Night One Investigations.

[Yaw]

Hez -- I wouldn't. First of all, you need to at least wait until you have some idea of your sanity, which won't be until you get a different result. Second, I think you're just painting a big target on your back as an outed cop. By all means, try to get the person lynched. But there are other ways to do it without coming out. If they're scum, they'll probably slip up somewhere, and since you know they're scum and will be watching closely, you're more likely to catch it.

MeMe -- I sympathize with the difficulty -- I recently got screwed over in Human Body Mafia by having

three

cops investigate me night 1! I was actually going to ask at some point how on earth to get out of that sort of situation. It's pretty clear that players who are perceived to be good scum get the IS treatment, and it would be nice to see something done so that good players aren't given an early death sentence with a scum role. I'm not sure I like the idea of increasing randomness, nor do I think it solves the problem. You're just going to get investigated night 2.

[Yaw]

I think I was getting muddled in referring to you and IS back there. In IS's case, he'd get investigated night 2. No questions asked. With non-IS people, I'll admit it would vary based on what happened day 1 and who else is in the game.

It sort of leads into a larger question, though. The only way IS survives a game as scum is if he's investigation-immune (or there aren't any cops). While we all metagame IS in this way, it's an extreme symptom of the difficulty you're describing. Much as it would be nice to see him get a fair shake as scum, good play requires playing to win using the tools at your disposal, which means IS gets investigated early and often in ways that a mod-investigated night 1 wouldn't solve.

I guess what I'm saying is that if we're going to try to come up with options to deal with this issue, they may as well deal with the worst-case scenario.

[Yaw]

Actually, one alternative would be to just give each member of your group the role of "mafia", and let them choose who the investigation-immune godfather is on night 1. Antrax Returns had something like that for each scum group, and it seemed to work out reasonably well. It would give the more notoriously good scum players a better shot at survival, without screwing up game mechanics too much.