Unjester

Unjester Alias: none Alignment: Third-party Role type: Passive Choice: none

An Unjester is a role that wins if it dies during the Night (or via a daykill), and loses if eliminated (voted out) or if alive at endgame.

As with its opposite, the Jester, an Unjester can typically win or lose without affecting the rest of the game; a nightkilled Unjester typically wins along with whichever faction otherwise won.

Variants

The opposite of an Unjester is a Jester (and the third possible win condition along similar lines – winning if alive at endgame, but not if eliminated or nightkilled – is the Survivor).

Use and Power

As opposed to the Jester, an Unjester is considerably less bastard; a Jester trying to get eliminated throws off the normal balance of the game (in which everyone is at least pretending to be Town), whereas an Unjester can most easily achieve their win condition via being a threat to the scum (attempting to draw their factional nightkill), meaning that they need to look Town and scumhunt well. Given that this is effectively the same set of skills as is needed to win as Town, an Unjester balances quite similarly to a Vanilla Townie.

The role is, however, not quite the same; the Town are rewarded for working together as a team, whereas as a self-aligned role, the Unjester is rewarded more for a strong individual performance (as they don't care whether or not town loses after they're killed, and thus benefit more from identifying scum than they do from actually pushing their eliminations). The presence of an Unjester can therefore be seen as hurting town slightly (and the role itself is harder to win with than a Vanilla Townie role would be, although player skill has a larger effect than it typically would).

One slightly oddball strategy may be to fakeclaim Vigilante if there appear to be multiple kills in the game. This is almost certain to get you killed by somebody, whether it's the Mafia looking to get rid of a threat, or a real Vigilante counterclaiming with a bullet. Fakeclaiming other roles (other than Vanilla Townie) is not recommended, due to the risk of a counterclaim that will cause you to get eliminated and thus fail your win condition.