Right, now that we’re off, I’m going to get on my soapbox for a minute. storyteller often makes the point that in these games, town players tend to be overly cautious about sharing the information that they have. I would agree, but only to a point. Town players definitely have a tendency to jealously hoard the information that comes with their Role. But in my experience, they combine that with a rather inexplicable need to share any and all information they get in other ways. A couple of examples from recent games I’ve played in come to mind:
In Crimson Glyph, whoever the doctor(me) protected got a notification that they “felt a layer of protection around them” or something similar. What drove me crazy in that game was that the people who I protected immediately posted that fact to the main thread. If they’d stayed quiet, any false doctor claim could have been outed because the false-claiming scum probably couldn’t have guessed who had been protected, while the real doctor would have been able to name them all.
Now, as it happens I was a scum doctor and my power was basically a giant red herring for the town, but the point stands. Sharing that kind of information gave Town no benefit and holding it back could give the Town a great benefit.
In Cecil Pond, one of the masons went on a mass voting spree at one point before he’d claimed. About a Day after he did claim, one of the other town players commented that if the scum were to just eliminate all players that the known masons had voted for and all of the scum, they stood a very good chance of uncovering the last unclaimed mason. People jumped on him for saying that, and his defence was that all the information was out in the open and the scum had probably already worked it out. Now, I was scum in that game. It never occurred to any of us that we could do this(we were rather more worried about a non-existent cop, as it happens). The thing was, even if the scum had figured it out, town got no benefit from that fact being in the open. And sometimes, even if the conclusion seems obvious, the scum will miss it! They aren’t perfect; they’ll miss townie slips just as town players will miss scum slips.
So please, I’m asking all of you: if you are in possession of non-public information, think about whether it should be made public. What benefit is there to town to have that information in the open? What benefit is there to scum?