Datisi's Micro Normal Review, October 2020

[callforjudgement]

oh yeah, a question i had about night action resolution: if rolestopper is targeting player X, and the tracker-finder is targeting X, and a tracker tracks the tracker-finder, what result does the tracker get, "visited X" or "no visit"? if i recall correctly, the wiki has two different answers to that...

I think the situation is that people

want

this situation to be "no visit", but there's no consistent way to do it within the rules. Luckily, there's normally a consistent way to do it in any given setup, and "no visit" is consistent in this one. (For what it's worth, I prefer sidestepping the whole problem by having even roleblocked actions be trackable, but the community has outvoted me on this.)

As for the balance of this setup, the issue is that the town roles hardly do anything; the best use of the Rolestopper for Town is the "Follow the Tracker" interaction, which scum have no way to break up, but even then the Tracker is much weaker than an unmodified Tracker. (It's very unlikely that town will earn a day by stopping two kills, so their only actual Night power is the chance of maybe catching scum performing the kill, which is hard when there are two scum that might be performing it.) So I think that it is indeed scumsided, and it also suffers from the issue that town are rewarded rather than punished if the Tracker claims early.

My main thought for a balance fix here is to make the Tracker (full) Bulletproof, and clue that to the scum somehow (unfortunately, "Bulletproof Tracker"-Finder is probably not Normal, or else I'd be suggesting that). That way, the Lazy Tracker gets more uses of its ability, and makes the setup more townsided because the scum can't just kill them; it also means that town aren't rewarded for letting their power roles be claimed early. Probably we'd have to resort to Informed again. My suggestion:

Town Bulletproof Lazy Tracker
Town Rolestopper
5 VT
Informed Mafia Goon ("There is a Town Bulletproof Lazy Tracker")
Mafia Tracker-Finder ~OR~ Mafia Rolecop

I'm not particularly happy with this, though, and it could probably be tweaked more.

[callforjudgement]

Modifiers like Indecisive just don't do much in a Micro; the town can still earn themself an extra Night with the power role alive, and one extra Night is a lot in a Micro (where games are often over after Day 3, and nearly always after Day 4). If you need to break up follow-the-X combos, you need to go with Simple.

Making the setup non-Multitasking is interesting as a way of providing a boost to town. I fear that the balance impact would be very unpredictable, though; it depends on how many of the town players figure out the implications that this has for the scum power roles (in particular, the mere act of making the setup non-Multitasking means that if scum fakeclaim anything other than VT or a very weak power role, town will know that there's too much claimed power in the setup because there couldn't be any powerful hidden scum roles to counteract it).

As a result, we may be looking at something along these lines:

Town Lazy Tracker
Town Simple Rolestopper
Town Neighbouriser
4 VT
Mafia Tracker-Finder
Mafia Goon

I have a feeling that this is townsided even with Multitasking, though. Town's roles still don't do much, but town are likely to figure out that at least 2 out of 3 of their power roles are town by setup speculation (especially if the Tracker-Finder flips, all but confirming that a Tracker claim is town); also, players have an unfortunate tendency to assume that Neighbourisers are town even though it isn't an alignment-locked role. So this setup has the problem you see in Opens sometimes, where the mere fact of having a vaguely confirmable role has a lot of balance impact in its own right, even though the role itself isn't all that powerful. (It doesn't take all that much town power to balance a 7:2.)

Now I'm wondering whether Lazy Tracker + Neighbouriser + 5 vs. 2 (i.e. without the Rolestopper) is balanced with Multitasking turned off. I think it's probably scumsided, but it rather depends on how good the scum are at fakeclaiming (I think it's balanced if scum fakeclaim VT, and may be townsided if scum screw up their claim, so they'll need to claim quite well to take advantage of the scumsidedness).

[callforjudgement]

Loyal Rolestopper + Checker is interesting as combos go. Was that intentional? One issue is that it can produce a false inno on the Tracker-Finder (this is very unlikely to happen), but town are at least aware that it's a possibility.

I have no idea what the meta for Checker is yet. It's weak enough that it can't be setup-speculated to belong to either side (which is probably important here), and it's probably more useful to scum than town in most setups, so the existence of three roles here is less likely to break the game for town.

The "Complex" on the Tracker-Finder is actually quite helpful for scum; it somewhat increases the chance that they will kill a town power role N2 (making it easier for them to survive a 3:2 ending).

I think the setup as you've listed might well be balanced, actually (although it's somewhat "out there", so harder to predict what will happen). If it's unbalanced, it's probably going to end up scumsided (especially if the scum are good at claiming). So that sounds about where you want the setup. The town power is of a nature where it could be useful in theory, but any individual piece of probably won't be that useful in practice.

Giving scum global Multitasking will have something of a balance impact here; without it, they can't fakeclaim any noticeable amount of town power and are pretty much locked into VT, with it they have more scope to be tricky (bluffing the existence of a powerful scum role). That said, VT is a pretty decent fakeclaim in this setup anyway, so the balance impact won't be all that large.

[callforjudgement]

Ah right, I got the false positives / negatives backwards. The combination works like Neapolitan, not Goon Cop, so there are no really problematic false negatives to worry about.

[callforjudgement]

In that case, scum just kills the Checker. The only protective is Simple, so scum can break up claimed role combinations with their regular nightkill.

[callforjudgement]

I typically expect actions that fail due to Loyal and the like to be trackable (just like actions that fail due to Ascetic are trackable). I'm not 100% sure that that's the correct Normal ruling, though.

[callforjudgement]

Four players will have died by the time you reach a 3:2 ending. That's very unlikely to be the four VTs (especially because it's fairly common for people to be forced to a claim and then not eliminated). Also bear in mind that scum could end up claiming a weak power role, rather than VT.

[callforjudgement]

The Tracker-Finder PM needs to clarify that the Complex modifier only prevents the tracker-finding from working on vanilla players – we wouldn't want the player to think that their factional kill would fail. That could be as simple as changing "Your Night action" to "This Night action".

Removing the "Assuming no interference from your action" from the Checker PM makes it no longer make sense. You probably want "You will be told whether or not your action succeeded".

The rules don't mention anything about how to request a replacement (i.e. that you can't do it in thread); "Follow all site rules" covers this, so this is basically up to whether you want all the site rules to also be present in your own ruleset or not.

I'm fine with the setup, and the rules and PMs hardly need changing, so I approve this assuming that you make at least the first two choices above (the third is more a mod discretion thign).

[callforjudgement]

/approve