Not Known 15's Mini Normal Review, November 2021

[implosion]

8 Vanilla Townies

Vanilla Townie

You are a Vanilla Townie.

You have no active abilities.

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

2 Mafia Goons

Mafia Goon

You are a Mafia Goon.
Your team-mates are

NAME

and

NAME

. You may talk to them

here

at any time.

You have the following active ability:
Each Night, if no other member of your faction is performing this action, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, that player will die.

You win if at least one mafia member is alive and all other players are dead (or if nothing can prevent the same).

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

1 Town Odd-Night Cop

Town Odd-Night Cop

You are a Town Odd-Night Cop

You have the following active ability:

On each odd-numbered Night, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, you will learn whether that player wins with Town. (You will get "no result" if this action is blocked.)

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

1 Town Watcher

Town Watcher

You are a Town Watcher.

You have the following active ability:

Each Night, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, you will learn which other players targeted that player that Night.

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

1 Mafia (Ninja Gunsmith)

Mafia (Ninja Gunsmith)

You are a Mafia (Ninja Gunsmith).
Your team-mates are

NAME

and

NAME

. You may talk to them

here

at any time.

You have the following active abilities:

Each Night, if no other member of your faction is performing this action, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, that player will die.
At night you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, you will know if they have a gun.
Cops, Vigilantes, Gunsmiths, Role Cops, Vanilla Cops, PT Cops, Vengefuls, Detectives, Neapolitans, Mafia not being Doctors or Traitors have guns. JOATs have guns if they have any of the roles they have have guns. This action is not visible to Tracker-like and Watcher-like roles.

You win if at least one mafia member is alive and all other players are dead (or if nothing can prevent the same).

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

Welcome to my Mini Normal.

Rules:
1.Follow the Site Rules. This includes not talking about ongoing games.
2.You may have access to private threads (e.g. Mafia factional chat); you can talk about this game there, but you may not quote anything from them outside of the PT. You may not quote any game-related PMs without express permission by your game mod.
3.Play to win this game.
4.Lurking: You will be prodded after 2 days of no substantial contribution(no prod dodging). After 24 hours of an unanswered prod I will search for a replacement(unless V/LA). Four prods in total, or two prods in one day will result in an instant replacement. ASK FOR REPLACEMENT IN A PM.
5.Vacation/Limited Access: Tell me when you are going to have limited access. If you have limited access, you will still count as having a prod after 3 days, and you will be instantly replaced after 5 days in total.
6.Weekend: For the purposes of prods and nights, Sunday and Saturday count as 12 hours each.
7.CHEATING:Cheating(breaking site rules, posting while dead, quoting Role PM's without explicit permission, encrypting posts without explicit permission, editing/deleting posts without explicit permission, doing anything obviously against the spirit of the rules) is forbidden. Don't do it.
Setup information:

8.Length of day phases:7 days. More if replacements force me to extend the phase.
9.Length of nights: 2 days. Will usually not end before all replacements are finished.

10. Elimination:The town can kill one person per day. This is called Elimination. People may vote to eliminate someone (e.g.VOTE: Not Known 15)
An elimination during the day necessiates more than 50% of all possible votes. You may vote for No Elimination. A No Elimination needs 50% of all possible votes.

11:Hammer:As soon as the required number of people for an Elimination or NoElimination is reached, the game descends into Twilight.
12:Twilight:Alive people, including the hammered elimination target, may continue to post until the flip.
13:Flip: After the flip the game descends into Night.
14:Daychat: Scum has Daychat by default.
15:Natural Action Resolution applies. Same priority cycles are resolved by making all actions of the same priority fail(e.g.Roleblocker vs Roleblocker, only both roleblocks fail).
16:Color, Backup Mod color and Vanilla Role PM:

Vanilla Townie

You are a Vanilla Townie.

You have no active abilities.

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

At least one person recieved this Role PM.

This is my color

#808080). Do not use it.
17:Breaking rules can result in any kind of punishment. Do not break the rules.
18:I may add additional rules at my discretion. I will tell everyone via PM if this happens.

Results:
Cop:Town on all townies, Not Town on all mafia.
Watcher:
You saw X and Y visiting your target.(e.g. Factional kill+Cop)
You saw Y visiting your target.(Factional kill/Cop)
You saw no one visiting your target.(Ninja action+ no other actions or no actions)
Gunsmith:
Your target has a gun(Cop, Mafia Goon)
Your target does not have a gun(All townies except Cop)

[implosion]

Primary: Something_Smart
Secondary: Ircher

[implosion]

I think there is absolutely no way to accurately predict how scum will react to getting that role PM. Some of them will think that it's intended as a fakeclaim for them. Some of them will ignore it completely and just consider it too much work to think about. Some of them will think that it's a puzzle that they can solve immediately to learn the whole setup. Some of them will misread things because it's so convoluted. Some of them will try to speculate deeply on exactly why this is in their role PM and none of them will be able to figure it out because it's there because of an extremely specific thing that came up during setup design.

I think this is just a design antipattern. There's a little problem in the setup, which is that the scum might mistakenly shoot the claimed cop n2. All of the solutions S_S suggested are appropriately small modifications to address this small problem; making one of the mafia informed with a small essay of text is not the right solution to solve that problem.