first off having just finished reading scott pilgrim i wanna say that book was great and am a little bummed im done cuz it warmed my heart. this flavor is awesome and very true to the book
but im not pullin punches. this setup was literally just the scumteam waiting to get ****ed in the *** raw by power roles. the only thing we had to combat them was rans command power but we were too damn terrified to use the roleblock cuz we had NO reliable way to realize that the stalker was on our team (and the role pm even states that its the same thing as a rolecop before someone comes in here with some ****ty stalker = anti town argument) so we just ended up ****ing ourselves over for making the optimal play from our perspective. we shoudlve just been given a damn roleblocker or at least not tell us that there was a role running around that could bingo us from our perspective. im also not feelin the trio of killing roles that town had. its overkill. and amnesiac cop is even worse than a cop in that the recipient is autocleared on claim by doing absolutely ****ing nothing. EDIT this has also made me reminded me how whack it is to be scum and push a mislynch only for town to get a shot off in the form if vengeful. its like town ****s up and mislynches and scum do their job yet town is awarded. smfh. i dont know how this is balanced
im posting this not to be a **** but in hopes that i dont see some of the **** i saw in this setup again
Marshy, I feel your pain, but obviously I have to disagree here. Scum team DID get screwed by PRs this game, but they still got pretty close to winning, and I think you're overselling how likely it actually was for things to play out this way (and all of this isn't really going to be addressed to you specifically, I'm just going to talk about the setup in general here, and the way things went).
First of all, all of the town PRs required skill (or luck) on town's part to use properly. You got bingo'd by J because you gave J a reason to investigate you. Red Ryu got shot because he gave Nabe a reason to shoot him. Kevin got shot because he gave Bardull a reason to shoot him (or, really, everyone else gave Bardull a reason NOT to shoot them). You can complain that they were all used well, but they're there to either be used or misused. Imagine if that had been in lesser hands? Ramona shoots a townie (or maybe even Scott?); Gideon kills a townie on his way out—that's essentially two town lynches for the price of one (keep in mind that he DID almost choose Kary or Zen before he ended up going with Kevin), and it's pretty much guaranteed to happen because the role is Hated, making it likely to be a policy lynch later in the game. That instantly makes this a much closer game, and the game
was already relatively close with all things considered.
I still contend that the Amnesiac Cop is balanced, though it does swing depending on how long each of the roles survive and which order they die in. In this specific instance, it worked better than a normal Cop because you killed the Cop N1, so town got a result they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. However, if Stacey had died instead, the whole role would have been rendered inert (which I believe Kanty already brought up). And J WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN CLEARED I CAN'T STRESS THIS ENOUGH. J thought he was a regular Cop. No one knows what a Gossip is because I made up the name. Stacey's flip, in no way, validates Wallace's role. You basically just get a Cop who somehow has no results. There's a give-and-take to these roles. The way things resolved her just resulted in a lot more take from the scum team.
I'll take my lumps when it comes to the Traitor, since not one person on the scum team figured it out. If I were to run the setup again, I would probably just tell the scumteam outright that there was a Traitor, though I may not say explicitly that the Stalker is that Traitor. But I still don't feel that it should have been that difficult to put together if you actually take a second to look at the information scum begins with.
First, the name. It's funny to me that Marshy points to the fact that I go out of my way to say that the Stalker is an alias for a Role Cop as reason not to suspect that the Stalker is anything more than I had let on, because it was intended to be exactly the opposite. If it were just a normal town Role Cop, I would have just called it that. I specifically went with the much scummier name of "Stalker" as a hint that this was not a town role. I have even seen Tom use the role in a past game (Cowboy Bebop) in just this way (which admittedly was a long time ago, but I signed up to host this game almost two years ago, sooo...).
Second, the numbers. Three scum in a 15 player game? I think the possibility that Ran was controlling players in a
second scum team was brought up in the scum QT at some point, because a 3-player scum team in a game this size seemed low. Is it really such a stretch to believe that you might have been controlling your own Traitor?
Finally, the context. It's a Role Cop, and I've given scum control of it. Logically one would assume that scum can
benefit from this ability, yes? What good is the role cop to scum unless the scum can, in some way, access the results? I mean, sure, you can assume that I just gave scum the power to control the Stalker as a way for scum to sabotage the role if they wanted to, impeding the results a town Role Cop would get, but look at scum's roles: two vanillas and a Captain, a role that implies no specific alignment. In this setup, a town Role Cop poses NO THREAT to scum whatsoever, and the scum team should be able to deduce that based only the information immediately before them.
I don't know. It's just hard for me to believe that, if one of Marshy, Ran and Red Ryu had bothered to really examine things for a second, they couldn't have figured this part out.
I guess I'm done. Sorry if parts of that came off like a rant. I'm willing to buy that the setup skews in town's favor, but I truly don't believe that it's as lopsided as some are saying. PRs tipped the scales because they were used well. Marshy played scummy so he got investigated. Red Ryu and Kev made themselves vig fodder, so they got shot. Ran picked weird Night Kills and never used his roleblock control, which could have turned out wildly useful (Nabe practically claimed PR on D1; why not roleblock him every Night for the rest of the game? Surely that's a better idea than making the Role Cop target nothing but dead players since, as I said, the Role Cop poses no threat to scum in this setup). And with all that said, town still came pretty close to losing. The game almost went to 3-man lylo.
