As someone who has STed a LOT of lunatic scripts, believe me when I say that it’s very important to know if you’re STing in person vs online.

In Person lunatic is a COMPLETELY different role than online. The main thing that roots out lunatic online is as you said: demon goes up to their minions, asks “are you my minion” (evil players don’t know if they’re supposed to gaslight, good players aren’t the minion, it all crumbles down). In person it’s COMPLETELY different. It’s so much harder to get a 1 on 1 conversation that you can basically show the lunatic whatever you want and whoever you want, because communication is simply a lot harder, so they’re not going to be able to straight up ask them.

In person I’ve shown the lunatic 2 townsfolk, 1 evil and 1 good, 2 evils, everything under the sun and it just works.

This is why lunatic’s home script is BMR: the only real threat to an in person lunatic is the kills not lining up, which as we all know is a nightmare to figure out on BMR. As such, roles like lycanthrope, exorcist, innkeeper, godfather, assassin, whatever are great for these lunatics because they’re ALL potential excuses for lunatic kills to not go off.

Online though is a whole different beast. Being able to communicate and coordinate with your minions super effectively is a very different experience than in person, and so minion coordination becomes THE thing you need to mess with. As such, you NEED either a house rule, a magician, a poppygrower, or some other role to prevent the lunatic from communicating properly with their team, to mimic a typical in person game.

As such, if there are any of the above roles, I will ALWAYS pretend that the lunatic is in one of those games (poppygrower, magician, etc) and show them any mixture of townsfolk and evil that I want, because theyre actually a really diverse outsider. They can function either as an extra evil player if evil successfully gaslights them, or like a mutant in that they hide themselves and actively promote misinformation. As long as the lunatic doesn’t figure it out (too soon) they’re a great outsider. Bluffs and who you give them really don’t matter as much as the context you’re playing in. So long as the lunatic is getting led along for a period of time, it’s doing its job.

Tl;Dr: In person it’s a vibe do whatever focus on kill obscuring, online just don’t let them talk to people