Cop

Cop Aliases: Seer Angel Alignment: Pro-town Role type: Investigative Informative Choice: Night Day

Summary

The most common special role. The Cop can investigate a player each night and find out whether they are innocent or guilty (pro-Town or anti-Town, respectively). Depending on the variation, sometimes they can discover the role name as well. Certain roles, such as the Godfather, can be immune to investigation, meaning regardless of their alignment, they will come up pro-Town.

A Cop can choose to reveal his role during the day, in order to get someone lynched. However, this is sure to make the Cop a target for the Mafia. The Mafia may also try to impersonate the Cop by claiming false results.

In a Werewolf game, the Cop is frequently referred to as a Seer.

Sanities

There are three common variations on the Cop role, typically called sanities:

• Insane Cop: always gets incorrect results (i.e. "guilty" for pro-Town roles and "innocent" for anti-Town roles)

once the player realizes they are insane, they can generally produce effective results by reporting the opposite of what they discover

• Paranoid Cop: always gets "guilty" results (rare in games with a Godfather, for obvious reasons)

once the Cop discovers their sanity, they may stop investigating, as all results are equally useless

• Naïve Cop: always gets "innocent" results

this may be the most common variant sanity used, as it masks Scum even if the Cop dies early

There is also the Random Cop, which is almost never used, because the randomness of the results prevents any valuable information from being gathered, including ones' own sanity. Games rarely last long enough to determine that results are truly random. All variant sanities are uncommon in Mini Games or other situations with just one Cop in the game. When a Cop who receives normal results needs to be distinguished from these, he is called a Sane Cop.

When a Moderator uses these roles, the player receiving the role is usually only told their role is a Cop. Sometimes sanity is revealed upon death, but frequently not, leading to ambiguity if a Cop is killed early in the game.

Sometimes a cop may investigate themselves, using their result to try and determine their sanity. If they get a "guilty" result, they know they are Paranoid or Insane. If they get an "innocent" result, they know they are either Naïve or Sane. Usually Moderators do not allow this (for differing reasons depending on who is modding and what the situation in-game is) and the Cop ends up with a failed result.

Other Variations

• Day Cop:

similar to the Cop, but he investigates one player each day instead of each night

• Role Cop:

similar to the Cop, but he receives information about powers and alignment is usually the Mafia's cop, though in large vanillaless games he is occasionally all cops

• Mentally ill insane cop: cop that randomly dies and can kill on his death night