Board Thread:Role Ideas (Rework)/@comment-28112409-20190324041252

I'm about to start a flamewar. I see you monkeys with your greasy fingers, waiting to finally have the chance to be the reviewer to something I made. I prepared a good ol' mug of my shoe up your ass for this occasion in case things go south.

So what failing attempt is coming for Ret, what could I possibly suggest that would work with this shitshow of a role, what recipe for my mother's lasagna and meatballs will I steal today? I have answers to most of these questions, but it's going to be a long read for you.

The way I see it is that Ret's results are too polarizing, and that makes it the main issue regarding why the role is incomprehensibly overpowered. Unlike almost all the other roles in the game, Ret can only be UP or OP in a game. You either die/live not using your rez or you die/live with your rez used, there's no in-between.

Consequently, my idea for improving the role is to look at all the things that happen when a resurrection is made, break it down into bits and pieces and then distribute those pieces to create a spectrum of results instead of just 2.

Why a spectrum of results? Look at Sheriff with me for a moment. He's pretty balanced, barely anyone (makes legit) complains about him, doesn't attract any controversy or anything regarding balance. The reason is because he has a spectrum of results.

The Sheriff could find a mafia on N1 and then die on N3 with no other results, he could find his first mafia on N4, he could find two evils on N2 and N4, he could find the SK N1 but get himself lynched as a terrible exe before the SK gets executed, he could be on fire and find all the detectable evils all 4 nights in a row or he can be worthless and find no evils at all for the duration of his life within the match.

The two sides of the spectrum counteract each other evenly, causing the extremes of both sides to be very rare rather than the most common thing to happen like with Ret's binary set of results. There's so many ways a Sheriff's contribution and results can go in multiple situations, it'd either be impossible or an absolute chore to count them all. This is what I want to try to turn Retribrokenist into in my attempt to make it balanced.

A quick list of what a resurrection does is as follows: These are the benefits of the single resurrection that I will try breaking down in this rework, capiche? With this in mind, the actual rework is right below here.
 * Brings back information from the dead.
 * Confirms the Retribrokenist.
 * Returns an extra vote to the town majority.
 * The extra vote is from a confirmed townie.
 * Allows the resurrected townie to perform game-changing actions if they can. (Vigilante, Bodyguard, etc.)

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Retributionist

Alignment: Town Support

Lore: It existed for several years then got removed. The End.

Attack: None

Defense: None

Unique Role: Yes

Abilities: You may speak to a dead townie, temporarily resurrect a townie at night, reveal yourself at night, or permanently resurrect a townie.

Attributes: Select your desired action in the day. You may speak to each dead townie only once per game. You may temporarily resurrect each townie once per game. You can permanently resurrect only one townie. You cannot resurrect a townie that has been temporarily resurrected beforehand.

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Mechanics

A sequence is to be followed in order to access greater abilities as the Retributionist. You start off with the ability to speak to a dead townie by default. Cleaned and stoned players cannot be targeted by any of these abilities.

1) In the day, you must click the sun icon and select a dead town member to speak to the following night. You cannot choose to speak with non-townies, except disguisers who've disguised as a town role. You cannot speak with the same dead townie more than once. Speaking with a dead townie isolates them from the dead chat completely, they cannot see the other dead talking or even the mediums, they can only speak with you.

2) Speaking with at least one dead townie unlocks temporary resurrection. Temporary resurrection revives a townie only for the night and has to be selected in the day, where they can perform their night ability for that night before they return to being dead. Once again, they cannot hear the dead or the mediums speaking at night when resurrected.

You cannot temporarily resurrect a townie more than once, nor can you temporarily resurrect non-townies except a disguiser disguised as a town role. Resurrecting disguisers allows them to speak with the mafia at night, but they are unable to visit.

Townies you cannot temporarily resurrect include the jailor, veteran, medium and the mayor. Spies will see the mafia/coven visits along with their bug when temporarily resurrected, bodyguards will still kill an attacker if they successfully protect someone, vigilantes who've already put their guns away for shooting a townie will not be able to use it again upon resurrection, etc.

Choosing to temporarily resurrect someone causes you to channel the next night, and the resurrected person will be able to perform a night action. If you are roleblocked or controlled during that night, the channel will fail and the temporarily resurrected townie will also be roleblocked. This wastes the temporary resurrection on the townie too.

3) Temporarily resurrecting a townie unlocks revealing yourself at night. You must select this in the day, and you will be revealed as the Retributionist at the start of the next night to EVERYONE. The reveal will fail if you are jailed on that night.

4) Revealing yourself unlocks permanently resurrecting a townie. You cannot resurrect a townie you temporarily resurrected before in the game. You cannot resurrect non-townies except disguisers disguised as a town role. You can only permanently resurrect one townie in the whole game.

Permanently resurrected townies return to the living as ghosts. They cannot hear the dead at all, they cannot speak at all, they cannot whisper or be whispered to, they cannot be killed, they cannot perform any night abilities, they cannot be voted up, they can only vote. Evils win when killing all living townies, even if the ghost remains alive.

To permanently resurrect a townie, you must select who you want to resurrect in the day. You will spend the rest of the next night channeling. If you are roleblocked or controlled during that night, your resurrection will fail.

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Goal and investigative results both remain the same.

Purpose/Reason

You're still reading? Hello there.

Like I said, I will break down all the benefits of a resurrection and distribute them onto a spectrum. That's precisely what I did. This version of the ret no longer has the 2 results of OP or UP, but now has a variety of things to do and a variety of ways doing those things can go for him.

The first property of his resurrection is bringing back information from the dead, which I have given to the ret as their default ability to start with so that they can communicate with the dead only when they choose to. One might complain that now this is making medium useless since ret can just do what he does anyway.

It doesn't change a thing, as current ret can revive a townie the night right after they died just like the Medium can talk to the dead the night right after they die. All the information is communicated between dead townies regardless, meaning when one is resurrected, all the information would come down with them. The ret still gets the info early on, but this time via directly speaking with someone rather than a rez.

This is also beneficial to the balance of the role in my opinion because the ret has to sit through the same things the medium sits through when people doubt whether they're really saying the truth or not, and can only be 100% confirmed when they die and their will is shown or they reveal on N4 at the earliest.

Even though ret is still unique, one major part that made claiming him impossible was being pressed to rez someone and your only valid excuse was being RB'd, controlled or jailed. Since no one (except a medium) can confirm whether you're really talking to the dead or temporarily resurrecting someone, you have to go all the way for the reveal for people to believe you for granted. This also gives the evil claiming plenty of time to do stuff by making the ret claim more viable. You can't be jailed on N4 either, because the reveal would fail if the jailor did that and the town would not get the confirmation they need.

That's one thing torn off from the rez, the next part was the rezzed townie doing stuff.

This is why the temporary resurrection is there, to allow the benefit of a townie doing actions to be utilized. Doctors, bodyguards, vigilantes that didn't die embarrassingly, escorts and transporters can all have one more shot at doing something while not being as broken as to be resurrected permanently and confirmed for the rest of the game. If you wish to or if you can only get use out of TIs, you are even capable of letting a TI get one last piece of information before speaking to them for it the next night. Instead of just one lucky townie getting to remain relevant the whole game with immense value, a bunch of townies can get a decent amount of relevancy and contribution to their game via the ret.

It also creates a choice for the player between town abilities that can yield value and risking it for the permanent extra vote. The extra vote will not always be viable for reasons I'll address a bit later, but ret's have to consider more when assessing what to do instead of just randomly rezzing someone and winning the game.

Another one down from the rez, next up is confirming the ret.

I just added this as a buffer stage between the perma rez and the other 2 options. Instead of self confirmation coming along with the rez on his 3rd action, I just separated the rez and the self-confirmation. This stage is interchangeable to be honest, I'd be totally fine with removing the revelation of the ret and just making it a stage you have to go through to pull off the rez. The revelation is also at night so that evils get an opportunity to make the ret's self confirmation futile for lynching purposes by killing him in the same night.

The intention for this is that this gives evils the opportunity to stop the ret after he reveals, since it happens at the start of the night, which lets them prevent the rez. It also allows the ret to fork the mafia into making a decision, between the ret who will revive someone or another important town role like jailor or mayor maybe. It also informs the consort of a good target to go after, or even the witch if there is one. Whole buncha things, mainly to hinder the ret from pulling off the big rez along with the previous benefits he's already pulled off. This stage is basically here to introduce a "Go big or die trying" concept to the ret, so now there's risk and reward to it. It acts as the barrier between the ret sticking to the safely decent contribution or going ham for the big one.

The last two properties of the rez, the extra vote and the fact that it is from a confirmed townie.

The latter has been made useless and futile simply by the fact that you can't vote the ghost up or kill him when he's rezzed, nor can you start whispering claims or info to him, nor can he tell you anything. I have put all of these on the ghost to strictly make sure that the ghost is just an extra vote and nothing else.

I repurposed the resurrection because I didn't want the extra vote to come with some other major disadvantage for evils. The rez can work as a clutch, like when You have 3 townies vs 2 mafia and the night is coming, with someone about to die and the maf getting lynch advantage. The extra vote would save town, so it really only acts as a cushion for when the town fucks up or has just lynched an NK/NE.

It can't work as a clutch beyond that, it won't save the town if they're already equal with mafia unless town somehow prevent a kill or kill a mafia the same night the townie get rezzed. The rez is definitely beneficial in snowball situations where town is winning and the extra vote secures it, but it can also end up being useless if the town was gonna win without the rez anyway.

The way the first 2 stages and the last one has been designed is to force the ret player to really pay attention to the game and decide the best approach to winning based on his predictions or evidence supporting which way the game will go. I also made it a ghost so that even though the chances of mafia getting lynched increase, they can still win by mislynching or not lynching at all if they managed to blend in well the whole game, essentially rewarding the evils for good deception skills. There's not much opportunity to do good deception in Ranked, obviously, but the reworks and buffs to the mafia deception is inevitable. You know it, I know it, we all know it.

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Congrats on reading another novel essay of mine. I'm open to (competent) criticism and (non-braindead) feedback, gimme the straight shot. 