Meh. I don't really agree with this.
We've removed the ability for scum to lie STUPIDLY. Which they could never get away with doing anyway.
Like, if scum make a claim that directly contradicts the setup, that's a kind of a lie; it's called a scumslip.
Had PPS been lying, essentially this would have just meant he'd made a dumb scumslip. But he wasn't, so we're fine. The mod has always been expected to clarify setup questions like this.
I would agree with you if your point were that this should have been clarified before there was any opportunity for anyone to accidentally tell a lie they could get caught in. This is an issue of "the eternal quest of mods to make their setups 100% clear and unambiguous" - nothing more.
My long and detailed response was just eaten by crappy 4G connections.
From what I remember of what I wrote...
1. You concede that my point that faust has confirmed for us that PPS didn’t lie stands?
2. The essential problem here is that, to me, the question broke the “You may only ask and receive answers to questions about your own role” rule. Once the items were assigned to players, they became part of their QTs and Roles, and no longer a “setup” issue.
If a player claims Transmogrifier from RMM 104, then says his role allows him to change one person’s power into another power, I can’t ask faust to confirm that’s how Transmogrifier works. Or in a more normal example, if mail-mi claims to block sudgy and that’s why Robz didn’t die last night, we can’t ask faust confirm any of that.
The use of the stick, to me, is the same thing. While the question wasn’t phrased as “If PPS is town and got the stick, would it have been immediately destroyed?”, we can’t help but think of it that way, because that’s what happened. It also must be thought of as being asked as “Can you please confirm that what PPS said is the truth?” We can’t unsee those words.
3. This didn’t remove scum’s “stupid lies” power. It removed all of their power to lie about setup things. If we (and they) know that any and all setup lies will be verified as lies by the mod as soon as they tell them, they can’t tell them. That helps us as town, but it makes the game unfair to scum. I just won a scum game by lying about the setup and mechanics for days. At no point did anyone in the game just go “Hey mod, are ashersky’s claims about how the game works really how the game works?” If they had, game over for scum. And that would be the case every single game.
I am not saying people can’t ask the questions. I’m saying mods shouldn’t answer them. Can you think of a game where someone claimed something in game, then you asked the mod about how that player’s role works, and they answered?
4. I agree with you that if this clarification had been provided before the game started, it’d be all good. And sometimes we catch things late, and we fix them when we can. No one is perfect, not even faust (maybe). But I think in this case, just leaving it unanswered was better, given the effect this renders on the game.