I don’t think that’s the key question at all. Confirming the claim would be nice, sure, but in most cases, it’s going to be impossible. A game design where even a moderate number of Town roles is confirmable would be grossly imbalanced, because a simple mass claim on Day One could all but win it for the Town (in a game of 21, even as few as, like, six confirmable roles would make the Scum’s task nigh on impossible, because it slashes the lynch pool so much).
Maybe it’s because I underwent the same quizzing that I’m sensitive to it, but I think we’re spending too much time trying to confirm power roles, here. It’s never a particularly good idea to try to decide from a position of imperfect information whether a role makes sense. If a claimed role is inconsistent, either internally or with something that we know to be true, that’s an avenue worth pursuing. But “I don’t think that role sounds plausible” is a very dangerous path to travel down; I know that as a designer I have deliberately inserted roles that seem weird or even useless to confuse exactly this sort of analysis. We can’t say with any confidence what kind of roles Chronos would devise; with regard to Kelly’s claim all I can say with confidence is that:
- I don’t really know what its significance might be and;
- Nothing about it directly contradicts anything I already know for sure about the game.
Thus, this claim does not affect my opinion of Kelly either way; I did not find him particularly suspicious before, and still don’t.
Once again, I assume that if I can develop a theory, the Scum can develop the same one, so I’ll give it a shot:
Assuming he’s not lying, my best guess is that the names Kelly receives are (randomly?) selected from a list of either players who voted for the lynch leader, players who did not vote for the lynch leader, or players who voted for Spawn. I think it’s a good but not certain bet that the names are Town. I mean, some of the possible options are:
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The names have nothing in common: Nonsensical - it makes Kelly either a liar or a red herring.
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The names are all Scum: Game-breaking.
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The names are all non-vanilla: Basically a huge swing, because any reveal by Kelly would potentially alert Scum to power roles and give us little useful information.
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The names are all vanilla Town: Possible, though it benefits the Scum almost as much as the Town if Kelly reveals the name.
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The names are all Town: This seems the most likely option. Investigators have two purposes, generally: to confirm Town and to catch Scum. If Kelly’s power functions in this way, it basically allows him to do the former - the more consistently valuable function of an investigator - while keeping him from doing the latter (which can be a swingy power). It’s actually sort of elegant, if it’s real - it kind of makes the balance less dynamic, because the investigator can’t have three lucky days and basically end the game quickly. It’s a Day power, so it (probably) can’t be role-blocked, but Kelly can’t direct it, which reduces its power by a notch.
Actually, if that’s NOT Kelly’s role, it IS a role someone should have in a future game.
The only thing that gives me pause in this theory is that failing to identify definitively what the names signify nerfs this power to the point where it’s almost useless (even if he’s telling the truth and I’m right and all of Kelly’s names are Townies, we can’t rely on the information even once Kelly is dead or confirmed by other means, because we can’t know if I’m right until the game is over).
