bork wrote:The denunciation of strongman here kind of sounds like an indictment of strongmen in general
This is totally valid. One bit of design philosophy that I think is pretty commonplace in the nrg is the idea that scum don't
need
counterplay to town roles for a setup to be balanced; and this is in general true (because of course a mountainous setup is scumsided, so town power is necessary to get balance) but as a result roles like strongman and ninja that exist purely to weaken specific town power are sometimes viewed as worse design options. I think the better viewpoint is to look at them as a different way of gating town power roles instead of modifiers.
fferyllt wrote:From my perspective, things went from "Wow, how lucky we hit the roleblocker on night 1" to "Wow, half of town were PRs. We had a 50% chance of targeting a PR on night 1 but there were FOUR different ways the kill could have failed. This game could have been all but lost after night 1."
I think part of my point is that in this setup, missing a kill on n1 isn't necessarily a death sentence for scum, because there are going to be two town roles with false information about what stopped the kill. Maybe a roleblocker or a jailkeeper claims incorrectly and outs themself and gets a townie killed for no reason, or forces the other to claim too, and maybe both of them were wrong and it was the doctor. In a way, this actually is good design that reduces swing; because there are so many kill-stopping roles, it's pretty likely that a kill will be stopped at some point but the impact of it happening is reduced.
Swing is something I didn't really address, and basically the main thing I have to say about it is that (and I may have said this publicly before, not sure) swing is like, the single hardest thing to design around IMO. Almost every single kind of town power role adds swing. Vigs add swing over hitting or missing, investigative roles add swing over hitting or missing or hitting "false" results (like a neapolitan targeting a town power role, or a gunsmith targeting a mafia doctor), protective roles add swing over hitting or missing, blocking roles add swing over hitting or missing or hitting town. Each of those different roles' swing can compound in really ugly ways; a doctor saved a strong power role with good reads? Well, that's pretty much game winning on its own.
The paradox is that to balance a game, you have to add a certain level of town power, and you're relegated to either putting that power in just a few roles (in which case, you're increasing swing because a few roles are very powerful and if they die early it has a larger effect) or distributing it among more roles, like in this setup (in which case, you're increasing swing because there are so many different interactions and roles that could cause different things to happen).
It's not *impossible* to design around but it's very, very hard.
fferyllt wrote:I don't think the final design of this game was a natural outgrowth of the design that NPOM envisaged when he came up with his initial design. It was something almost completely different. What kinds of lessons in design and balance was this supposed to teach?
I think looking at the first draft of the setup and seeing how it grew isn't that useful in this case because he sort of redesigned it fully because the first draft was just too off the mark in balance.
Prism wrote:My issue was that the setup included BOTH of the conflicting PRs and the red herring Vanilla Cop/no scum power. One was fine, both was absolutely not.
I think taking issue with the vanilla cop in this setup/your take in general is generally defensible. It is true that it isn't really serving a particular purpose and I can see that in conjunction with the unusual power assortment being an issue. It is kind of a subtle issue in a way that I can imagine being really hard to catch in review, though; it's hard to predict at the review stage that the town will see a vanilla cop and the rest of the setup and speculate in this particular way about it, even if now after the game it seems obvious in retrospect. There is somewhat of a fine line that I think mastina was getting at in that players shouldn't be able to
assume
that, e.g., there's at least one scum PR in a game with a vanilla cop. But this was probably not the setup for that to happen given the core of blocking/protective roles.
