Honestly, my thoughts mirror nsg's here. I love your design logic, don't think the setup is massively scumsided, but I do understand the rather valid concern involving the town doctor and the informed gunsmith about a mafia doctor. I'm not as concerned about a weak friendly neighbor, that's an inherent double-edged sword built into the role where it is a considerably strong role with a known drawback to it, and is not a role that takes considerable knowledge/experience/skill to pilot. (Just about any given player given that role can have an idea on how to use it competently. Well-used, the role could snowball to victory off of just surviving and clearing itself and its target, but also gives utility for breadcrumbing a guilty. Poorly used, and it can create a false-innocent* or with bad breadcrumbing, a false-guilty. The latter is much less likely than the former.)In post 5, northsidegal wrote:so on first glance i don't think it's terribly scumsided although i think some of the concerns you just mentioned might be kinda valid, for instance the gunsmith taking the real doctor as a mafia doctor (although this might arguably be an example of a good red herring)
i like a lot of your thinking in your design logic (and i appreciate you including that a lot – i always end up asking people for it anyways because it helps me know what direction to try to take the setup in). if you want a gunsmith / maf doc combo, i think having the gunsmith be informed of this is a pretty good idea. weak friendly neighbor is a cool role, although personally i consider the "weak" part as less of a downside than you seem to – you say that if one scum is doing well enough that they essentially disable the friendly neighbor, but i think that in a lot of scenarios (at least with a halfway competent FN), that really just means a guilty on that scum member. again, kind of depends on whether a newbie or more experienced player is the WFN, but still
i think the setup is at its weakest with the strongman and the 2-shot commuter, although it being the relative weakest (i.e. compared to the rest of the setup) doesn't mean that it's bad
honestly i think that it's probably passable as is? of course, the evil NRG bureaucrat in me wants to tweak it around and not just pass it as is, but i honestly don't think it's really necessary. of course, if you'd like to talk it through a bit more and if you feel like you might want to change your mind on it i'm open to hearing different ideas, but ithinkthat it's passable as is. would like to hear mastina's opinion as well.
I do think that, thanks to the mafia doctor and the town doctor and the informed gunsmith and the scum 1x strongman, the game
is
slightly scumsided, but as nsg said, within the passable margin of error. (Ideal balance is 50-50. There's a 10% margin of acceptable deviation from a perfect 50-50, where a game can be up to 60-40 town-scum or 60-40 scum-town, and I'd place this at somewhere in the 58-60% scum margin, passable but still scumsided.)If the setup were to be tweaked, the tweaks would need to be
very very minor
, minuscule ones, because the setup is beautiful, the setup is elegant, the setup is nice, is wonderful, and not atrociously balanced. But I am currently too tired to make any suggestions on any tweak of this nature, if it's even desired. (Soonest I'd be able to do this, if you want it, is Sunday.)Because as I said above, it's passable in my opinion as-is. Slightly scumsided, scumsided enough to
almost
be outside the acceptable margin of balance, but to just be inside the region. So I'd mostly defer the judgement to the setup designer/mod, if they're okay with the running the setup knowing that it's slightly scumsided. If they are, if you are, then it's fine, but if you're not quite happy with it as it is, then yeah, needs some form of very minor tweak/adjustment.*This is the source of the aforementioned improbable, but not impossible, false-innocent, because the answer is yes, a doctor can save a Weak role visiting a scum player.In post 8, Morning Tweet wrote:Oh, also I have a question: If the Weak Friendly Neighbour is killed by visiting a mafia-aligned player, can the doctor save them, or is the death unpreventable?