Confirm receipt of role PM.
OK, so the roles here present some possibilities. Some thoughts on them:
The Brig seems anti-Town, to me, at least in the early game. Brigging someone does not bring us any closer to our win condition, but it does bring the Muties closer to theirs. It gives us no information (and in fact takes away information, since we can’t study the votes of imprisoned folks), and we don’t really know yet whom we’d like to throw in the Brig, while the Muties do know who they’d like to throw in. The only time I think it would be justifiable is if we’re almost certain that someone is Scum, but then we should be spacing that person, not just locking them up. So it’s really only useful if there’s at least two people we want to take out of commission. Because of this, I will default to considering any brigging as extremely suspicious, and will vote for any Captain or Security Officer who does so without a very good reason.
The executive officer is another position that could be exploited by Muties. Again, the key problem is that they know immediately who they want promoted or demoted, but we don’t (at least, not yet). I will therefore also consider any use of the XO’s power suspicious, though not as much so as brigging.
This brings us to the two information-gathering roles, Engineer and Doctor (currently myself). It’s better if these are in loyal Crew hands than Muties, of course, but I’m not nearly as worried about muties in these positions: They’ll be forced to either lie or tell the truth, and either way, they give us information. There is no harm to learning more information, so these roles should absolutely use their powers every Day, and I will find suspicious any Engineer or Doctor who does not use their powers. Further, since the identities of these officers are public knowledge anyway, there’s no reason for them not to report their results as soon as they can.
Fortunately, everyone knows who the investigators are, so we don’t have to worry about false-claims, and they’ll be replaced if killed or imprisoned, so the Scum can’t just systematically get rid of them completely. Unfortunately, though, it looks to me like the Scum can nullify them almost completely: The Engineer has to publicly declare who he’s watching, so, if he’s watching a Mutie, that Mutie can just choose to lay low for that Night, and he won’t see anything nefarious. And the Doctor doesn’t get results until Nightfall, at which point strategy discussion is forbidden, so the Scum can always just choose to kill the Doctor before he has a chance to say anything. Obviously they can’t do this all the time, because eventually there’s going to be a Mutie in the doctor position, and they don’t want to either kill one of their own or to call attention to him by leaving him and him alone of all doctors alive, but that still leaves them plenty of room to wreak merry Hell with our information flow.
The Doctor and Engineer should of course still attempt to gather information, but we shouldn’t be particularly surprised if they don’t succeed.
