Psychologist

Psychologist Alias: Gunsmith Alignment: Pro-town Role type: Informative Choice: Night

A Psychologist is an investigative role that determines, in some sense, whether a player has an ability that can kill another player.

Psychologists are most useful to the Town; although the role makes logical sense for other alignments, this is rarely seen.

Variations

The exact behaviour of the role is not completely standardised yet; as such, all versions of the Psychologist can be considered variants.

The simplest possible version of a Psychologist simply determines whether a player has an active killing ability; thus, it would detect Vigilantes, and any Mafia, Werewolf, or Serial Killer with a standard nightkill. This version of the role is very powerful in town hands; because there are few ways to get false positives or false negatives, it's more similar to a Cop than to Gunsmith. However, note that anti-Town roles with no active kill, such as some variants of the Traitor, will appear innocent. Note that although the name Gunsmith is occasionally seen for this role, on mafiascum.net that name is typically used for a different role.

Because the simple version is so powerful, many moderators prefer to limit its power somewhat. In the Hard Boiled setup, a Psychologist can only detect players who have a kill but have not yet successfully used it. (In most action resolution methods, the Psychologist will also not get a "has an unused kill" result on a player if they successfully perform a kill that night.)

A subtler change that's been seen to weaken the Psychologist is for them to detect players who have the capability to cause a death at night (including indirectly); this is much more prone to false positives, e.g. it could detect a standard Miller if there's a Weak player around, a Deflector if anyone has a kill, etc.

Use and Power

As a player, you generally want to use your Psychologist ability to find threats to your team (typically the Mafia, although if you're Mafia yourself, you can instead use it to find Vigilantes, and players on opposite teams in a multiball game). Avoid anyone you think is likely to provide a false negative or false positive (e.g. never scan a claimed Vigilante, as you'll likely get "can kill" whether or not they're telling the truth), and otherwise treat the role like you would a Cop. Also, try to be absolutely sure on what circumstances will provoke a false positive or false negative; the role is sufficiently non-standardised that it can take a careful reading of your role PM, and perhaps questions to the moderator, to determine what circumstances could cause a pro-Town player to have a kill or an anti-Town player to not have one.

As a moderator, bear in mind that the role is a fairly powerful investigative, but that players are typically inclined to overestimate its power. Most setups with a Psychologist have also included some convoluted way for it to produce misleading results, based on the exact wording of the role (this is part of the reason why the role tends to be nonstandardised – so that moderators can tweak the wording to produce creative false positives and false negatives). In general, players tend to miss this when it happens (this has happened at least twice by now), and the incorrect conclusions that they draw can end up hurting their faction more than their valid results help. As such, it's wise not to be too clever with it.

The variant that cannot detect players who have already killed is substantially weaker, but is useful if you want multiple investigative roles in a game when you already have a Jailkeeper, Tracker, or similar role that gets more powerful as the game goes long; because its strength is mostly in the early game, it tends to cause less late-game swing than usual for an investigative role.