Honestly, if my win condition was buffed slightly (three-shot and all useable N1? Ability to see alignment if I inspect a target? Having to lynch 2 town at all instead of killing 2 specific and at least one with a lynch?) and I was given a one-shot bulletproof or something like that to give the aforementioned wiggle room, I think it would've been enough to balance neutral-courier without destabilizing the setup.
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NOC Fallout New Vegas NOC [GAME OVER - Wastelanders Win]
- Thread starter More Cowbell
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Honestly though straight up claiming your role wasn't a horrible idea if you make it to, say, Day 3. At that point it's semi-obvious that the Courier doesn't have a night kill and you aren't overly harmful to the mafia either (though I'd cut out the check that you have just so that they don't think of you as threatening), so I think you'd be able to at least avoid being killed that way. I agree that you should've had a lot more wriggle room in terms of which roles you have to kill, however.
Originally the role was just needing those three players dead, but with no checks. The checks with the condition of lynching a villager I thought would add interesting gameplay of actively trying to get a player lynched instead of simply coasting by and living. I do really like the role, all said and done, especially when compared to a survivor or a regular lyncher.
I think the win condition was hard and could have been slightly buffed (maybe if neutral let it know there is no village alignment checker to give it a false claim in addition to knowing alignment of its checks? maybe instant knowledge of the last villager needed to be lynched if one dies at night? maybe give it an every night check?), but I think the role was hurt by trying to play it as town-sided in the early game. I think the playstyle needed to be the opposite of how it was taken: you need to appear scummy enough not to be night killed and can weasel your way out of being lynched by being townie as need be. I think the role wasn't unwinnable and was overall fair, but I think overall game balance wouldn't have been hurt by improving the role's chances of winning.
I thought the post that you made calling out Spiffy and Celever, while logically sound, was a really bad play, as it broke your normal way of posting just to call out a mafia that you know is almost certainly not Caesar. If you honestly believed that one of VonFiedler or Serious Bananas were mafia, then you had to believe that Spiffy/Celever were a non-Caesar mafia. From the mafia's perspective, why would you want to come off as leading a bandwagon against one of these players with new allegations? You put a target on your back if your post is right. From the town's perspective, you just broke your posting style and end up looking really suspicious as a result. That post makes you look like you have an agenda, especially if you end up being wrong. It's lose/lose.
Odds are decent that as long as you are alive you can win off of some decent luck in a mislynch, and you can make a judgment call based on how the mafia are doing on whether or not to town side or mafia side as the game progresses. From what the role does know, it does know it needs to be alive in order to win, which I think needs to be the number one priority of the role.
Claiming publicly when you only need 1 mafia dead and one villager mislynch is a possible play as sam pointed out. You could point out that you've been trying to help village and will continue to do so and that wasting you is taking away a lynch from an actual mafia, and say you'll just hope to win along the way. You also could claim survivor, which would be fairly believable midway through the game, which gives you a bit more freedom.
The role also had very few unwinnable scenarios as it gets closer to late game. Caesar's the most likely role to be caught by the watcher especially if an earlier tracker claim happened and a mafia lynch is never something that is out of the picture; odds are that at least one mafia will be lynched during the course of the game, and given you have more knowledge of the set up than most it becomes something you can control. It happened to be hard this game though, as von played fairly well (although I think he should have been called out for how sure he was that jalmont was town - jalmont did nothing at that point to deserve that level of certainty of his town-ness). Watcher will never be "an unlynchable villager" alive at late game with a. his role being by far the most useful info role the village has, b. being one of the few protective roles the village has, c. the mafia having a role cop, and d. no doctor to save him from a mafia kill. There are no roles that could possibly clear a vanilla villager, and either the villager appears so clear the mafia will kill him and refresh the mislynch target or he's an actual possible mislynch target you can push.
So yeah, I think that while it's true that the role could have probably used some slight buffs, it wasn't so bad that it was bad that it didn't have them.
I think the win condition was hard and could have been slightly buffed (maybe if neutral let it know there is no village alignment checker to give it a false claim in addition to knowing alignment of its checks? maybe instant knowledge of the last villager needed to be lynched if one dies at night? maybe give it an every night check?), but I think the role was hurt by trying to play it as town-sided in the early game. I think the playstyle needed to be the opposite of how it was taken: you need to appear scummy enough not to be night killed and can weasel your way out of being lynched by being townie as need be. I think the role wasn't unwinnable and was overall fair, but I think overall game balance wouldn't have been hurt by improving the role's chances of winning.
I thought the post that you made calling out Spiffy and Celever, while logically sound, was a really bad play, as it broke your normal way of posting just to call out a mafia that you know is almost certainly not Caesar. If you honestly believed that one of VonFiedler or Serious Bananas were mafia, then you had to believe that Spiffy/Celever were a non-Caesar mafia. From the mafia's perspective, why would you want to come off as leading a bandwagon against one of these players with new allegations? You put a target on your back if your post is right. From the town's perspective, you just broke your posting style and end up looking really suspicious as a result. That post makes you look like you have an agenda, especially if you end up being wrong. It's lose/lose.
Odds are decent that as long as you are alive you can win off of some decent luck in a mislynch, and you can make a judgment call based on how the mafia are doing on whether or not to town side or mafia side as the game progresses. From what the role does know, it does know it needs to be alive in order to win, which I think needs to be the number one priority of the role.
Claiming publicly when you only need 1 mafia dead and one villager mislynch is a possible play as sam pointed out. You could point out that you've been trying to help village and will continue to do so and that wasting you is taking away a lynch from an actual mafia, and say you'll just hope to win along the way. You also could claim survivor, which would be fairly believable midway through the game, which gives you a bit more freedom.
The role also had very few unwinnable scenarios as it gets closer to late game. Caesar's the most likely role to be caught by the watcher especially if an earlier tracker claim happened and a mafia lynch is never something that is out of the picture; odds are that at least one mafia will be lynched during the course of the game, and given you have more knowledge of the set up than most it becomes something you can control. It happened to be hard this game though, as von played fairly well (although I think he should have been called out for how sure he was that jalmont was town - jalmont did nothing at that point to deserve that level of certainty of his town-ness). Watcher will never be "an unlynchable villager" alive at late game with a. his role being by far the most useful info role the village has, b. being one of the few protective roles the village has, c. the mafia having a role cop, and d. no doctor to save him from a mafia kill. There are no roles that could possibly clear a vanilla villager, and either the villager appears so clear the mafia will kill him and refresh the mislynch target or he's an actual possible mislynch target you can push.
So yeah, I think that while it's true that the role could have probably used some slight buffs, it wasn't so bad that it was bad that it didn't have them.
I think you're underestimating just how difficult it is to win as a neutral role, especially one with a hugely variable information role like this :/
Discarding role interactions, being middle of the road is remarkably difficult to actually pull off, especially as the game drags on. Day one interactions have a way of being immensely useful later on as scum can get away with just about anything when there's very little context in the game to draw from. Scum already have a plan of how to interact with each other and town doesn't have to care about future interactions at all. Self-aligned players have to be very self-aware to stop themselves from being incriminated later on when more information is on the table. That's just one example; there's ways that just about any strategy can backfire into your face. This is basically why survivors and serial killers (SKs ESPECIALLY need this, period) have to have some form of protection. Cop immunity and bulletproof are the most common ones I see and directly influence the optimal strategies in order to reduce the amount of variables that can just lose you the game instantly.
The Spiffy+Celever post I made was because I had asked someone if they wanted to replace into the game and he had already said he would, and it just kind of... didn't happen for whatever reason. I was changing my strategy because I know that people who have experience playing with me will be able to tell what alignment I am just based on my pushes. I can't fake my town pushes as scum, so I had to switch my strategy around to push actual scumreads just so I could survive him joining the game.
I don't think that post necessarily would've gotten me killed directly, though. I specifically stated that I was hard-townreading VonFiedler even in that one post, and it would've been incredibly foolish to silence a potentially strong voice that could (and would at least TRY to) shut down lynch attempts on him. It would've been sound to try to push me to Spiffy instead of Celever regardless, so it wasn't all that sticky of a spot that I was putting Celever out there.
There's also the problem of if I happened to be a roleblock target or just never hit any of my targets with my night ability (or worst case scenario, just targeted the people who died each night phase). I had the solid strategy and (very very very lucky) execution of just targeting people I expected wouldn't be lynched or killed anytime soon each night phase (which worked, since both my targets and the third I was planning to target all outlived me), but you can't really expect that the role will be used optimally. Balancing roles like this has to be done with the assumption that they're not going to use their roles optimally; most of the time, I would not have been able to find more than one target and I'd have to blindly grope around for lynches and hope I get lucky. It doesn't really matter if I survive to the end if both my town targets are there with me, after all.
Discarding role interactions, being middle of the road is remarkably difficult to actually pull off, especially as the game drags on. Day one interactions have a way of being immensely useful later on as scum can get away with just about anything when there's very little context in the game to draw from. Scum already have a plan of how to interact with each other and town doesn't have to care about future interactions at all. Self-aligned players have to be very self-aware to stop themselves from being incriminated later on when more information is on the table. That's just one example; there's ways that just about any strategy can backfire into your face. This is basically why survivors and serial killers (SKs ESPECIALLY need this, period) have to have some form of protection. Cop immunity and bulletproof are the most common ones I see and directly influence the optimal strategies in order to reduce the amount of variables that can just lose you the game instantly.
The Spiffy+Celever post I made was because I had asked someone if they wanted to replace into the game and he had already said he would, and it just kind of... didn't happen for whatever reason. I was changing my strategy because I know that people who have experience playing with me will be able to tell what alignment I am just based on my pushes. I can't fake my town pushes as scum, so I had to switch my strategy around to push actual scumreads just so I could survive him joining the game.
I don't think that post necessarily would've gotten me killed directly, though. I specifically stated that I was hard-townreading VonFiedler even in that one post, and it would've been incredibly foolish to silence a potentially strong voice that could (and would at least TRY to) shut down lynch attempts on him. It would've been sound to try to push me to Spiffy instead of Celever regardless, so it wasn't all that sticky of a spot that I was putting Celever out there.
There's also the problem of if I happened to be a roleblock target or just never hit any of my targets with my night ability (or worst case scenario, just targeted the people who died each night phase). I had the solid strategy and (very very very lucky) execution of just targeting people I expected wouldn't be lynched or killed anytime soon each night phase (which worked, since both my targets and the third I was planning to target all outlived me), but you can't really expect that the role will be used optimally. Balancing roles like this has to be done with the assumption that they're not going to use their roles optimally; most of the time, I would not have been able to find more than one target and I'd have to blindly grope around for lynches and hope I get lucky. It doesn't really matter if I survive to the end if both my town targets are there with me, after all.
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