I've never been a cop at all, ever.

Perhaps (though trentonlf is always high on the list of picks for the NK, regardless of having a role), but my exchange with adaliabooks (and with JoeSapphire) was about successfully breadcrumbing things, and then town successfully picking up on them, agreeing on how to interpret and act on them when the Cop dies before getting a chance to reveal their investigations.

Anyway, I think the setup was unbalanced, but the important thing is that the players, and the mod, had fun.

At least from my perspective, having been cop in 175% of the games in which I've played, being cop makes one a little paranoid, both because of how having the role makes you approach the game, and because of the pressure that comes with it.


I'm with Hyper on this. The notion of sitting on it and just breadcrumbing works great in theory, but it's kind of shit in practice.

Scum are generally role-hunting, so if you breadcrumb hard enough for whatever you're teasing to be clear once you flip, you're raising your NK profile anyway. If you breadcrumb soft, then you're relying on town to not only see it but interpret it as is.

Trent could say "McHack is definitely scum" then either no one notices or everyone says "based on what?" If he says, "Well, when I flip you'll know" then great, mchack dies a day later, but he might as well just have claimed.

Now, a VT could try to fake that sort of play - and I've considered it - but that only works if they happen to guess scum right, yada yada. So it has as many downsides as upsides, so pretty much anyone doing that is likely to be the actual cop.

If Trent says, "just a feeling" when he flips you run the risk that scum (or even townies town-reading mchack) convince everyone it was just his gut and that if trent had actually copped scum he would have claimed and mchack never gets lynched.

And to top it off, the cop has no real conception of setup/protection/threat. If scum have a role cop, in general the odds of dying after N1 start to go up significantly as scum narrow vanilla vs. potential cop/PR.

You can't have cop + protection be so strong that 'follow the cop' is a slam dunk, but I think the cop role here was a little too underpowered with no protection at all.

But long and short, I think in general if the cop has a red check, and has any valid reason to think they're in consideration for NK (or vig), actual practice shifts towards claiming it and hoping for the best.

Similar to HSL as well, I thought the flavor was a bit much (and at least could have used a TLDR translation in bold) so I didn't read all the detail carefully, but if I'm reading other comments right town had cop, commuter, RB, and whatever TF Vitek was? That's...a pretty weak slate. As SPF suggests, jailer would have been a bit stronger, both in that it's less likely to be policy lynched, and has some protection value.

Commuter and town RB are both subject to policy lynch, esp. following SPF's fake claim the prior game. Vitek was fluff, though perhaps Joe was thinking the role was watcher/role cop bait and semi-useful from that perspective in drawing an NK, maybe.

I prefer interesting games to balanced ones in the end. I enjoy being surprised by crazy setups.

Literally the only thing I lied about was my alignment, it wasn't a falseclaim in the normal sense. Besides, there was a town roleblocker in this very game. They're not so unheard of that all Rokebkockers should be lynched. Not sure why that should apply to commuters either.

This.

I've hosted and played in games with triggers built in that often fling the game in wild directions.

Some have not liked such things....

Crazy setups are fine, and I enjoy them, so long as they're role-madness and/or bastard, both in design and execution. In fact my very first experience with forum mafia was flubbucket's milk game which was plenty crazy a setup; had I not enjoyed it, I wouldn't have stuck around.

RB is trickier, because as you note the role itself can be "confirmed" in theory, even if alignment is questionable, and in a game with 2 RBs it becomes more likely that at least one is town.

Commuter, OTOH, is a mirror of the reasons people drove Cristi to lynch last game for her 'backup cop' role:

it can't really be watched/tracked (could be ninja)
it doesn't act on anybody else so can't be confirmed by another town player
it gives a great excuse for not being NKed
common enough to be a viable claim while not so common that a fake claim is likely to draw CC

Short of copping or flip, it's pretty much completely unverifiable. There is a way to handle claims with policy-lynch implications (flub's miller in the asylum game, yogs here) in order to reduce the risk, but the risk is still there which lessens the absolute value of the role, even if a player executes the night phase part well which they may or may not, and is ultimately pretty random in value anyway (no value at all if not targeted, or if used wrong night, etc.).

Edit: Of course, this proposition is different in a fully open setup where the existence of a town commuter is known, so the claim has value on its face.

Which asylum game is that? I read up on some of flub's previuos games and don't think saw this one.

I remember a trilogy of asylum games, have a look in the master list in the admin thread.

Technically the third one was A Slalom Mafia, but it's part of the trilogy.

Well, Commuter can be kind of confirmed by any PR ... just not it's alignment. But confirming the role just requires targeting the Commuter and getting a failure message.

Yeah, I saw those, but couldn't find any instance of flub claiming miller.

Here you go.

.....

So I went there, started reading from that point. Then spent time trying to figure out what weird mafia acronym CSPVG is.