[QUOTE=NAF1138]
Yup. And it’s 50/50 each time, not 50% of his answers will be correct.
Maybe useless maybe not. But it’s probably better than nothing.
[/QUOTE]
Well, let’s take a look at what kind of numbers a beat cop would get, first, we consider the known roles in the game: scum (includes potential millers), townie (potentially includes gf), doctor, ga, cop, vig, sk, mason. That means, if he’s going to be wrong, there’s a 1/7 chance for each of the other roles to be chosen for the individual.
Thus, if the result is vanilla townie, then it’s clearly more likely that the individual is a townie because he was either right (1/2 * 100%) or he was wrong (1/2 * ~14%), thus, if he was a townie, he has a 50% chance of showing up as one, but if he was something else, he only has about a 7% chance of having shown up as a townie. Further, of those 7 other roles he may have been, clearly most of them (doctor, ga, cop, mason, vig) are in the favor of the town. IOW, if someone shows up as a townie from a beat cop, he’s mostly safe and, all other things being equal, should be treated with less suspicion.
Of course, all of that said, chrisk saying such a thing is suspicious to me at this early point in the game, because he’s going to either cast suspicion on himself by the mafia if he is not the mafia OR save the mafia from having to choose that individual from being targetted as potentially beneficial role to the town. OTOH, if he’s a beat cop, he could have also incorrectly identified a mafia or other beneficial role to be a vanilla townie, however unlikely, OR assuming he actually is a detective, he could feign beat cop and actually use the ability to protect a helpful role. Thus, as FlyingCowofDoom said, I’m curious to see how the mafia will react to this claim, but I don’t think it makes sense to lynch him at this point.