The Good
Affinity - Vanilla Townie. Honorary bodyguard for drawing the NK to himself N1 in lieu of any of the more powerful roles it could have hit.
capt. h - Vanilla Townie. Ironic that the one doing so much role speculation didn't have a role himself.
Colt - Town Bodyguard. One of the town's less powerful roles. The Hitman shot would bypass it, leaving Colt unkilled and his ability ready for another shot. Otherwise, if shot by NK or by UK, he'd block the shot but take a mortal wound, meaning that he'd be alive and voting for the following day, but would die alongside the day's lynch. This meant that his ability didn't have any long-term effect on the raw Town vs Scum numbers, and was best used to protect pro-town, confirmed, or power roled townies. His ability could still be decisive, though, either in LyLo with one scum left where he could buy time for the last lynch, or by protecting Zakeri and stopping scum from screwing themselves out of another day before LyLo (which almost happened).
Conqueror - Town Lawyer. Another lesser role. In its original form, would actually be verbose enough to skip the whole next night phase to give the confirmed townie a day in which to be guaranteed safe (and it was for this that the command was called #Fillibuster), but I decided that this was too powerful with everything else on the table. At its best, his role could give the town an extra lynch, either by catching scum and taking it down with him, or else by giving scum strong incentive to kill the confirmed townie whose role was now public. It's because scum could just immediately NK the target confirmed by this role that I don't deem it very powerful, although it could have some synergy with the Bodyguard.
Dormio - Town Paralyzer. Could ##Prick another player by PM during the day. The target would be roleblocked during the day without notification, and would then be notified upon the start of the nightphase that they were roleblocked. Both these aspects were intended to make the role somewhat pro-scum. First, scum had no day abilities whatsoever, so dayblocking could only hurt town. Secondly, a town power role that was blocked isn't really helped by being told he's blocked, but if scum are blocked and notified, they can make sure they have someone else send in the NK.
Still, if scum were hit, it'd almost always inconvenience them by keeping them from using their full set of powers. Due to Bardiche's role and to the fact that scum don't have to kill, it wouldn't ever really give a fullclear or confirmation. Investigative roles are never to be completely trusted, and attempting to shoehorn a non-investigative role into a perfect cop is a shenanigan that ought to be thwarted often enough to make folks stop doing it.
Kilgamayan - Vanilla Townie. I am so sorry you did not get a cooler role to go with the one you got last game.
Pescible4u - Town Biologist. This is the role that has probably received the most scrutiny, and folks have called it both too strongly anti-town and too strongly anti-scum. I believe it to be neither, nor even especially swingy, although I would still call it the game's strongest investigative role.
Because of Hourai, and because of his ability, inherited by Bardiche, that acted as an antiFramer, potentially as few as two scum could be vulnerable to the test at any one time, and only by having done enough good scumhunting to include those specific two in his pick of five could this role get a positive result. If you're curious about the math, there was about a 25% of getting a positive result if shooting randomly, and that would fall to about 10% if Hourai's ability was used as an antiFramer - worse odds than a Cop can expect to have, and for less information.
Even with a positive result, there would be a few townies there (especially with the concern of a Miller) to make sure that the Town couldn't just lynch their way through the list. So, it was definitely painful for scum to get hit by this, but the limited degree of certainty in targets was a proportionally reasonable payoff for the scumhunting required to get that result, and the role would get less and less effective as scum numbers dwindled. It was at best a scumhunting aid, to steer the town in the right direction.
As far as hurting the town goes, I don't think anyone would call a Cop a liability to town just because scum has a Framer/Godfather. Investigative results should always be taken with a grain of salt, and should never trump scumhunting. If the town had gotten a misleading result, and then proceeded to take that result as the gospel, it would have deserved to lose for that mistake, just like letting a Godfather cruise through LyLo from a Cop check.
NeoSerela - Town Radio Operator. A pretty fun role, although there never really was any secret information transferred to make use of. NeoSerela's only part in things was picking who the two radios would go to in the Pregame phase (he could have kept one for himself if he had wanted, but this would have made his eavesdropping ability pointless). If a player with a radio died, it would go to NeoSerela if he didn't have one, or else to the player who had last voted the dead radio holder, regardless of whether it was a lynch or a NK. The reason that messages were only passed every 24 hours was so that no inferences about identity could be made based on timezones.
Also, while it's true that passing the radio took a night action, if a lone scum came into possession of a radio, he'd be informed that he could barely manage to pass it off to someone else on his way to the NK and it wouldn't use his night action. An obvious rule patch to stop the town from confirming two of its number every day when one scum remained, but I wanted there to be a reason not to pass the radios for town, and I sure as hell wasn't going to allow them to exploit that to catch scum without hunting.
PX - Vanilla Townie. Another one. I wanted to include enough that scum wouldn't really draw any extra suspicion for claiming it themselves.
Shadoweh - Town Heroic Vigilante. Was hoping that this potentially unlimited dayvig would be a present to someone who was really wanting it, but it worked out pretty well anyway. The original concept for this was a measure to prevent excessive newbtown from bringing the Town down - sometimes the most pro-town thing to do is shoot someone who may be townie, but is causing grief for the town. This role is actually motivated to shoot the townier of two lynch options, because it means that the town may have an extra kill the next day too.
UncertainKitten - Town Cowboy Cop. An investigative counterpart to the Kevorkian Doc that I'm surprised I haven't seen before. Could investigate on even nights, or kill to forfeit all future investigations. The odds of the game lasting until Day Five, let alone the cop surviving that long, were pretty small, so in practice this role basically boiled down to getting one investigation N2, and then shooting on N3. Still, it was the only role capable of getting a good result on both Hourai and Zakeri, so that's something. I'm always sad to see a new role die N1.
The Bad
Bardiche - Zombie Eavesdropper. If I hadn't come up with most role names at the last minute, I would have called him 'Zombie Scavenger'. He had a few abilities, all of them more useful later in the game. Firstly, so long as he was alive, scum would automatically receive a copy of all radio communications. Hourai let the Town know that there was potentially a listener out there, though, so this didn't get much use. Secondly, Bardiche would inherit the abilities of dead scum. Thirdly, he got to use an ability each night without actually using up his night action.
Basically, he was intended to be scum's weapon against excessive setup speculation. "Scum couldn't have done that, the one with that kind of ability is already dead." "Scum couldn't have done that, they have to spend an action on NKing." This role was meant to prevent that sort of thing from being valid.
Hanged Hourai - Traitor Mad Scientist. For the record, I named this role Traitor first, and only afterwards looked on the wiki and saw that the word was already used to describe basically what I intended, and I didn't want the town to know for sure whether he could talk with scum, since the town is never supposed to be sure about scum communication limitations in general. Anyway, his mind control beacon was kind of a one-way Bus Driver. He picked two targets, and anything trying to hit the first at night would instead hit the second, with no notification for the user that a redirect had happened.
This role was basically meant to be used as either a Godfatherizer, or a Framer, and the two functions could be switched between freely. Also, while Hourai would automatically protect himself from scum NKs, if he was hit by the Rolecop he'd become a true zombie, wouldn't lose his ability, would be able to post in the scum QT, and would begin showing as a zombie to Edible's test as well.
huh what - Zombie Investigator. If I hadn't come up with most role names at the last minute, I would have called this one 'Zombie Creeper' or something. Investigative roles are generally less useful for scum than for town, so this one was made extra powerful. He'd get the full role PM, the full list of actions used so far over the course of the game, and the full list of actions used on that person over the course of the game.
The purpose of this role was roleclaim fodder, the other big meta-related thing scum have to worry about in role-heavy games. With this role, the zombies would have a much better idea of what was out there, and they'd be able to counterclaim or think up new roles more convincingly. Also, this role came with an implicit guarantee that there were no Watchers or Trackers in the game, which freed the scum team up to claim whatever night actions they wanted without worry of being disproven.
Schezo - Zombie Hitman. This role could perform an extra, unblockable NK on any night. What more do you want?
The Wily
Zakeri - Survivalist Profiler. Another role I like. A survivor with the ability to perform a limited rolecop - and he becomes immune to his rolecopped targets' actions. He shows as Town to Edible's investigation in the first place. If hit by UK's investigation before he scans her, he shows up as third party, and if after, then he shows up as town. If UK tries to vig him after being scanned, the shot fizzles but she keeps her abilities. Likewise with Shadoweh. Dormio's roleblock can only stop his scans if he pricks Zakeri before being scanned, and even while roleblocked Zakeri's gathered immunities remain. Conqueror's ability would appear to reveal Zakeri's role PM as that of a vanilla townie if he had been scanned by Zakeri first.
Any scum who Zakeri had scanned would fail to NK him if they were the one to send in the role PM - this includes Schezo's Hitman shot. After scanning Hourai, his future scans would ignore all attempts at redirection. He'd be immune to a scanned ability even if Bardiche was the one using it. huh what's investigation wouldn't be affected one way or the other, however.
This role was prevented from being too useful to the town by (and he was informed of this as well) the fact that if he investigated scum, even despite gaining immunity to their scum abilities, he wouldn't actually know that they were scum. Each scum had a pre-provided fakeclaim, and if Zakeri scanned them before they claimed any role in the thread, he'd find them to be their fakeclaim (Bardiche = Vanilla Townie, huh what = Watcher/Tracker, Schezo = Kevorkian Doc). After claiming a role in public in the thread, Zakeri's scan would instead return a result of that role. In either case, scum would have been notified in the QT that they had been rolecopped and of the result of that rolecop, but not who had copped them. In retrospect, it might have been a bit more fair for scum if I had informed them from the start of a living rolecop, and just required them to always have a fakeclaim they wanted to appear as. In any case, these limitations would mean that Zakeri's ability wouldn't do much to find scum before the LyLo massclaim, and once the town was in LyLo, Zakeri would be smart to try and get town lynched too.
I am so sad that this role didn't end up being useful, but that's partly my own fault for allowing so few scans. If I used this role again, I'd probably give it two or three scans per night.
