User blog:Calllack/New roles analysis

This analysis will look at the effects of the new roles added in the Coven expansion on the complexity and difficulty of the game for all roles and factions.

Psychic

I've decided to start with this one because it's an easy one. Psychic is a huge boon to the Town - or it appears so on first inspection. By being able to find a confirmed Town member every other night, they can easily gain a trusted ally or partner. As you probably know this is really, really useful for finding the scum because you can pool ideas.

However, it won't take long - in fact it may be beginning already - before scum roles start imitating Psychics. Psychic is one of the easiest roles to create a fake will for now. And it is Town Investigative. That means it will be a popular choice in Ranked (Practice).

So in future, players may get whispered by a 'Psychic' who wants to pool resources - that is to say, discover your role. From the perspective of a scum role, there's a significant danger that the person you whisper to find their role will actualy be another scum (e.g. Maf finding SK) who will know you are a fake Psychic and kill you right away.

In addition, the number of whispers will increase: conversations between Psychics and their buddies. But this will not increase complexity, because it was already a natural scum tactic to kill anybody who seems to be sharing secret information.

So overall, how does the Psychic affect the meta? Not a lot. In fact, barely at all. Apart from all players needing to be aware of how the role works, so they can spot badly-made fake wills (which is necessary for all roles) the only thing we need to worry about is fake Psychics trying to buddy with us, which can be prevented by putting their claim into our wills the same as would be done in any buddy situation in which the other player is not confirmed.

As for the difficulty of playing as Psychic, it's actually one of the easiest Town roles. It's essentially a TI which finds info by itself. This makes it a good role for new players. At the same time, because its selections of evil and good roles are totally random, it's fairly balanced - unless the player is particularly unlucky or lucky. So it has the capability to be good or bad - which is the same for every other TI role. The difference is that this role requires no skill at scumreading/deduction to know who to investigate to find info; it's all done for you.