GeorgeBailey's Mini Normal Review, October 2020

[northsidegal]

yeah, it's probably scumsided. bodyguard and motion detector i consider to be pretty negligible power, so then the main town power comes from the neapolitan which has a lot of avenues to go wrong. like, if the neapolitan dies n1 or gets lynched d1 it's probably like a 95% scum win, which is probably not desirable.

i don't really see how a checker would boost town power all that much? if anything, it seems to me like it would just be weakening the motion detector. like, i don't see any role that really has any sort of synergy with checker, which i think might also mean that come massclaim people might not believe the claim, which would also hurt town.

i might even say that you could make the neighbors straight up into masons and that would leave the setup roughly balanced? doesn't really keep your original vision of backup neighbors though, and kind of eliminates the "scum inheriting" thing. i'm having a tough time thinking of additions to this that don't make the roles super complicated where the names stretch to a mile long, like lazy combined motion detector fruit vendor or something.

maybe you could make the MD into a lazy motion detector jailkeeper (not combined)?

[northsidegal]

an interesting dynamic that i just thought of is to replace the motion detector with a traffic analyst while potentially also informing scum of the existence of a traffic analyst

this gives scum an incentive to hunt for the neighbors to kill them in order to grant one of their members "immunity" so to speak from the traffic analyst. (of course, it could also give them incentive to just kill the traffic analyst, but whatever)

you might consider it "gimmicky" but my first thought after thinking about that would be to expand the neighborhood aspect i.e. by making two scum backup neighbors and maybe by adding a third neighbor into the neighborhood. that makes scum getting in a better outcome with regards to dodging the TA, although it does make the game kind of swingy. i think it's interesting though, and i'm kind of just spitballing here.

[northsidegal]

i think i like the idea of swapping a motion detector with a traffic analyst, however i worry about the neapolitan and the traffic analyst racking up too many clears in the VTs in the first few days.

odd-night neapolitan and even-night traffic analyst maybe?

i think that'd still be a little scumsided. there's a lot of anti-synergy between a bodyguard and odd/even night roles. of course, that could be by design because it's not a hugely fun interaction for basically anyone when a claimed PR lives an extra day due to a bodyguard protect, but regardless it still leaves town a little weak

how do you feel about sort of boosting power on both ends by making it unlimited neap + even night TA while informing scum that town has a TA?

[northsidegal]

sorry, had a busy week (or two...)

i still think that looks a little scumsided. both the traffic analyst and the neapolitan have kind of a large number of false positives, especially if scum manages to kill one of the neighbors early. i could also easily see a scenario in which the scum backup neighbors convince the TA that backup neighbors would still return true to traffic analysts, because "do backups of roles return positive to roles like gunsmith" is the kind of semi-esoteric normal game question that i think a lot of people tend to get confused on (including members of the NRG sometimes).

i think if you made it an unlimited neapolitan rather than even-night it would still be scumsided but not to the degree that i wouldn't pass it, so if you wanted to run a more scumsided game that'd be fine.

[northsidegal]

and now that i think about it unlimited neap in the neighborhood with the bodyguard isn't even

all

that scumsided, maybe it'c closer to even than i get it credit for. in the past sometimes i've overlooked the potential power of neighborhoods with power roles in them, so if the neighbors in this game could trust each other enough and work out some kind of gambit or something like that then they might be able to make it work.

[northsidegal]

anyway, my thinking with gating the neapolitan was that he has less false positives than the traffic analyst, since he will know not to check his neighbours. though looking at it now, it does feel a bit weak for town, since the backup neighbours are never a hard guilty to him... even-night neap into full neap is a passable setup?

yeah, i think i'd pass it. ever since implosion embezzled all the money we were going to start that company with and left me to deal with the IRS i've felt it's only fair that i could pass games i'm slightly less sure about

seriously though, i think a lot of it comes down to if the neighbors can work stuff out and work together, and to be honest i'm probably a little behind on the "how much do neighbors in normal games trust each other" meta. so i trust you when you say that they'll trust each other pretty quickly.

[northsidegal]

[note: sample size is 2, one of those games is over a year old, *and* i was scum in both of those games so perhaps i'm a bit biased in how much they actually trusted each other and how quickly oh god i don't want to be responsible for whatever horror this brings to mafiasc--]

don't worry, it's a coin flip as to

when

if this game becomes a trainwreck the reviewer or the mod will be blamed. 50% is pretty decent odds!

[northsidegal]

minor, but bodyguard should be "you will die instead" instead of just "you will die". would be a pretty hilarious role to just also die along with whoever was targeted if you pick correctly, maybe i should put that in the grand idea thread
macho should say that it cannot be protected from kills in any way rather than just doctors and bodyguards

apart from that role PMs seemed fine.

based on the role PMs you need to specify that daytalk is enabled by default in the rules, and you also need to include a sample VT role PM.

[northsidegal]

i'm like 95% sure that macho is meant to not be able to be protected by anything (although there was a very entertaining NRG argument over whether that also extended to rolestoppers, from which we have one of the all-time great quotes: "If you're Macho and someone tries to rolestop you, you never realise you're being targeted for a kill, so your machismo never gets challenged.")

(maybe

@implo

can weigh in but yeah i'm pretty sure that's how it is)

i'll edit the wiki article to make it more clear

[northsidegal]

it's either all neighborhoods have daytalk default or none do, so you should specify all neighborhoods instead of just mafia (i.e. so that the neighbors still have daytalk)

[northsidegal]

yeah /pass if it wasn't clear

[northsidegal]

happy birthday implo!