Personally, my notion of “balance” is that every player should have a roughly 50% chance of winning, assuming equal skill on all players’ parts. To this end, I would recommend completely ignoring JSexton’s point system, because the game is not linear. The points might work for some setups, but then, you might as well just say which setups are balanced.
For an all-vanilla game, you can calculate the win chances precisely, but it very quickly becomes untenable for games with even very simple power roles. My current approach is to assume basic strategies for the various power roles, and then to run Monte Carlo simulations of a large number of games. As an added bonus, this enables testing of various strategies (for instance, it is indeed good play for the Doctor to self-protect at the start of the game, but it’s only a hair less valuable for the Doctor to protect others, even blindly, so it isn’t actually a big deal for balance if the Doctor can’t self-protect).
Of course, there are other things one might mean by “balance”, like keeping the game interesting for as long as possible, and tuning how much effect a lucky or unlucky early death will have, and making all of the roles interesting. Obviously the roles won’t all be equal in value, but I personally have a rule that no role should ever be strictly worse than a vanilla Townie. Some roles might have drawbacks, but they should always have benefits, too.
When I read the thread, I was sooo pleased to see your name!!
If I could have it my way I’d love Storyteller to host (Evil Dead was awesome - still guilty I didn’t protect NAF. But the Day/Night-powers were so new to me).
So if Story would host, I’ll be happy to play scum if I could set my own team. Starting with:
Bufftabby
Sinjin
Cookies
Squid
NAF
MHaye
<3
Would include Idle - but I know he prefers being vanilla.
Either way - seems like this might be the beginning of a beautiful game
I am still willing to host the game, even on here. I will need a co-moderator, though. I may be the crazy-lazy one here, but I will need help keeping track of vote totals and night actions.
I have a plan for how to utilize a co-moderator, but I will need one.
I will also need a reasonably close count for how many players we’ll have since, unusually, it looks like planning the game to fit the number of people instead of the normal “sign up the right amount for the game” system.
Having said all of this, if people prefer to use another moderator, I would also love to play in the game. It’s certainly the easier task.
I wholly endorse Total Lost’s proposal.
On a completely unrelated topic, Vote Total Lost
Vote Bufftabby
Vote Sinjin
Vote Cookies
Vote Squid
Vote NAF
Vote MHaye
So great to be able to play with ya in one again. Haha, I remember three or four years ago when I messaged ya out of the blue asking about it and you’re like “…the fuck? How do you know who I am?” and I had to explain how I was a secret fan of your playstyle and always hoped you’d play again. Woohoo…
bear hugs