Resolved: Fool is competitive #debate

Feedback/Suggestions
#41

Of course, but I’ve also seen scum “outed” as “fool” under the same reasoning.

And even if that never happened it would be besides the point, since the claim isn’t that fool is easy, but that fool makes the game worse.

The fact that a fool is even enabled to act 100% identically to a scum (again in ways that a scum trying to appear BD simply can’t) is a problem, even without the actual existence of a fool doing so.

Every single scum read could be a fool faking it, or just a fool playing pro-scum moves in order to make it genuine (which will be completely identical to a sellsword for the purposes of scumreading).

#42

A class can require skill to play and/or to interact with and still be extremely unhealthy for the game

#43

Some scum withhold exculpatory evidence until the last second of a BD’s trial then declare “pardoning”, to draw attention to how they voted innocent yet their main motivation was ensure everyone else voted execute.

That’s scum pretending to appear BD, and Fool can do it too.

#44

That was to prove you wrong here:

#45

That’s not 100%

That’s in one specific instance

#46

Or a Blue Dragon being unintentionally being suspicious (maybe making some fancy play), but you aren’t going to argue that BD as a faction should be removed from the game.

#47

Wanna bet

#48

He (or you …) is free to provide an example of “scum trying to appear BD” that fool can’t mimic. Otherwise I could just continue listing examples of fool doing it successfully and you could keep shooting me down with “that’s just one other specific instance” each time.

#49

Of course we can’t. The whole point is that we can’t, because the fool CAN perfectly mimic scum and scum are trying to appear BD when they aren’t trying to appear neut.

#50

A BD can be suspicious, but short of a horrendous misplay a BD won’t act identically to a scum, simply because at the end of the day whatever their play was had the intention of helping the BD rather than hurting it.

While it’s often hard to tell the difference between a BD helping BD and a scum pretending to help BD, there IS still a difference, because the scum isn’t actually helping the BD, he’s just pretending to. However the fool can just actually help scum for real, with the same intent a traditional scum would have.

It’s very similar to the problem starting Neutral King had. But worse because it ends up having a ripple effect that prevents scumreading in general far too often.

#51

^this^

#52

Rereading your quote again it seems you meant fool can act exactly like scum, in a way that scum can’t. Do you have an example because I don’t think that makes sense, it’s like saying fool can act like scum but scum can’t act like scum.

#53

It’s difficult to convey the idea of powerwolfing without the word powerwolfing
‘Aggressively pushing the scum win condition’ loses a lot of the nuance involved with powerwolfing

2 Likes
#54

So I really think that the outside language ban is unreasonable.

I’m not trying to misrepresent your position in saying this but I believe it comes from one of seeing that forumers bash on fool a lot and you disagreeing with that. Thus you created this thread to try to argue your point on the matter.
There’s a lot of vital context that comes from out of ToL where fool does not exist (or at least not in its traditional form), which is useful for juxtaposition with ToL

3 Likes
#55

In any case, I already agree with the points brought up about how distinguishing between Fool / Scum is often inanely difficult due to the similarities between them.

  • They both are not aligned with the BD
  • They can’t reliably fakeclaim a large amount of classes due to the presence of feedback

The only major difference between them is that one is informed, and the other isn’t. This means that scum can be weeded out through reading votes and interactions between players (especially when using a dead scum as a compass of sorts).
Fool might want to emulate this, but without information they can struggle to do so unless they are p damn good.

The point that I raise is that the possible skill testing element of reading between scum / fool only comes in the late game, at which point scum’s claims start really sinking unless they’ve played their hand well (and/or have an out), effectively canceling out the skill testing element.

1 Like
#56

In a game where mechanical confirmation is so potent, reading between the two becomes tough.
And that’s how [citation needed @Arete] Fool often just gets lynched because their logs aren’t valid or they’re just not confirmed, eliminating the skilltesting element.

#57

I’m about the worst person to ask for a citation here, I have literally claimed to have successfully visited the jailed target and gotten pardoned because no one noticed but the Merc

#58

what usually happens when fool is hung when you are bd?

#59

throwback to the time I was Fool faking Knight and refusing to vote up any of the obvious evils and, despite the fact that there was no mechanical evidence to support the idea that I was BD, another player started flaming me for gamethrowing rather than suggesting the possibility that I could be evil

#60

I’m looking for anecdotal evidence for how fool wins from a BD perspective