Jesters

The jesters are an umbrella minor troupe that encompasses a variety of unaffiliated jester-type masks. These masks do not have a shared objective like other troupes, but are rather unified through similar objectives and motives.

Historically, most of the Jester masks used to simply be crew masks, but this had a few drawbacks. First, due to the masks' objectives often causing the player to exit the round or greatly disrupt gameplay, they failed to be able to meaningfully help with crew objectives. They also ended up being poor cover for non-crew troupes, since masks like the insider were unable to target them.

Jester's Code

All jesters have a unified objective to not kill another player, with the action of doing so transforming them into the fool (the obvious exception being the fool itself). This imposes a somewhat interesting restriction: how do you get the crew to escalate to taking your life without having taken a life yourself? While you can still resort to some level of limited violence, there is a more gradual escalation into full murder that must be undertaken, creating a more interesting situation for those involved.

Funishment

Jesters broadly exist to punish overzealous crew masks who engage in excessive murder. Due to a general numbers disparity between the crew troupe and other troupes, it's often most effective to be aggressive with taking out suspects, since even a false positive is not substantially punishing. This creates an overly oppressive situation where anyone stepping out of line is killed without much in any way of retaliation.

The various jester roles generally counter this by introducing punishments for killing players. Since any role could be a jester imitating someone else, always resorting to a lethal response can have grave consequences for the player who does so. Even if a situation did escalate to violence and has left a party in critical condition, it's in your best interest to bring the injured party into medical, lest they pass away and you have to face their wrath.

Ambiguity

Beyond simply punishing violent play, jesters also open up a space for typically "untouchable" jobs to engage in more destructive play. In a major troupe like traitors, having a team member with high status and access to the station is a completely game-warping asset. As such, these command and security roles which are typically excluded from participating in these troupes often become unreasonably trustworthy. Although they cannot be a literal explicitly-evil traitor, a Captain can still be a bad guy who you may need to deal with.

Jesters provide a route for these type of experiences. Since they cannot meaningfully collaborate with other jesters or advance the state of the round to terminus, there is less of a risk associated with handing out these masks. Additionally, since they share the core objective of wanting to be killed, their incentive is not to overpower and destroy the entire station, but rather to escalate the situation to a point where the crew resorts to lethality.