[GUIDE] Common Mistakes in Setup Making

[Isis]

if this topic is open for discussion anyway -

can we tweak the angle on cults/jesters?
specifically cults, I don't love the treatment cults get here. The red card thrown is "balance", but a few users have decently colorable arguments that they can balance a cult recruiter. And even "Even night cult recruiter" is arguably enough, without requiring something fundamentally different from cult be presented.
Setups with balance measures have been proposed/played on site, including large closeds like D&D, Cultist Recruiter (fundamentally different: town gets to recruit cult back), CultD3(fundamentally differentish because cult is capped at 3), and NK's micro closed (he did what was functionally even-night cult, cult lost by a landslide, and it'd be really easy to see town winning more than 40 games of 100 runs of that experience.)
Cult games are nowhere near mainstream, and that is due to their similarity to jester: a townread on a slot based on a previous dayphase gets punished if it continues to be followed. Large numbers of players don't want to mess with that, independent of each faction's probability of winning. I'm one of those people.
I'm just not very confident "don't put CL in your setup because balance" is much more palpable than "don't put ungated Sane Cop in your setup because Balance", they're almost as dramatic. Cult Leader is undeniably more dramatic - it's just, not by an entire order of magnitude, I feel.
I'd prefer the same discouragement with the "you get punished for incentives mafia generally encourages"(like jester), or discouragement due to it being rolled in under "game is based around one extremely powerful role". It is incredibly easy to argue Korina's Cult D3 falls in line with the latter characterization, it makes just about no attempt to give a cultist a fighting chance if the cult leader openwolfs day1, the game goes to 1:7 nightless.
Just a thought I guess.
I might be totally missing the plot kind of with respect to, this guide being intended to skip unnecessary steps with ToS player submitting closed ToS setups as opens and that being fundamentally different from Jingle's high competency for sketching out a new open setup

[Isis]

I myself care a lot about #1, but we have large swaths of players who indicate that #1 doesn't really impact how much fun they expect to have.
#3 isn't reflected by this OP in general but is a really good point that's on my mind during design lately. Some cult nerfs can help, see Her Name is Thaumiel for a cult game with very minimized harms from 3 and as a result one of my favorite cult designs. But it's. Pretty important.
Would you object to the OP focusing it's treatment of the problem on (1)? I think for those starting out designing setups, restricting yourself to the fraction of players who tolerate the win condition instability of cult is starting on hard mode, at the least.

[Isis]

I agree