Gypyx's Mini Normal Review, August 2021

[Ircher]

Doctor + Day 1 IC is not generally a favored interaction. Scum will pretty much always shoot the IC N1 unless they know/have good reason to suspect there is a doctor and then be upset when their kill fails.

[Ircher]

I looked through the review archives and it's IC + watcher that was the one that was really ewww, so it might be okay here especially since the doctor is one shot. It's still not one I'd consider favorable, but I don't think it would prevent a pass here.

I think town's power is comparable to 3x masons. The JOAT is stronger than a mason but the ICs are quite a bit weaker. That said, town does have a decent chance of gaining an extra mislim here between the doc shot and vig shot. 3x masons versus all goons is considered balanced in an open, but being a closed setup makes it a big scumsided. I'm inclined to think this might be just outside the balanced region, but you might want to wait for mastina's thoughts.

[Ircher]

Based on my earlier analysis, the doctor shot failing would result in a rather scum-sided game. That is, this setup with the JOAT replaced with a 1-Shot Vig would be too scumsided to run, but barely so. The setup would be more scum sided than the equivalent (referring to scum power) 3x masons setup.

The case where the doc shot succeeds is probably the opposite situation. Gaining a mislim is really powerful for town. I think in this scenario, the balance is pretty much flipped; the number of innocents plus the extra mislim will give scum a rough game. I don't think they'll have issues with taking out the confirmed innocents; by the nature of the setup (and they already know there are multiple ICs by having an IC finder and , protectives would have to be very limited. Thus, I'd expect them to just attempt the shot again. That said, scum might believe they were roleblocked rather than doc protected. That may pose problematic for them if they attempt to fake claim (although this setup encourages scum to just claim vanilla town from a setup spec perspective).

Overall, I think the outcome of that one action probably dictates the rest of the game. If it fails, scum have an easy game. If it succeeds, scum have an uphill battle. Thus, I think the primary question here is how often do we expect the doc shot to succeed? That number is pretty much guaranteed to be greater than rand since there is a Day 1 IC here, but how much more? I would conjecture that the percentage of successful doctor saves in this setup could be as high as 50% here, though this is pure conjecture not based on any objective measurements.

Another consideration: players really like shooting other players. It would not surprise me if the JOAT ends up using the doc shot on N2 instead of N1 the majority of the time. Also, the vig has the possibility of killing the other IC, however slight that may be.

I don't have any suggestions to improve the setup's balance while keeping it in its current vision. I feel like there ought to be some clever use of informed here, but I don't think outright telling scum there is a doctor of some sort is the right information to provide.

[Ircher]

I think that's fine.