Coroner

Coroner Aliases: Forensic Cop Mortician Alignment: Town Role type: Informative Choice: Night

A Coroner is a role that can target a dead player to discern information about them, typically serving as a counter to No Reveal mechanics.

Standard version

A Coroner can target a dead player with their Night Choice, and will learn an untampered/truthful version of that player's full role and alignment. For example, a Death Miller would show as "Town Death Miller" (not Mafia Goon), and a Coroner could learn the truth about a player whose flip had been hidden by a Janitor. Even in limited-reveal games, the Coroner learns all the information that players would normally be told in a full-reveal game.

Variations

The exact way in which a Coroner gains their results vary: some versions of the Coroner act during the day (a Day Coroner), are sent results automatically (i.e. are automatically told the truth about all dead players), or receive their results via a public broadcast to the town rather than privately. (Sometimes a Coroner will even automatically cause the truth about any dead player to be publicly revealed, functioning as a sort of Enabler for flips; this version of the role does not necessarily need to be Town-aligned.)

A game with multiple killing factions may well combine a Coroner and the reverse role Janitor; in this case, each Coroner Janitor learns the information that the opposing Coroner Janitor obscured (perhaps, in flavour, because they share a dump site).

The functionality of a Coroner is sometimes expanded to give some sort of hint about the player who made the role.

Use & Balance

The Coroner is a niche role that usually only appears to counter limited reveals, and is by far the most useful in No Reveal or limited-reveal games. The role is not particularly powerful (and unlikely to be key to a setup it appears in); the main balance effect is the inference that Coroners are normally town, making them a target that town Role Cops want to hit. A Coroner who can prove their role (e.g. via causing results broadcasts, or being tracked to a player who was already dead at the start of the night) is close to an Innocent Child (barring potential mod-WIFOM about the moderator giving a useless role to scum just to confuse role claims); as such, it's rare to give a Coroner kill protection.

If the game does not have multiple kills on each night, a Coroner is likely to have few choices in target; thus the only difference between the usual Night-active variation, and Day or passive variations, will be in how quickly the Coroner learns the cause of the kill.

A Coroner who can gain hints about the killer can be much more powerful (in the extreme case, learning who made a kill outright, it is likely more powerful than Watcher, a role that is already very powerful in town hands, due to being much easier to target).

Coroners are typically only seen in bastard mod games, not because the role itself is bastard, but because its functionality is unnecessary in a more normal game; in those games, players are normally accurately told the role and alignment of dead players anyway (see flip), so a Coroner would not be able to learn anything that was not known already.

Play Advice

Unless the moderator is just screwing with you (always a possibility in a game that contains a Coroner), your purpose as a Coroner is either to a) confirm yourself as likely Town via confirming your role, or b) to let town know what's going on when someone starts tampering with the flips. You should normally be able to tell which flips are most likely to have been tampered with (look for anything unusual), and simply aim at those players. If there are multiple no-reveal deaths in a night.

If you have a sure-fire way to confirm yourself as a Coroner (e.g. claiming a public Coroner broadcast, forcing scum to either risk a counterclaim or simply allow you to become confirmed), you should typically hold off on actually confirming yourself until a massclaim, or a situation where you are in severe danger of being lynched; a provable Coroner is hard to discredit, so the claim has a tendency to attract nightkills.

Sample Role PMs

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

• As an active action: you may choose a dead player. You will be given accurate information on that player's role and alignment. (edit)

Example (simplest form)

Welcome to game! You are a Town Coroner.

You have the following active ability:

• Each Night, you may choose a dead player. You will be given accurate information on that player's role and alignment.

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 Coroner.

You have the following active ability:

• Once in the game at Night, you may choose a dead player. You will be given accurate information on that player's role and alignment.

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.