At least from my perspective, having been cop in 175% of the games in which I've played, being cop makes one a little paranoid, both because of how having the role makes you approach the game, and because of the pressure that comes with it.


I'm with Hyper on this. The notion of sitting on it and just breadcrumbing works great in theory, but it's kind of shit in practice.

Scum are generally role-hunting, so if you breadcrumb hard enough for whatever you're teasing to be clear once you flip, you're raising your NK profile anyway. If you breadcrumb soft, then you're relying on town to not only see it but interpret it as is.

Trent could say "McHack is definitely scum" then either no one notices or everyone says "based on what?" If he says, "Well, when I flip you'll know" then great, mchack dies a day later, but he might as well just have claimed.

Now, a VT could try to fake that sort of play - and I've considered it - but that only works if they happen to guess scum right, yada yada. So it has as many downsides as upsides, so pretty much anyone doing that is likely to be the actual cop.

If Trent says, "just a feeling" when he flips you run the risk that scum (or even townies town-reading mchack) convince everyone it was just his gut and that if trent had actually copped scum he would have claimed and mchack never gets lynched.

And to top it off, the cop has no real conception of setup/protection/threat. If scum have a role cop, in general the odds of dying after N1 start to go up significantly as scum narrow vanilla vs. potential cop/PR.

You can't have cop + protection be so strong that 'follow the cop' is a slam dunk, but I think the cop role here was a little too underpowered with no protection at all.

But long and short, I think in general if the cop has a red check, and has any valid reason to think they're in consideration for NK (or vig), actual practice shifts towards claiming it and hoping for the best.

Similar to HSL as well, I thought the flavor was a bit much (and at least could have used a TLDR translation in bold) so I didn't read all the detail carefully, but if I'm reading other comments right town had cop, commuter, RB, and whatever TF Vitek was? That's...a pretty weak slate. As SPF suggests, jailer would have been a bit stronger, both in that it's less likely to be policy lynched, and has some protection value.

Commuter and town RB are both subject to policy lynch, esp. following SPF's fake claim the prior game. Vitek was fluff, though perhaps Joe was thinking the role was watcher/role cop bait and semi-useful from that perspective in drawing an NK, maybe.