[DaBackpack]

I dont think there's a correct answer with the whole modkill thing. Both sunfan and Wolfe are correct. A modkill removes agency from both town and wolves, but the specific outcomes can favor either side on a situational basis. it just depends.

you can't just leave inactive players in the game--- therefore, modkills have to be allowed. sometimes it favors town, sometimes wolves. most of the time it boils down to how it affects parity. it's hard to legislate a single "modkill replaces a lynch" rule on the basis of fairness alone.

the important part, to me at least, is transparency and accountability. inactives will be modkilled, but when? players of all alignments need some kind of advance warning of the details of "how will XYZ be resolved" before they can play optimally.

Getting someone lynched, and then discovering that another player died because of a modkill, feels kind of fucked up because me knowing that XYZ was gonna be removed from the game would have 100% affected how I played the previous phase. Modkills are a necessary part of the game, but they remove player agency--- the question should be more about how to preserve the most agency despite this. i.e. giving the players the tools and information to reclaim ownership over the game's outcome even when something outside anybody's control happens.

should a modkill count as a lynch? I dunno, it depends. What matters more to me is "how much is a modkill gonna fuck up my ability to plan?" And minimizing that part, esp through transparency and accountability, at least lets us preemptively prepare for such scenarios.

a simple example is something to the effect of, "a player will not be modkilled without 2 hour's notice to the thread." that way we don't end up accidentally fuck up parity by causing 2 flips after EoD.

The WV situation is actually a good example of this--- for one, I'd feel even worse if there was no announcement about an impending modkill. Because we would have worked hard to solve the game and then would have been blindsided when not just one, but TWO flips happened. That could have easily gone south for town if WV wasn't a wolf.

tl;dr: modkills always suck and they're sometimes unavoidable. but having one all-ecompassing rule about how they affect lynches kind of sidesteps the real problem. It's not so much about "is this fair", because it's never going to be fair--- what matters more is that, even when it's not fair, there are no surprises in how the situation is handled, and that no matter what, we can adjust our play to accommodate around whatever is gonna happen, before it actually happens