Mafiascum.net

Myself and a couple of other players had an interesting AIM game yesterday night. There were 2 night kills night 1 one of the victims being scum, two docs outed themselves that day and protected eachother the next night, and no kills happened night 2.
I was one of the docs, and figured that a scum could claim doc, and choose not to kill to appear as a doctor, but that would make the setup 2 scum, 1 SK, 1 doc and three townies.
The other doc believed my claim saying "you have to be who you say you are, otherwise the game isn't balanced".

Personally, i don't think you can rely on game balance that heavily. Now that i look back on it, he was probably right in this case, but in larger games, or playing with mods that have a tendency to think of insane setups, i don't think it can be relied upon like that.

Your thoughts?

Well, the probability is high that the game is well balanced, but as the saying goes:



In mafia games this is especially true, trying to outguess the mod often won't do any good, and balance can be achieved on many ways, so you never should feel too certain about what you're up against.

That is te de-facto tactic of determining if a role claim is valid.

It can be used of course. Just always remember, it's not absolute. You might increase the cnahces of a role being valid (or false) but it's not 100% certain because all mods are human. And you have to take into account that there might be other hidden things that would balance a game instead.

There's a discussion of something like this on the Wiki under PseudoMetaGaming, although not from a balance perspective.