Typical Bolton Fan, intelligance of a small dog…hey, wait a minute. 
What’s this intelligance of which you speak? Sounds common, I’ll stick with having intelligence…
Ok, joking aside and looking at the game in general.
17 players, so I would guess :12 Town, 4 Wolf, 1 Dracula.
I really feel sorry for Dracula, if the role exists in the game, unless he has a trick or two up his sleeve that we don’t know about, because if he dies, the town he converts goes back to town and they still get a chance to win.
However, it would not surprise me if there was no Dracula in the game and there is an extra town instead. An extra wolf would compromise the game a lot towards the scum unless there were a lot of masons to counterbalance.
The intelligence to get cats and dogs mixed up, you keep it. 
Also the possibility of scum having an investigative role is worrying. How do we combat that? Our power roles could be tooling away quite nciely under the radar and get chomped anyway, because a Scout found them. Does this mean our guys should cough up any investigation results straight away. I do not know the optimal way to deal with this. Of coure, there may be no scout…
I’m not sure there is a way to combat the role as stated other than accept the possiblity that the role may or may not exist. If they have a Scout, they have a Scout. The game should be balanced to take account of it, if the role exists.
Of course, it is interesting to see you suggesting that our power roles should pass out information as they get it, given that we don’t even know if we have a Detective on our side or not and that it appears to be the only power role with information worth passing out.
I can’t see why the Masons or Physicans should reveal anything unless they have to.
What I said was
What I didn’t say was
“Hey guys, all power roles should spill their guts right now.”
I’m trying to start a dialogue. Your immediate misrepresentation of me has been noted.
This looks like a passive suggestion to me.
If the wolves do get a Night Kill, a Role Block and an Investigation each Night, this town has to be well balanced to counter that. Otherwise there is no point in us playing.
I prefer the option to let the power roles play as they see fit and trust to them to do the best they can for the town.
What’s your opinion then, on what a Detective, if one exists, should do with their information?
What about the other town roles, should they pass out any information? What information do they have to pass out?
I can’t help but look at the title of the game and picture in my head Vince Mcmahon’s voice from the opening montage of Raw yelling “Welcome to Cecilvania!”
Too geeky? Ah well.
A few thoughts on the intial game set up, as far as it goes with a semi-closed set up. How much does the Dracula role suck? It’s like a bad serial killer. Target a wolf? Die. Targeted by a wolf? Die. Target a townie? Die, just not right away. At least, I would expect so. I can’t imagine very many situations where it would be in a townies interest to not pipe up right away if they get bitten by the bat. The doctor or detective, if either exist, might want to stay quiet, since it could conceivably draw unwanted attention to themselves to out him, but I don’t see any benefit to a vanilla staying quiet. Well, except for Hal Briston if he were playing, seeing it as a chance to sort of finally get that Mason only victory.
A doctor and a detective seems likely, since every game outside of YSI(which doesn’t count) had one as far as I can remember off the top of my head. 2 masons seems likely, based on the jsexton formula, though that seems like the easiest place to be flexible depending on what roles, if any, the scum get. 17 players, so 4 scum seems like the best bet. It’d be kinda funny to include the Dracula role in the rules, have it generate a bunch of conversation, and then not include it in the game. I don’t think that is the case mind you, but it would still be pretty funny.
I’ll be back a bit later with an intial vote and potentially additional thoughts.
Just a brief note: I will be gone until Monday.
Have fun all.
I would bet anything there’s no Scout. It seems like it would be a game-breakingly powerful role, when you consider that the Wolves can speek freely among themselves and the Scout would therefore not be under the same constraints as the Constable.
The Wolves already have an abundance of information. An investigative role on their side would tip the balance WAY too far over to them.
something is not right.
NSF and uscdiver set this game up as veterans only. The setup as they have disclosed so far does not strike me as particularly tricky or complex. Taken at face value the set up is straightforward with a few extra scum powers.
Dracula himself is nothing but a suped up survivor.
I expect something tricky. But I do not know what yet.
Random ideas
multiple pro town roles. I think that would cause sufficient confusion to want newbies to stay out and fits with the information we have so far.
Right now that is all I can think of.
The way that the Dracula role is setup, what really prevents the ‘victims’ from going and just telling when the wolves are all but eliminated? Or hell, even right off the bat, when it happens? Since the Count is the only one that would know how many vampires there are, those bitten could think of being in a minority? /shrug
I do agree, there could be something going on here…whats to prevent them from being slightly gastard moddish here?
I agree to some extent. But the same abundance of information also diminishes the scout power. Since the wolves already know who is town and who isn’t. Except for the Dracula. Scout investigations only matter if they hit constable physik mason or Dracula. Still very powerful but not game breakingly so.
(bolding mine)
I disagree with the bolded part. Even a Scout investigation that turns up Vanilla reduces the pool of Town where power roles can hide. It would allow Wolves to better target both their Day smudging/voting as well as their night kills on the power roles, and reduce the chance of “wasted” night kills on Vanilla townies. Also, normally, whenever scum gains info from a night kill, Town gains the same info. With a Scout, they can gain info and Town gets nada. I think it’s an incredibly powerful role for scum, and I hope it’s a red herring from the mods
Scout investigations matter if they hit vanilla town, too. Let’s say there are twelve Townspeople. Let’s also say that the Scout is unlucky; he investigates vanilla Townspeople on the first and second Nights, and gets offed before he can communicate his third Night’s results to the rest of the wolves.
At that point there are, at most, nine townies left alive, and probably fewer. Let’s say there are eight, two of them are known Stoneworkers, and the Physick and the Constable are among the unknowns. Without the Scout role, the wolves would have one chance in three of hitting a power role if they strike the unknowns at random. With the Scout, they have one chance in two – a pretty significant difference, and that’s if the Scout has been relatively unlucky. It’s a way powerful role.
OTOH, if there’s no Scout, the fact that the townies are confused about whether there’s a Scout lends the wolves a slight advantage in itself, since it muddies the waters and may induce the Constable to claim too early. I’d bet anything that’s what’s going on, and the way for Town to neutralize that advantage is to proceed on the assumption that there isn’t a Scout.
Just a heads up, I am only going to post vote counts once every 24hours or so. It’s up to you guys to try to track things if you need updates more often than that.
I am going to be modding this game with the lightest touch possible, I want you guys to have as open and free a game as I can allow, that is part of the reason for the smaller # of post counts. I am going to try to be predictable in my timing, and accurate the first time.
I don’t think this was mentioned explicitly in the rules, but mod posted vote counts are always acurate, it is on you guys to correct me if I make an error. I will do my level best not to screw them up, but stuff happens. If anyone has a method for counting votes better than hand counting let me know. (I have heard tell of such methods, but I am not super tech savy so they haven’t ment much to me.)
Also, I am running an offsite spoiler board. Since most of the people who would be watching the game are playing in it, I am not expecting it to be all that active, but please feel free to PM me your thoughts as the game progresses. I will set each of you up with a thread and post your PMs to me in there.
Also, I will be opening the ability to make color suggestions to you players. If you have an idea for something cool to happen (a neat death, an awesome location, some cool background flavor, or a full blown color scenario) let me know and I will work it into what is going on.
Most importantly, have fun guys. You all (mostly) know each other fairly well, so lets keep the game clean. I will not put a stop to any personal attacks (light handed modding) unless I feel you are starting to violate the spirit of the game or the rules of the board, but let’s not break any friendships over here. Play nice.
Ok, enough of me. I need to go set up a sig file.
ah yes. You both are correct. Scout investigations do provide useful information. So essentially scum will be able to hunt for the constable twice as fast. That’s not good.
So the possibilities are.
No scout and the game is like usual.
Or
there is a scout and something exists to counterbalance it.
That brings me back to the idea that there are multiple town powerroles. Ie more than one constable. I can’t think of what else would justify scum having a scout. Though I guess scum might not have a scout at all. But with the setup having been declared complex. I’m thinking that a scout exists.
Interesting. I strongly disagree that the Town ought to be assuming anything at all. Just for kicks, I spent the last half hour using JSexton’s legendary point system (most readily available at the Batman spoiler board) to work up a bunch of possible game constructions.
I’ve found six scenarios already that would be considered close to perfectly balanced under that system, and I haven’t even come near to examining all the possibilities. There are arrangements that would be balanced including anywhere from three to five scum, any, all, or duplicate Town roles, and even duplicate Scum roles. Choosing among these scenarios would be a function of Mod preference regarding the type of game they want, which is something we can’t even begin to guess about.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be talking about the set-up; the discussion probably won’t generate any solid conclusions, but it will get people talking enough to start analyzing their thought processes. I don’t think we should base any actual actions on assumptions made during the discussion, simply beacuse I don’t think we can have anything like certainty about the set-up right now. That said…
The level of certainty you display in your post is a bit troubling. Knowing the number of Scum would certainly give a person a better foundation on which to guess at the likely composition of the game with confidence. Hm.
my initial point, which I initally overstated, is that the scout, while powerful, is not game breakingly powerful. So I see no reason to expect that there is no scout. While finding powerroles faster obviously favors scum, it is not a gamebreaker. We want to keep the powerroles alive, but losing the detective and/or doctor is a setback not a game loser.