If being hard to confirm gives mercs a reason to lie about their role, that’s even better. We want there to be more deception and lies in the game, don’t we?
I feel that the worst possible scenario is a merc saying “hey, I’m a merc”, target saying “yep, she’s a merc”, then everyone else ignoring her for the rest of the game. That’s boring and serves no real purpose but to eliminate someone as a possible MM / NK.
Putting the Merc in a position where they have to think hard about whether to be honest or not - and where a late-game Prince, with only one execute left, has to decide to go after a merc claim or someone else - is much more interesting.
Or, in other words…
You bet your ass if I’ve already jailed that as prince and that’s the claim, I have no reason to save my execution (as the one thing he can’t be is a non gamethrowing BD that will cost me my executions).
Yes, but the merc could also lie (since they’d know your situation.) That’s interesting!
Under the current situation, meanwhile, the merc claims early on and you never jail them to begin with. That’s boring - it’s reduced the work you have to do as a Prince, because you can scratch one person off your list of possible NKs / MMs immediately. I feel we should try and minimize that - and I feel that “scratched off the list of possible NKs / MMs” is actually much worse than “auto-executed as a possible NK / MM”, since realistically executions do have costs and risks, whereas scratching the merc claim off your list is a no-brainer with zero thought to it at all.
(Sure, they can be converted or possessed. But overall the ease of confirming a merc drastically reduces the amount of thought you have to give to that person as a Prince - or as anyone else, of course. That’s bad for the game. Rolling a merc shouldn’t instantly reduce the number of possible considerations for MM from 14 to 13, not when we already have so many other roles that can trivially cross themselves off that list. Finding the MM / NK should be hard, which means giving them more of a crowd to hide in and not letting neutrals just autoconfirm that they’re not the MM / NK with the push of a button.)