Cook's Mini Normal Review, March 2021

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Rolelist

12 Players.

5

Vanilla Townies

2

Town Masons

1

Town Friendly Neighbor

1

Town Doctor

1

Mafia Traitor Roleblocker

1

Mafia Fruit Vendor

1

Mafia 2-Shot Vanilla Cop

As per Normal guidelines, the Traitor is informed of the Mafia team, and the Mafia team is informed of the presence of a Traitor.

For Reviewers

Going in to balancing this setup, I wanted to make a 2maf1traitor vs 9 town setup work without creating a breaking strategy.

Town's main power is confirmability of its own ranks as opposed to confirming scum. 2 Masons can vouch for each other, especially in later-game phases, and Friendly Neighbor being the "investigative" means it's pointless to follow an investigation role, since FN outing defeats its own purpose.

Doctor, too, isn't capable of acting as a Cop, either, since Traitor being targeted by Mafia could result in a Doctor save that appears to "confirm" that player as not Mafia.

To counter this, scum is capable of also confirming itself, with a Fruit Vendor to create a potential false confirm.

Vanilla Cop was also thrown in to allow Mafia to better read the room and find any protectives who might not be claiming.

Already, two scum PRs in a 3:9 setup was a problem, hence my decision to make the customary Roleblocker a Traitor to weaken scum's capability to coordinate a Doc play.

Overall, I expect this setup to initially be townsided but I'm hoping we can make it work.

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Primary: Isis
Secondary: implosion

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I was gonna say something similar, I think you're right that the initial draft is a bit townsided. Doctor + confirmable roles is always risky because even though it's not a breaking strategy in the sense that the town can follow the cop, it still leaves a lot of potential frustration for scum that the situation Isis described can happen; this is compounded by the fact that the setup starts in evens so the first doc save earns an extra miselim.

Some possible solutions or partial solutions could be:

-Liberal application of the macho or ascetic modifiers (possibly in conjunction with some informed scum role that gives them info about that so that they know they don't have to waffle around whether or not to target a claimed mason or FN)
-Weakening or changing the role of the doctor, e.g. giving it a modifier like odd or even night, changing it to a bodyguard, etc
-Improving or changing the scum's 2-shot vanilla cop to something more specific, like ungating it, changing it to a rolecop, changing it to a doctor-finder (which would also effectively inform scum that there's a town doctor), etc.
-Upgrading the traitor if we still think it's too townsided. My personal philosophy of scum power roles is that they're basically an alternative way to gate town power roles (though this isn't true of the fruit vendor); if the town power roles are strong on their own or the scum power roles aren't especially effective against them in the first place then you don't necessarily need a traitor. That said I think it probably will still make sense in this setup.

Also since it is quite likely to matter here: are scum intended to be multitasking by default?

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Role PMs are generally good to see so we can look over them and make sure they look right.

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As a minor thing, there are a couple of sort of "flavorful" things in these role PMs that are fine, but I'd slightly advise against - e.g. the phrase "You in addition carry the burden of the following knowledge:". In a normal game I'd typically expect to see "You are informed of the following:" or the like. I only mention this because it's conceivable that some players might in some way reference unconventional phrasing which is something you'd want to avoid if you can.

This line should be removed from the traitor PM: "You may also post in your PT pre-game and I will count that as a confirmation"

This line: "If you target the Traitor with your kill, they will die." is something that you normally wouldn't be able to say at all, because mafia wouldn't know if the traitor is bulletproof. In this case I'd still get rid of it just because mafia might read into it that there's no protective role or something like that; players should generally know how traitor mechanics work, and if they're not sure they can ask. The reminder of traitor mechanics is fine (good, in fact), I'd just I guess rephrase it into something like "your factional kill works normally against the traitor - they cannot be recruited."

Mason PM should specifically mention that the other person is town, not just that they're a mason, since there's still a bit of a holdover from long ago when there was ambiguity between the terms "mason" and "neighbor".