Spy (Town Investigative)

[orangeandblack5]

Spy

Alignment: Town Investigative

Abilities: Sneak into somebody’s house each night to collect fingerprint samples and compare them to your samples from the previous night.

Attributes:
-You will know if your target's samples are of the same faction (Town/Mafia/Coven/Neutral) as your previous target.
-When you collect a new sample, you will throw away old samples due to contamination. The new samples become the control group.
-You may NOT sample yourself.
-You may NOT sample a revealed Mayor.

Goal: Lynch every criminal and evildoer.

Win Conditions:
Wins with the Town
Wins with Survivors
Must kill the Mafia
Must kill Witches
Must kill Serial Killers
Must kill Arsonists
Must kill Werewolves
Must kill Vampires

Investigative Results:
Sheriff: You cannot find evidence of wrongdoing. Your target seems innocent.
Investigator: Your target sticks to the shadows. They must be a Spy, Blackmailer, or the Jailor.
Consigliere: Your target sneaks into others' houses and analyzes their DNA. They must be a Spy.

F.A.Q.

Why not just make this a new role and call it the Scientist?
Slow down there, Exacerbated - the Spy is in serious need of a rework, as per usual, and there are already a lot of Town Investigative roles. As Tracker should be brought into the base game, adding another one seems like a worse idea than introducing it via Spy rework.

Spy was already reworked once, does it really need another?
Yes. The previous rework kept one of Spy's most damaging aspects, getting free information that cripples the Mafia, completely intact. Being able to see Mafia visits is an ability that no Town role should have as a free passive. Thus, this rework completely removes that ability. Its other ability is also problematic - it is able to confirm the Spy through verifying things like transports before the target announces them, but on its own it isn't a powerful enough ability to be its own role when seeing the Mafia visits is removed. Thus, the whole role needs to be reworked, not just part of it like last time.

Why does this deserve to be in the game?
"The Investigator and the Sheriff are both fairly linear Town Investigative roles. Just a point and click and you are twenty steps nearer to discerning the game state and figuring out who is who. This Spy rework is a Town Investigative role that has a much higher skill cap but is potentially much more powerful, with the ability to potentially clear TWO townies in one fell swoop or catch TWO Mafia back to back... IF you are good at making associations between players. I would like to make this Spy rework a reality as it shifts the focus of investigative roles away from examining players as atomized individuals towards examining how players are related or interconnected with each other. It is a good thing for this game, in my opinion, to create roles that examine interpersonal dynamics of Town and Mafia behavior." - Exacerbated

How does this interact with the Framer?
This Spy rework actually helps indirectly buffing the Framer by making it the Spy's worst nightmare. For you see, making the Spy's target appear as guilty means that they now look the SAME as other Mafia members, and DIFFERENT from other Town members. This means that a single frame can screw over a Spy that isn't paying very close attention to how players interact during the day.

Discuss.

[Brilliand]

Looks like this is the "Parity Cop" proposal for reworking the spy. It's come up a few times before, so I'm not sure we need a new thread about it. Similarly, it has a lot of supporters, but I'm not one of those supporters because I prefer my own "role tracker" idea for reworking the Spy.

[orangeandblack5]

I was the originator of that proposal: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=56625

It has never received its own post as a Spy rework.

Post-Unity, it deserves one.

[JacksonVirgo]

I actually love this idea and hate the current Spy so I feel this is great.
Though alignments are kind of wack, I was thinking more of a ToL approach and go as far as checking if x1 can win with x2 rather than check their alignments. It is very similar regardless but yeah.

So if you check the Jailor and then check the Survivor - match positive
Then from the survivors, check the Serial Killer - match positive
Then from the SK to the Medium - match negative

[JacksonVirgo]

Probably should make it that you can sample x person only once?

[orangeandblack5]

I actually love this idea and hate the current Spy so I feel this is great.
Though alignments are kind of wack, I was thinking more of a ToL approach and go as far as checking if x1 can win with x2 rather than check their alignments. It is very similar regardless but yeah.

So if you check the Jailor and then check the Survivor - match positive
Then from the survivors, check the Serial Killer - match positive
Then from the SK to the Medium - match negative

I don't think that makes a huge difference for anyone except the NE, as there is no chance of Survivors in Ranked.

As such, I don't really care which is used.

Probably should make it that you can sample x person only once?

Why? If you want to go A-B-C-A and waste a night be my guest.

[JacksonVirgo]

I actually love this idea and hate the current Spy so I feel this is great.
Though alignments are kind of wack, I was thinking more of a ToL approach and go as far as checking if x1 can win with x2 rather than check their alignments. It is very similar regardless but yeah.

So if you check the Jailor and then check the Survivor - match positive
Then from the survivors, check the Serial Killer - match positive
Then from the SK to the Medium - match negative

I don't think that makes a huge difference for anyone except the NE, as there is no chance of Survivors in Ranked.

As such, I don't really care which is used.

Probably should make it that you can sample x person only once?

Why? If you want to go A-B-C-A and waste a night be my guest.

For the first bit, I feel it'd be better and more adaptable for outside of ranked.
For the second, I just thought that it could be abused but yeah nevermind

[orangeandblack5]

I'll throw up a poll then

But my main issue is that "Different" almost always means "one of these is scum" in Ranked as opposed to the possibility of both being scum

[Brilliand]

The "wins with" criteria has issues due to roles like Jester, Amnesiac and Guardian Angel that win or lose independently of whether any other given player wins. I guess you could call all of those "wins with everyone", but it's just a bit messy.

That said, the "wins with" criteria is way more intuitive for the cases where it is well-defined.

[orangeandblack5]

In general, the way I would expect those to work are as follows:

Jester - either compatible or incompatible with everyone
GA - compatible with their target
Amnesiac - compatible with everyone

However the amount I care about those types of cases is significantly less than the instances that will come up in Ranked, and for that the Town/Mafia/Neutral split works much better for reasons outlined in the poll.

[JacksonVirgo]

The "wins with" criteria has issues due to roles like Jester, Amnesiac and Guardian Angel that win or lose independently of whether any other given player wins. I guess you could call all of those "wins with everyone", but it's just a bit messy.

That said, the "wins with" criteria is way more intuitive for the cases where it is well-defined.

I was thinking that 'can win with' rather than 'does win with'.

GA - Matches positive with their targets faction?
Amnesiac - Wins with anybody respectively but if they get swabbed the night they remember someone or beyond it's that roles results.
Jester - Matching negative with everyone would make it the bane of the Spy? Maybe?
Executioner- Matches positive with anyone except their target sounds fun lol.
Witch - Matches negative with town, anyone else it matches positive.

Thoughts?

[JacksonVirgo]

In general, the way I would expect those to work are as follows:

Jester - either compatible or incompatible with everyone
GA - compatible with their target
Amnesiac - compatible with everyone

However the amount I care about those types of cases is significantly less than the instances that will come up in Ranked, and for that the Town/Mafia/Neutral split works much better for reasons outlined in the poll.

I see we had the same thoughts lol, jester should be incompatible though?

[orangeandblack5]

Why make it so good against Spy though? That's just really screwy

[Brilliand]

Jester - Matching negative with everyone would make it the bane of the Spy? Maybe?

I'm not so sure. I think a role that matches compatible with everyone (i.e. Survivor) would cause the Spy more problems than a role that matches incompatible with everyone, since the next check after finding an evil will essentially be an "unknown" anyway.

Also, I'd prefer that the Jester results be extremely similar to the Executioner results, so that an Exe turning Jester doesn't cause much of a shift.

[JacksonVirgo]

Jester - Matching negative with everyone would make it the bane of the Spy? Maybe?

I'm not so sure. I think a role that matches compatible with everyone (i.e. Survivor) would cause the Spy more problems than a role that matches incompatible with everyone, since the next check after finding an evil will essentially be an "unknown" anyway.

Also, I'd prefer that the Jester results be extremely similar to the Executioner results, so that an Exe turning Jester doesn't cause much of a shift.

So you're thinking jester/exe matches positive with everyone except the exe's target for the exe? That could work

[Brilliand]

So you're thinking jester/exe matches positive with everyone except the exe's target for the exe? That could work

Yep.

[BlastingOff]

How does this interact with Disguiser? Does the Spy see Disguiser as Mafia or as whatever alignment they disguised as? It'd be cool if it was the former, evils need every buff that you can give them, assuming they do not get core reworks

[JacksonVirgo]

How does this interact with Disguiser? Does the Spy see Disguiser as Mafia or as whatever alignment they disguised as? It'd be cool if it was the former, evils need every buff that you can give them, assuming they do not get core reworks

I think the word you're looking for is the latter. The former would be Spy seeing Disguiser as Mafia regardless of disguise.

[orangeandblack5]

Sheriff is weak to Framer but not to Disguiser.

Investigator is weak to Disguiser but not very weak to Framer.

I don't think we should necessarily look at making Spy extremely weak to Framer and also weak to Disguiser, unless anyone has a good argument for why that should be the case (ie, if this role is significantly stronger enough to be worth the added weakness, which I'm not honestly sold on).

Otherwise, I'd say add it later if needed.

[Royee]

detective is a fine role in a rolelist with neutrals.