Reporter

Reporter Alias: Cowardly Reporter Alignment: Town Third-Party Mafia Role type: Investigative Communicative Choice: Night

Reporter is a role that is an easily confounded variation of a Tracker. They only learn if someone has acted or not, like the first half of the Motion Detector.

Normal version

Each Night, a Reporter may choose a player to find out if they are home. If their action succeeds, they will know if their target has acted or not. Actions taken by a Ninja are ignored for this purpose, and the Reporter will produce the same results as if the Ninja's actions did not occur.

Reporters will only know if their target acted or not, they will not know how they acted.

Variations

The Inspector is the flip side of the (normal) Reporter, an Inspector can check a player to see if they were targeted or not.

Reporter is a name that has been given to four completely different roles historically, none of which took off. If you were redirected here from Cowardly Reporter, see Variant 2.

Historical variants of the Reporter are here:

Variant 1

A Reporter can check a player's house to find out if they are home. Anyone doing something during the night is not home, so they get a positive result if they do not target anyone and are not targeted by anyone, and a negative result otherwise.

This is a highly specific and easily confounded variation on Tracker or Watcher. It does not necessarily need to be either alignment.

This variant is more commonly known as a Motion Detector.

Variant 2

A Cowardly Reporter is a variation on Variant 1. At Night, it can either choose to investigate a player like Variant 1, or it can hide in the newsroom (functioning as a Commuter) for that Night. Due to the potential for hiding to be a dominant strategy, the ability to hide is usually restricted via Even/Odd Night or Non-Consecutive Night modifiers.

Despite the terminology this role has nothing to do with Hider.

As the above would imply, this variant is stronger than Variant 1 due to having access to the Commuter ability.

Variant 3

A Reporter can be responsible for posting some of the flavor in mod scenes while they are alive, often in newspaper style. This sometimes means they receive the details of who dies overNight and what other relevant details should be included in the mod scene in advance.

This role is usually just an interesting way to add a flavorful role to the game. It does not necessarily need to be either alignment. However, this version of the Reporter may also be given a power role like Role Cop to aid in making what it reports relevant.

Variant 4

A Reporter can be a self-aligned player who wins when all power roles in the game are dead (regardless of their alignment), at which time it leaves the game. To give it a chance of fulfilling such a Win Condition, the Reporter's Night Action is that of a Role Cop, and it can anonymously publish messages at will through the mod.

This incarnation of Reporter is not intended for role madness games, as it does not have a factional kill and thus has no real way of directly killing power roles.

Use & Balance

A Reporter is basically a Follower without the pseudo Role Cop ability. Reporters are useful for confirming if somenone has acted during the Night or not.

Sample Role PMs

The standardized Role PM for "Reporter" describes the action as follows:

• As a targeted action: you will learn if that player has acted or not. (edit)

Example (simplest form)

Welcome to game! You are a Town Reporter.

You have the following active ability:

• Each Night, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, you will learn if that player has acted or not.

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

Example (with modifiers)

Welcome to game! You are a Town 1-shot Loud Reporter.

You have the following active ability:

• Once in the game at Night, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, you will learn if that player has acted or not. Your target will learn that you targeted them (but not what action you targeted them with).

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.