My take:
I think people are overselling how scum-sided this one is due to a different lever. I'd put this as mildly to lower-mid scum-favored (which feels a lot harsher, to be fair, because 90% of the time SOTF runs mildly to lower-mid town-favored). But what this game really went hard on was swing, which can lead to a game feeling a lot stompier than it necessarily is on paper.
I disagree really, really hard with the idea that town's PRs were bad for it. Town was gifted an incredibly potent setup, because half the point of investigative PRs is
clearing townies. At three investigations a night, town had an incredible theoretical ability to parse and compile information, and also had a kill that scum had to jump through hoops to counter or play around (no BP scum = scum must either guess a roleblock or else investigate first and then start blocking).
The problem, as I see it, comes in the form of counterplay. About 2/3 of scum's power budget was slapped onto one member: Goose. Goose's role counters tracker, watcher, and bodyguard and is countered
by role cop (and, to a lesser degree, vig). As long as Goose is alive, scum's kill rolls right over two of town's best roles. The second Goose is dead, scum is up the proverbial creek, because suddenly the team has zero oomph and town has potentially three investigative roles, a bulletproof protection (which I think is getting undervalued hard--if the role gets outed and it's time for follow-the-cop, a bulletproof bodyguard creates a no-win situation because you can't kill the cop
or the "doctor" until a night down the line), and a kill.
I think, were I prepping the game, I'd've gone one of the following ways:
1. Goose's role gets split between Goose and Ricky. Basically, give scum two killing roles, one that can't be
tracked and one that eludes
only watchers. Give each a single-shot pierce kill. This forces scum to decide what it's more afraid of, but in turn lets them know there's both a tracker and a watcher in play. It also forces potential ricks/suboptimal usage in order to squeeze out the pierce kill.
2. Goose's role gets nerfed a bit. Drop to only one pierce kill (this makes the usage more tactical). Disable the ninja effect when using the pierce kill. This, again, forces a hard choice.
A few other factors I think people are missing:
-Scum's safe-claims were not great. It was exclusively flavor stuff, and scum was in fact given potential to trip over the exact same VT fluff thing town was--basically, we got to exploit it because one townie made an inadvisable claim and another flipped. Actually, what I was holding my breath waiting for was to get busted on ignoring Zetsu's mass claim suggestion--we just didn't have a very good answer to it so I pretended it wasn't even worth discussion, never mentioned it, and hoped it'd slide. Got away with it!
-Shooting town as town costing a phase is par for the course. That's the risk to counteract a very powerful ability, and does make the game swingier (and is also why general theory at least used to be considering hard whether or not to take a shot). Yes, the game could've ended in two phases with two bad vig shots and two bad votes. The other side of that is the game could've ended in two phases with two
good vig shots and votes.
-re: the content of the townie claims, I do think it was maybe a misfire. It reminds me a bit of Danganronpa mafia, where every VT got a generic role... except me, who got a specific dude. Hilarity naturally ensued. That said, I also think it's important to note that while it did some bad stuff for town (got Jace whacked) it also did some really good stuff for town (effectively cleared three townies). The real damage from the discourse, though, was that basically every VT lined up and spilled... allowing scum to then pour all resources into messing with town power roles. In an ideal world, getting a VT confirmed is great for town because any phase scum's knowingly shooting a VT for their slot instead of their play, that's a loss. But also in an ideal world, VTs act as a bit of a buffer between the good roles and the NK, and if that's lost the spiral escalates quickly.
The other side of this is that, by virtue of the discourse, scum was largely locked out of claiming VT (only Goose could've swung it) because to do so would look really,
really sketch given the debate.
Fenris wrote: ↑Sat Apr 25, 2020 7:29 pm
also on the last day in dead chat we were just Waiting for scum to realize they could just pile onto boogie's one vote and end the phase but they never did i guess since ricky didnt do the math and also ms was high for that last phase lmao
yall could have ended our suffering sooner u jerks
^The thing here is, that requires setup knowledge to be safe. All it takes for the day to get super, super bad is a boogie JOAT/Blizzard busdriver or something silly like that, and suddenly scum just got double-KOed at night, is outnumbered again, and blatantly admitted who they are. The game's not over 'til the credits roll, and if you go off half-cocked and something curveballs you, you can really easily lose a winning hand.
I was intent on playing townie until the very last second.
One last thing, re: memes and spam. I don't hate it. It absolutely makes the game more fatiguing to get through, and I don't think "just skip the fluff" is fair unless everyone starts color-coding their fluff or something because te only way to know what is fluff or not is to read it. I do think, to kick up the old talk (on the opposite side I once was!), there's maybe an argument to made for turning off post count incrementing in mafia if that's gonna be the norm, just so that people don't
actually get into high score competitions. Or else to make a side board for people to just get their +1s or whatever. Posting a ton in the thread because you're having fun is great! Posting a ton in the thread to see a number go up I'm less sold on, especially since it can be distracting to others and doesn't have the chief virtue of the fun side (namely,
being fun in its own right).
re: phases, generally I'm a fan of trying to have ideal win time equal for both sides, but sometimes it's not possible. 14 is sadly a really bad number for mafia IMO because you've either got 3 scum (notably town-slanted to start) or 4 scum (notably scum-slanted to start). At 13 or 15, it's easier to say which way to go. 14's just bad times.
