role it does change things though, but that kind of thing is really more up to you than me.

[northsidegal]

when you say cop traitor might cause anger, do you mean it'll anger town, the traitor, scum, or a combination of the above?

probably mostly town.

something else to at least consider which i have the unfortunate tendency to sometimes overlook is what it could feel like if a newer player were to roll traitor cop. traitor is already a pretty high-stress role to roll, and i think that for a newer player it's sort of confusing to also have rolled cop, much less combined neighborizer cop – i'm not sure i'd really understand what i should be doing with my role. (to be fair, i'm not sure i'd completely understand it if i myself rolled that role, but i could probably guess some stuff)

idea for you: remove the odd-night rolecop, change it to just a traitor neighborizer role-cop. no combined, so the traitor can choose to role-cop or neighborize every night. this way you keep the situation going on where both the TA and the gunsmith get these weird non-false false-positives, which i think is sort of preserving the setup vision you have. just an idea though, feel free to build on it however you want.

[northsidegal]

wow so I was the only one of the three of us that realized a traitor cop is someone who has a role that finds the answers the traitor cop already knows.

and then when I tried to explain y'all were like "Isis is a square who think Mafia Neapolitans can't be in normals or something"

lol

yeah i think some combination of just the idea of "traitor cop" leading me to think "oh of course the traitor wouldn't know so the cop thing is clever" and being almost certain that that had been done before in a normal lead me to think that, lol

gonna have to agree on squares being pretty great

[northsidegal]

don't tell implo, he might reduce my end of year NRG bonus by a few hundred thousand dollars for that mistake

[northsidegal]

perhaps traitor combined rolecop neighborizer is better? i really want the setup to have a bit of flair, lest we end up with "just another setup" - which may be a good thing, but, you know?

also, just a note on this—"just another setup" really means "a really good setup" here. kind of the entire philosophy behind the normal queue is a relatively standard, consistent experience. it's much much worse to try to have a really unique setup and end up with the players hating you than it is to just stick to something more standard.

[northsidegal]

i would change the strongman in 32 to a 1-shot or maybe 2-shot

also don't think informing is necessary

[northsidegal]

i think that ungated strongman makes the setup too scumsided honestly

[northsidegal]

i'm not sure if a traitor knowing the roles of its teammates is actually normal or not, i think that the answer is actually no and that the traitor only knows the identities

in normal groupscum PMs it's sometimes given as just a convenience so that the scum don't have to say what they are in the PT or re-post their role PMs there but i think that it matters here

[northsidegal]

need one for "your action failed" and one for the person invited to the hood

[northsidegal]

we'll need to see your rules next

[northsidegal]

rules look good, except you'll need to include a sample VT pm somewhere.

i would also personally suggest that you also allow bold votes in addition to vote tags to avoid angleshoot-y situations. say, in lylo, i have the hammer vote and i decide to bold "vote: isis", who then says that wow nsg you suck i was town, and then implosion says wow nsg you suck i was scum and i fooled you. according to the rules, i haven't actually voted anyone and so i can now vote implosion to win the game, but the impression was there that i did vote. this is an unlikely situation but i've seen it before, so personally i always allow bold votes, even if they're harder to see. you don't have to do this or anything, just my suggestion.

another personal suggestion is to have votes for "no elimination" be at 50% rather than a majority, because 50% of players wanting one is technically all that it takes for them to force no elimination, so it being set at 50% just cuts out the part where they would have to wait until deadline. (example: 4 people are alive, 2 want to no-eliminate. they can force this to happen by simply not voting until deadline runs out, so it makes sense to just have it be hammered at 50% instead of requiring 3 people to hammer it.)

so apart from the sample VT thing which i trust you to include in your rules when you actually start the game, think it's a pass from me.

[northsidegal]

fair, just figured i'd bring it up

[northsidegal]

no problem! that's what we're here for