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This game is getting way too much scanning.
I find being in a pack to be a boring role because you don't have to really think that hard about what the other players are. Lynching the seer and priest is a nice little side game, but for the most part you just want to lynch someone who is not in your pack.
In my setup, the cultists have the same game of "figure out who the wolves are", only their motivation is the opposite of the villagers. They have to use the same analysis techniques that a villager has to.
It also means the wolves have to be a bit more choosy about who they decide to hunt since they may hit a cultist (of course a cultist may be cursed).
Werewolf has a lot of zombieism because so many roles have little or no incentive to pay attention during the day or seek out information from other players. Packs can zombie because they know just about everything they need to from day 1. Villagers zombie because they figure they can just wait for the justice league to swoop in and save the day. Scanners zombie because they rely on scanning to get information instead of talking.
You're sort of contradicting yourself there. Analysis will never be more than soft pressure on the wolves, it's so unreliable that you need to really slip up before you're really caught by the village. Scanning is hard pressure: you need to find them before they find you.
And then what?
You're now banking on them being able to look at the exact same data as the village and to ferret out the wolves while the villagers don't. Because if both the cultists and the village find a wolf, well then the wolf is going to get lynched and the cultists aren't anywhere nearer to winning.
Villagers also zombie when after three days there's still no usable data, because wolves have gotten quite good at hiding and so they have no hope left but to wait for a scanner because otherwise they're just lynching random people.
Your setup was the one we previously used here. The reason we have so many exotic cultist variants is no one was happy with having cultists as villagers who want the wolves to win. If the cultists had no contact with wolves, they got bored and barely participated, since analysing to find a wolf to befriend is much harder than analysing to find one to kill - you can't get it wrong even once. If cultists started in contact with wolves, they'd either get hunted or sold out almost immediately, or left completely out of the loop as to what was going on, since they had no reason to stay loyal to whichever pack they were in contact with.
As for it causing villagers to focus on lynching wolves and possibly aboid killing outed cultists, I agree. And I say that's an absolutely terrible thing. We need to make sure people feel their role is valuable, whether they're villagers, cultists or seers. Far too many players barely participate or disappear as is.
My personal preference is to keep only the "scans differently" aspect of cultists, ie have two varieties of wolf and two varieties of seer.
I agree with most of what you have been saying. I will, however, make a change to your last statement.
Many villagers do zombie after a while. But they shouldn't. Randakar and myself tracked down wolves one game fairly well. The game before last, while I was a cultist, we could figure out who was probably in the other pack once that first wolf fell. Analysis is possible. But the village needs to allow analysis to happen. Do not run up the exact same people every day. Have 3 contenders and keep the votes close. etc, etc, etc....
By 'two varieties of wolf', you mean, I assume, that cultists should have some form of hunt?
You are right in saying that if every villager was motivated, the game would be grand.
But here's my typical way of approaching a game:
At first, I'm excited by the new game, but there's nothing to go on. I tend to be more interested in RP than analysis at that point because there's not enough info for me to sink my teeth in, unless there's a lucky early lynch or scan.
As we get more info, I can start going and focus on the task at hand. But by then, we've already lost quite a few players and if I'm alone in analysing, then it quickly gets pointless since no-one's listening.
All of this, of course, provided I even survive the first few days.
This creates, for me at least, quite a narrow set of parameters for me to have a truly enjoyable game.
I agree with Falc, a WW game is usually split in three phases:
- first days: mostly RPing since nobody knows anything
- midgame: lot of activity, analyzing and discussion
- endgame: little activity, partly because there is few people left and partly because people in the know doesn't need/want to discuss things in public.
The midgame is usually the most fun.
It's hard from a GM perspective to set up a game that is interesting from the get go to the very end and a lot depends on factors outside the GM's control, like which players survives to the end, if the game is still balanced towards the end or if some side feel they have already lost etc.
I have tried to make the early game more interesting with day 0 voting that means something, with players being able to pick their own roles, with picking role playing friendly settings etc. To make the endgame more interesting about the only thing I see that the GM can do is try to have a setup that is as balanced as possible to ensure no landslide victories and to make sure in the rules that no players can find themselves alive but without possibility to win.
- first days: mostly RPing since nobody knows anything
- midgame: lot of activity, analyzing and discussion
- endgame: little activity, partly because there is few people left and partly because people in the know doesn't need/want to discuss things in public.
The midgame is usually the most fun.
It's hard from a GM perspective to set up a game that is interesting from the get go to the very end and a lot depends on factors outside the GM's control, like which players survives to the end, if the game is still balanced towards the end or if some side feel they have already lost etc.
I have tried to make the early game more interesting with day 0 voting that means something, with players being able to pick their own roles, with picking role playing friendly settings etc. To make the endgame more interesting about the only thing I see that the GM can do is try to have a setup that is as balanced as possible to ensure no landslide victories and to make sure in the rules that no players can find themselves alive but without possibility to win.
I think that the endgame is perhaps the least of our worries in a Big. The variation of the initial setup, the many ways to explain a no-hunt night, those all contribute to an uncertain and thus tense situation. As long as no-one is quite certain how close we are parity, then the game should remain interesting.
Comparatively, in Lites, this is much more of a problem. A few days with nothing but dead villagers and the spectre of a Stalingrad parity crushes all hopes and interest in the game.
Comparatively, in Lites, this is much more of a problem. A few days with nothing but dead villagers and the spectre of a Stalingrad parity crushes all hopes and interest in the game.
One solution is not to kill all the most active players, purely because they are active.
That didn't happen so much in this game, at least not to my recollection.
EDIT-for example, esemesasa was run up for essentially no reason other than asking for a sub. Though I guess on a practical level it meant that it spared those who still intended to continue.
Also, every now and then there were calls to look at those who were "Staying under the radar".
All in all, this game seemed good to me. It was as active as practically any big game I have yet to play. I would have been more active myself, but my time was somewhat limited and I devoted a good deal of it to conferring with pack mates.
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I'm pretty sure at least one person explicitly suggested I be lynched as I was too active for my own good. I heard several implied threats against other players too.
It was a good game though, an excellent one in fact.
But you did survive voting at least!
It was the brutal that got you.
I enjoyed because I was a wolf pretty much for the first time (I won't count the game before this when I was hunted night 0 because I really had no impact on the game) and seemed to avoid being detected up until being scanned.
I also agree with falc and the different stages of the game.
And players tend to lynch other players who talk too much. I put that theory to a test not too long ago when I did simple votes with no analysis whatsoever. And I didn't receive a vote for an extremely long time. Which is counterproductive to a village because players need to voice who they think are wolves and why. So by voting players who talk, it becomes bad form.
My favorite roles are villager because I get to analyze more, though the last game I was a cultist I also did to find the other pack.
And players tend to lynch other players who talk too much. I put that theory to a test not too long ago when I did simple votes with no analysis whatsoever. And I didn't receive a vote for an extremely long time. Which is counterproductive to a village because players need to voice who they think are wolves and why. So by voting players who talk, it becomes bad form.
My favorite roles are villager because I get to analyze more, though the last game I was a cultist I also did to find the other pack.
You could look at it that way. Or you could look at it as there being no cultists, and a second variety of wolf that can only be detected by the priest.
That feels pretty pointless and if done wrong it would unbalance the game.
We have had games with two seers one that detected vampires and one that detected wolves. So the village lynched the vampire-seer and the vampire pack had smooth sailing to victory while the wolf-seer scanned and outed the wolves. But I guess you would have both "vampires" and "wolves" in the same "monster" pack?
Yes, the two varieties would be mixed so no pack had just one type. It's the setup I had in my aborted Murder Mystery game; each pack had a mix of thugs and masterminds, or whatever it was I called the hardboiled and scheming variants of wolves. That way you could always fall back on analysis if you could no longer scan some members of a pack, just as you'd have to if you lost the seer in a standard setup.
The point being that people aren't satisfied with cultists as naughty villagers, but having someone evil who scans differently greatly increases paranoia and hinders the formation of ironman JLs. Rather than having the cultist as a low priority only threatening if contacted by the seer though, it makes all baddies worth looking for. There'd need to be a slight rebalancing to compensate, but it's not the most extreme change we've tried.
If nothing else, we need to know the answer to this. In hindsight it was a game changer.