Cat -
When I first read your post, my initialy response was “no, no, this is a terrible idea, forget it, what, is he crazy?”
After a bit of ponderation, I’m not so sure. So I’m going to challenge some of your assertions a bit here, but consider me more of a devil’s advocate than a direct opponent of this plan.
With you so far, but I don’t see this as a particular advantage. There is certainly no
Here I disagree with you strongly on the latter half of your statement, though not on the former. The scum factions have no motivation, none, to pick off the other scum factions at Night. It’s a bit like the PFK in Batman. Any given scum faction would much prefer to kill Townies at Night, and get opposing Scum lynched during the Day. It’s cleaner and simpler that way. If a scum player claimed as such, the other scum factions would never target that player, simply because we’d lynch that player sooner or later (probably sooner).
But this is basically academic, because the scum aren’t going to claim as such. Yes, a true mass claim, in which everyone was perfectly honest, would ensure a scum victory (probably a Wolf victory, unless the Cabal guessed really well). But the scum aren’t operating collectively, they’re operating as individual groups, and as individual groups, none of them benefit from an open reveal. They’ll all claim Town roles.
That’s a sort of an interesting perspective. As you may know by now, I have somewhat recent experience with false claiming, and you’re right - the longer you can stall before you have to fake claim, the better your chances of developing a claim that fits within the setup of the game. Which is to say if there’s a mass claim and we have, for example, six claimed Vigilantes, we can probably safely assume that most of them are scum.
And here’s the chief problem with the plan as I see it. A fundamental element of the first Conspiracy game was the hidden powers. Scum and Town had hidden powers in the first game, and they affected the gameplay in ways that would have been impossible to predict looking at the game at its outset. We don’t know what the scum could do, given good information.
This is a huge problem. Certain pro-Town roles become absolutely useless if known. Their owners might be well-served by a lie, but once the Townies start lying it becomes impossible to distinguish Town from Scum except by blind luck.
On balance, I need more convincing. But I, for one, am open to it.