Checker

Checker Alias: Tagger Alignment: Town Mafia Role type: Investigative Choice: Night

A Checker is a player who can target a player, learning whether their action was a success. It has no direct effect on the targeted player; it thus serves as an investigation to determine whether something is interfering with the Checker's actions.

Normal version

Each night, a Checker may choose one other player to target. If the attempt to target the player succeeds, the Checker will be informed that it succeeded. As with most actions, a Checker action does nothing if blocked, if it targets an Ascetic player, etc., but the Checker will be able to determine that something went wrong from the lack of a result PM (the moderator sends a no result PM to let the Checker know that their action failed).

Example Checker results include "You checked target" and "Your action failed, and you did not receive a result"; in other words, a Checker is in effect an investigative role that produces no useful information about the target.

Variations

As with most investigative roles, in games where redirection abilities such as Redirector and Deflector exist, the moderator will need to decide whether the Checker is told who they targeted when their action succeeds. (Exactly the same issue comes up with roles like Cop; however, players are more likely to use a Checker action purely to test for redirections than they are to use a more powerful investigative role, so it is more important in this context.)

Checkers are frequently given modifiers, like Loyal or Simple, that could cause their action to fail; the Checker result then serves as a mechanism of determining whether the modifier activated, and thus determining information about the target.

The non-investigative equivalent of Checker is Visitor; while a Checker targets a player and learns whether their targeting attempt succeeded, a Visitor targets a player and does not learn anything at all.

A Fruit Vendor is in a sense a reverse Checker; instead of the user of the action learning whether it worked, the target learns whether it worked.

Use & Balance

A Checker is somewhat stronger than a Visitor; it has all the same effects, but additionally provides information to the Checker.

A Checker can easily be used to create investigative roles with one-sided uncertainty (e.g. Loyal Checker or Disloyal Checker). This can help to reduce the amount of outguessing-the-mod in the setup by making it clear to players which results can be expected to have false positives, and which results are reliable.

In scum hands, a Checker doesn't do much in terms of its direct effect on the game, but can help to make a fakeclaim (especially of an investigative role) more believable, because the action shows up on Tracker-like reports and can determine whether it should have received a result or not.

Play Advice

If you are a plain, unmodified Town Checker, the main use of your role will be to try to figure out if night actions are being interfered with (and if so, to gain clues as to why). For example, investigating a claimed Ascetic, something that is a bad idea with any other investigative roles, will be useful to get confirmation of the claim.

If you have a modifier that causes your action to fail under certain circumstances, you should use it to try to get investigative results. A "successful" result will be very clear; a no-result much less clear, but in most cases it will be your modifier that triggered. Generally speaking, you're unlikely to be affected by a "random" roleblock unless you have claimed, so the most likely explanations for a failure will be related to either your modifier or your target's role.

As scum, use a Checker role to make your fake-claims more reliable. You may wish to claim it as a more powerful investigative role (especially if claiming late in the game), as such a claim can only be disproved by a Rolecop or via a contradiction with one of your faked results (although make sure not to give too much information away).

Sample Role PMs

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

• As a targeted action: you will be informed that your action succeeded (but your action has no other effect). (edit)

Example (simplest form)

Welcome to game! You are a Town Checker.

You have the following active ability:

• Each Night, you may target a player. Assuming no interference with your action, you will be informed that your action succeeded (but your action has no other effect).

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 Checker.

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 be informed that your action succeeded (but your action has no other effect). 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.