Role Cop

Role Cop Alias: Role Cop Alignment: any Role type: Informative Choice: Night

A Scout (or Role Cop) is an investigative role that receives the role name of its target. In Normal games, this is "Cop", "Doctor", "Roleblocker, and so forth. There is no indication of the target's alignment; if a Mafia Goon is investigated, they return "Vanilla".

This version of the role, and only this version of the role, is considered Normal on mafiascum.net.

In themed games, Scout has been known to return the target's flavor name (i.e. Pikachu), the target's role name (i.e. One-Shot Thundershocker), or both.

Scouts have been seen aligned with Town and scum, and is actually a somewhat popular Mafia role in games with many power roles.

Variations

In some role madness games, the condition that Scout does not learn its target's alignment is not applied. Scouts will learn the full role name of their targets. This has been extended to the Scout receiving the entire Role PM of its target (with names and chat topic links deleted, of course).

Use and Power

In Normal games, Scouts are about on par with Trackers in terms of its power - Scout does not learn who its target targeted, but Tracker doesn't know what kind of action the target used. In Theme games, Scout can be a somewhat unreliable Cop (or perhaps Flavor Cop) depending on how likely it is that the result they got would be attached to one faction or another. Either way, Scout is obviously good for shutting down fakeclaims if it lives long enough.

In scum hands, Scout is useful for hunting power roles to be killed on future Nights. Its drawback is that it takes an extra Night for the scum to kill someone the Scout finds is a power role.