Oh wow Doggo, that’s a great question!
Let’s take a look at the list of possible scum roles:
Twins - show up as town every other night. bypasses any waterbearer (doc) protection.
Lion - controls all team NKs, cannot be protected.
Scorpion - twice per game can stop a water-bearer, fish, goat, or ram the next night. If used on a bull, centaur, or scales user, the scorpion either loses their second shot or they outright die.
Centaur - target player and make their ability activate on random target.
Goat - target player, if that player was targetted, you get the targeting ability for one night.
Fish - prevents scum from being night killed if they had no votes or one vote on them.
Now, in relation to other roles and stuff…
-Scum Twins has utility against any towny water bearer and towny crab. There is no drawback.
-Lion seemingly has no utility at all. There is no positive (that I can see).
-Scum Scorpion has utility against towny water-bearer, goat, and ram, but only twice per game. Since twins bypasses water-bearer already, I think that the primary utility of the scorpion is to let scum kill a ram reliably. The goat utility is kinda eh, I think scum gets so much more utility in beating rams with this ability. HOWEVER, the possibility for scum to just lose their secnd shot or outright die in they hit a wrong sign is just a substantial risk.
-Scum Centaur can force the two shot doc to waste a shot and to have it be on a random target. Can also force the one shot scales to waste a shot and to have it be on a random target. Scum Centaur could use it to potentially kill a town Scorpion if the random shot hits someone on the no-hit list. Has minor implications with goat. Overall, the biggest scum utility is targeting water bearer and scales and wasting their shot(s).
-Scum Goat can be used in conjunction with other scummates to pass helpful abilities to the goat at the right time. However, due to the day long wait that the goat has, it is probably better for scum to have just given their player a duplicate ability to start with.
-Scum fish protects against town scales. Don’t think it’s useful for anything else?
Overall, I’d rank the effectiveness of the scum roles as follows:
- Twins. Clear advantage against two roles with no downside.
- Fish. Clear advantage against a powerful town role with no downside.
- Scorpion. Clear advantage against two or three town roles, but substantial downside against a number of others.
- Centaur. Disrupts 3 town roles, but doesn’t outright stop anything bad from happening to scum and turns things into RNG.
- Goat. Maybe lets scum know of some town roles in play but idk, seems really situational.
- Lion. Why does this even exist.
Soooooo…
Overall I predict scum to be 3 twins and 1 fish, or just all 4 twins.
Which means any town water bearers are prolly super screwed this game.
Overall this game has some interesting roles, but so many other roles just negate the interesting ones, turning this into a sorta not-very-role-centric game? idk if I’ve played mafia enough to assess that properly though.