Out of those you mention, only the NK needs to survive to the end of the game to win. MM has his passives and reappearance to carry him through the early game. Reaper and Possessor have chill and jump to get through the day phase and Sorcerer can ally itself with evil to get enough numbers.
I’m playing too much devil’s advocate here though. What ToL needs in my opinion is less general confirmability and more confirmability at high cost. Great examples are butler’s poison and hunters wolf. It confirms them beyond any doubt, but also severely jeopardizes whoever they target and in butler’s case itself. Something like having telepathy prevent linking that night, seems like a good tradeoff.
I don’t think psy should be nerfed too hard though, since he is one of the BD power roles along with prince. I’d prefer things like not having a message show up if you try to occ/deb an occupy immune. Drunks have HH to prove and butlers have their poison. Making hunter non-unique so it becomes a valid fake claim. Weakening Observer’s follow by only showing who their target visits and it needing to be empowered through some limited use day ability to show who visits their target as well. Noble’s force accuse only be visible to who is being forced to accuse and silent to everyone else.
I have an idea, though it relies on the possibility of two night abilities being used the same night. What if we get rid of Assassin and replace one of the converted classes’ abilities with kill? So the Nightwatch could for example kill someone and follow someone else the same night. So instead of being promoted (more like demoted) to Assassin, you would simply have one of your abilities replaced with an attack.
While I agree with many your general points… I think the problem is a bit different there. I have no problem with investigative abilities being mostly you’re screwed. It’s where the challange does come in. Can the investigative convince everyone it’s actually investigative… can evils counterclaim or undermine the investigative. Not to mention the general skill that comes from scum reading vs staying under the radar.
That being said the real problem to me at least, is the 80% of classes that leave blatently obvious footprints of occupied people, uncontestable observer logs, trail of debauched people, psychic links, self confirming accusation tweaks etc… poison/bleed healing, being unique etc… the window of claimable classes is pretty much just 4-5 classes, hence creating the lul-knight problem.
I’m pretty good at logical deduction, so this will be biased
Evils actually have to put effort into their logs, while BD does not and if they rush their logs ofc they will be lynched, do your logs one night at a time. Not all in one night and pick a claim from N1 it’ll allow you to swap your claim to something else more believable, but once you claim publicly YOU ARE STUCK WITH IT. Logical Deduction is easier because the days go by fast social deduction is very hard.
I’ve put together this list before, but seriously. Most roles are not credible for a NK / MM to claim, outside of fairly-rare extenuating circumstances or relying on some extremely suspect tricks that most players will see through (ie. only ever targeting dead people.) The roles you can claim:
Almost Always
Court Wizard, Knight, Paladin / Sheriff. That’s it.
Plus maybe Princess, for the Mastermind only, but you can’t WoW, and you’re not Noble, which can trip you up easily.
Rarely, or with significant risk
Hunter: Unique, and if a real hunter exists they’ll happily be the first to upvote you. Can prove with bleed.
Physician / Alchemist: Works at first, but you’ll get caught when asked to cure poison / bleed.
Butler / Drunk: Logs are not really fakeable. People will ask someone to confirm your logs, and lynch you if nobody does. Butler can also be asked to poison king, while Drunk’s deb makes his identity glaringly obvious.
Basically Impossible
Noble: Gets asked to prove by forcing someone to vote.
Observer: Observer logs flatly require too much information to credibly fake.
Prince: Logs impossible to fake, real prince will kill you anyway.
Psychic: Unique, logs impossible to fake, multiple ways to prove instantly.
Mercenary: Produces messages for his target.
Fool / Scorned: Not something you claim directly, but theoretically an option. Gets you CSed, or executed by the King or Prince.
…you may occasionally be able to slip one of these impossible claims past an inattentive court, or happen to have an Aristocrat / Apostle who can help you prove at the exact moment you need to. And you can technically give some of them to the Prince / Psychic, if you don’t mind dying the moment it comes up publicly. But that’s basically luck, not skill, and it’s not at all reliable. Realistically, in any given game, there are 3 or 4 Mastermind / NK claims that will hold up to any sort of scrutiny, and that’s being generous and giving you Princess. That is not enough.
It’s not about effort. No amount of “effort” will let the starting MM or an NK successfully duplicate Noble abilities, or pretend to be an Observer, or produce a Butler / Drunk will that BD will confirm. The fact is that what people are calling logical deduction isn’t deduction at all - it’s just a matter of whether the BD follows a very simple, straightforward, mindless checklist of ways to verify roles or not. If you claim something that they could confirm, as the MM or NK, you’re left crossing your fingers hoping they don’t check you, and the only way you can win is if they’re stupid like that. For them, there is no logic and no deduction, just one binary choice with an obvious best option. Deduction requires more complicated interactions, which means you can’t give BD easy ways to verify claims.
I feel that part of the problem is that some players are very proud of themselves for figuring out and reliably applying those same few linear tests; it feels like you’re some genius master of deduction for constantly spotting the dumb MMs who try to slip a Butler log past you. But the fact is that that doesn’t really qualify as meaningful deduction - it’s too obvious, to the point where it could be seen as almost automatic among skilled players.
If you want interesting deductions, then evils need claims that can rely on more abstract and unique inferences in order to spot. For instance, “why didn’t you protect XYZ?” is an interesting way to catch a Knight claim - they can give you a reason, then it’s up to the court to assess the validity of that reason and whether they trust it. The best claims will allow for lies piled on lies like that, with BD having a lot of possible places to pull the thread, but no one obvious way to instantly and effortlessly figure out the truth. Right now, the game rarely requires that level of deduction because the usable MM / NK claims are so limited that you can just lynch everyone claiming them in the late game if you haven’t found the MM / NK yet.
I’d say for some more claims we should first remove Mercenary notifications (which seems to be pushed by most people. It would be pretty hard to add any more claimable classes without completely redoing them.
I’d personally like to see some changes to Hunter (which I think you suggested) by making it non unique, removing Retribution and reducing wolves. Retribution is just kind of weird anyways.
Yeah, unfortunately, looking at that list, the Mercenary and Hunter are the only roles I can see easily making more fakeable without drastic overhauls. Plus I guess we could discuss whether the Princess really needs WoW and what she would get instead, but it doesn’t come up a huge amount.
Mostly it’s just something to consider when making new ideas or discussing potential changes - we want to make sure they move things towards more fakeable roles, or at least (most importantly) don’t reduce the number of fakeable roles.
I actually suggested giving Possessors a way to copy any ability! Basically, give the Possessor a day ability called “mimic”, which can only be used while possessing someone. When activated, it gives you the Day and Night abilities of the class you’re possessing for the current day and the next night (you can use another Day ability that day, so you can actually use one of the abilities you’re faking.)
Some abilities would have to be off-limits (obviously no Prince), but I think it’d be very interesting and would make people far more paranoid about Possessors.
Btw, on the Master rework thread I did an analysis of which additions can be faked:
Priest - Anyone usually. Some classes might die and make it harder but for the most part it is much easier to fake a one off result. It also can give you a reason to be night Immune if Unseen calls you out N2 or something as Sorc or Poss.
Psychic - Converted only. Too meny ways to prove otherwise
Noble - Converted only. If you used PP twice already then you can keep faking him if promoted however.
Scribe - Converted or Possessor. No one else can fake whisper reading.
Steward - Converted. Just like other offensive classes.
Maid - Anyone. If you know factions and can fake Princess you can fake this. Both of those are fairly straightforward to figure out as scum.
Squire - Anyone. However it won’t last forever.
CW - Anyone. His abilitys weren’t changed at all in terms of fakability.
In total this would add 4 classes that could be faked by classes other than their converted versions (counting scribe because of Possessor) And only 1 that can’t (the rest were already there)
Only an absolute newbie or an evil trying to pass it off would have window peeked N1. Why on earth would a legitimate observer use a peak on litterally the night where it is both the least likely to find an unseen (as there will only be 2 findables as the first conversion cannot have hit, and all 9 of the starting BD are alive and not converted yet). Not to mention scorned and fool are most likely to use their frames on n1, as that is the night when the most investigatives are alive. Oh and of course, obviously if it’s an unseen game the MM can’t be found yet… meaning there’s litterally only a total of 1 findable unseen.
Then when you go to “dead people that can’t contest”. The dead guy can’t contest, but there’s a 90%+ chance that one of the living guys can contest it. You know who the dead guy visited from his log… but for all you know he was visited by a sheriff, physician and knight that are still alive, and all 3 of those can absolutely call that out.
Now admitted, it can be gotten away with right now up until there is a veterans or ranked mode. as half of players don’t seem to even care to ask for, read logs or even have people do obvious tests. I mean it’s fake claimable in the same way that noble is fake claimable if nobody asks him to force anyone to vote. But realistically with 3 days worth of logs, there is a 90-99% chance that at least 1 living BD has information that can contradict your logs (even if currently there’s so many inexperienced players that you can slide it past them half the time).
