Executioner and jester are both unironically good neutrals and the fact people disagree just shows that anti-intellectualism is on the rise
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The irony is not lost on you, mate.
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my last game i had 3 3p roles in the game design
just that uh. two of them had exactly town wincon and were basically just millers 
and the other had exactly wolf wincon
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cant kingmake if you can only win with one faction
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I find that calling neutral parties “unbalanced” isn’t usually the right criticism to make. There are plenty of neutrals which have little to no interaction with the game such that they are completely “balanced” – take Luka’s Survivor example – but these still often do not end up being fun.
In my opinion, the “real problem” with neutrals is that Mafia as a game with two factions having opposing win conditions has built-in and near-endless gameplay depth, as both parties are competing and can outplay each other endlessly. Your opponents can always get better at reading you and you can always get better at fooling your opponents, or vice versa. It is the same way that a competitive sport is easier to create depth and challenge in than a solo challenge, and solo challenges are frequently turned into competitions (for example, via time trials) to make them more dynamic and interesting.
Neutrals with non-exclusive win conditions do not have this kind of inherent gameplay depth, as they are not necessarily “competing” against other players to win. While many neutrals have win conditions which are somewhat at odds with other players’, it is still a different game that they are playing, one that usually ends up being less interesting than Mafia itself. I do not believe that the vast majority of neutrals create a game more interesting than the social fun of having to hunt the mafia or prevent yourself from being hunted as mafia, at least by the standards of most dedicated mafia players. If the neutrals are always less fun to play as than the main alignments, why include them at all?
The same argument does not necessarily apply to neutral-killing roles which are inherently opposed to both mafia and town: I find I have more fun with these roles, as they still involve the core gameplay of Mafia to a greater degree. You function as a “solo Mafia faction”. However, these roles have the problem of usually being exceedingly difficult to play as or to play against: this is a place where I would say the balance concerns about neutrals are the primary problem.
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Taking examples given here in the thread, Survivors, Executioners, and Jesters have relatively simple gameplay incentives which inconvenience but do not outright oppose the other players. You do not have a “puzzle” to solve in the same way that a villager does, as others’ alignments are largely tangential to your success, and you also do not provide much of that puzzle to the other players. Your goal is much simpler than that of the mafia faction and you do not have teammates, greatly reducing the amount of strategizing involved with victory, and it is very easy to be “locked out” of progressing your win condition for large parts of the game.
As either a villager or a wolf, the process of every day is massively important to you, both pertaining to your own gameplay and others’ (as it either allows you to develop your reads on other players or push agenda to keep yourself and your teammates alive), and the outcome of every day is also massively important to you (both villager and wolf executions substantially develop your win condition in one direction or another).
As a Survivor, the outcome of each execution does not matter to you at all so long as it is not yourself, and the process of the day (threading the needle between execution and being killed in the night) only matters as it pertains to your own gameplay. You have no true investment in what other players do, except to halfheartedly push for their execution over your own.
As an Executioner, you wind up dismissing the majority of the day’s process, as the fate of players other than your target does not matter to you at all. The “agenda” that an Executioner must push is a strictly narrower version of the “agenda” a wolf must push. There are fewer options available to you; less of the game matters. You may as well ignore every post that doesn’t mention your target’s name, as they’re relevant only insofar as you must dismiss their points. If your target is not a candidate for execution at the time (due to mechanics or due to social factors beyond your power to change at the given time), you have essentially nothing to do.
As a Jester, it is a similar story: you do not care what other players are doing except as it pertains to you. You wind up in a bubble where most of the game does not matter, and there will be days when you cannot advance your win condition at all. That is not a fun scenario to be in compared to playing as a normal wolf or villager, where every player’s posts and every execution matters to what your goal is.
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oh that’s why i like scorned
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scorned solves 95% of this
Looking at the role, it certainly seems more fun than the average “simple” Executioner, since it does not get permanently “stuck” trying to kill a player who is not a plausible execution target, and if it does get “stuck” for a day, it can spend that time instead trying to choose a second target for the night. The role is still not playing a traditional game of Mafia, but the perpendicular game is not actively miserable.
It is, however, still somewhat boring to me, as much of ideal play is going to rely on selecting targets who were always going to be executed soon, reducing the need to push against the consensus given by an assigned target. Selecting targets at night reduces the need for clever day play in that way. The ideal gameplay for these kinds of roles ends up being more passive compared to the mafia or the town.
Despite more “complicated” neutrals often being less unpleasant to play as, since their win condition and abilities are allowed to be more in-depth and therefore more interesting to pursue, I still do not particularly enjoy neutrals like this as a matter of personal preference. I personally find playing as a regular wolf to be a more engaging form of dishonest, agenda-based gameplay. It is more flexible, it requires more on-the-fly thinking and long-term planning, and it is more satisfying to win against other players who strictly oppose you rather than to slide by with slanted goals.
The place where neutrals would make up for this in design space would be adding meaning to the broader game via play or counterplay. Neutrals do have some use case in this context, as the threat of their possibility makes hunting for wolves more complicated. The Scorned is a good example of a neutral which does this well. Players may be pushing agenda in bad faith that is not necessarily in favor of the wolves, so it is more difficult to “socially confirm” those who take strictly anti-wolf actions. Villager and wolf strategy becomes more intricate. I just tend to find these benefits to not usually be worth taking a player “out of the game” in the way that randing a neutral role does to them, so I prefer to create these sorts of incentives through other roles.
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and was a godfather
hey i’m noticing a trend!
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i much prefer the neutral’s bubbled gameplay of mafia than normal mafia only old people play that
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neutrals are comically player dependent
it doesn’t tend to be more complicated than that
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