Was thinking it's time for another go for Werewolf if anyone's up to it, I'll host this time but there will be a couple of changes. -The day/night cycle will take roughly 6 days to complete. That's three days for day and three for night, that might seem like a long time but it gives players the chance to get their votes in. I might even round that off to a week and have 3.5 days between each sunrise/sunset. -In the last round, some players started cutting themselves to 'prove' that they're not a werewolf, you cannot do this. Any action that gives unquestionable proof that you are who you say you are is strictly forbidden. You can lie, scheme and cheat your way to victory but you cannot 'prove' that you are a civilian or otherwise. I would encourage players to use the PM feature on the forum to discuss strategy with other players in private. I'm playing another game on another at the moment which has 9 unique roles for the civilians, I was going to use those (they seem to balance fairly well) and to also let players select a talent that is a minor skill that'll give them an edge in one area or another. I haven't decided what these are yet, open to suggestions. The setting will be the Void; the basic idea is that the void was collapsed after the events of Arcanum and the world is now entering an industrial era. Technology rules supreme though there are still some practitioners of magic in the smaller parts of the world. Eventually, scientists discovered a way to open a temporary gateway to the void by technological means that will work regardless of magical aptitude (bit of deus ex machina, but bare with me). This 'new void' bares no resemblance to the original seen in Arcanum, it is unknown what happened to the original inhabitants as they no longer seem to occupy what once was. Each of you are a dangerous criminal that, over the course of recent history, has been banished to the void. Eventually, new criminals stopped arriving and what feels like many centuries has passed. Many of you still have dreams of returning to Arcanum so naturally when a stranger appears and offers just that you all readily agree to help however there is a price; the void, and all who remain, will be destroyed irrevocably. There are some amongst you that do not want this for whatever reason, these are the wolves. That's the basic idea anyway, if you want to post a backstory for your character, please do so here - but otherwise I frankly don't care how heavily you want to roleplay in the actual game thread. Ideally we'd have around a dozen players, I realise that's fairly steep for The House Of Lords, but let's see how many we can get first. So, anyone interested?
Sounds great. I'm all for it. One question about the rules: Will the wolves be literal wolves/werewolves in this game, or is it just symbolic? If the latter, how will we recognize whether or not have we killed a "wolf"? As for the backstory, I just recently finished Arcanum with Victor Salazar before I could get satiated with his character, and since he definitely fits here, I'll be more than glad to play as him in the roleplay. If anyone's interested in his full story, he's the next to last character I described in this post. For those of you more in the tl;dr mood, he's an evil human sadomasochistic wizard who enjoys tormenting people with his fire and mental spells as much as casting those painful magicks on himself. Needless to say, his body is covered with burn scars, which however are nowhere near as devastating as the scars in his mind. Victor Salazar probably isn't even his true name, but he has been using it ever since he burned down and escaped from the asylum and it's debatable whether he even remembers anything prior to that event. Also, he grins. A lot. Whether he was banished for a specific crime or for the entirety of his activity isn't that important, especially after all those years, but one thing is sure - he definitely deserved it.
'Wolf' is mostly symbolic, the game is also called Mafia in some parts of the world (mine included) - it's more about strategy and maneuvering your way out of situations than fighting actual wolves. I hadn't decided on how a wolf would be recognised, perhaps they all stole a part of the machine that opens a portal back to arcanum or something. The game usually starts at night, so if they kill the stranger off then the angry mob of crims acts out of retribution.
An interesting thing would be to introduce a third party, with an agenda of their own. I've seen this work in many werewolf-games. This only works if we get enough people to join, though.
Not a bad idea, in the other game I'm playing there's a linker that can link two characters together. If one's a wolf and the other not then they form their own side. Something more concrete would be nice though. Three players so far though, any others?
Like this, then: There are the usual sides, civilians and werewolves, but there are a few hidden characters in the game (who can be both werewolf and civilian) who are 'type B' (everyone else is 'type A'). Neither the As or Bs know who the Bs are (apart from yourself if you're a B), but you don't want to flaunt it because there is a fourth group, the Cs, who wants to eliminate the Bs. In an example, we could call the Bs 'aristocrates' and the Cs 'rebelling workers'. So, these two subgroups have important agendas aside from the main objective of winning the struggle between weres and civs. An interesting power in this case is to award an A with the ability to spot Bs or Cs once every turn. It could open up for very interesting exchanges of information, and so on. You could always try a "wolfsbane" and advertise in the GD.
That could work, however I think we have to be wary of making it too complicated - as it's both more confusing for the players and easier for me to make a mistake. How about both villagers and wolves belong to one of two ancillary groups (let's call them type A and type B for now) - each player is only ever aware of which group they belong to; the two are opposed and whichever is in majority at the end of the game wins. Then give the mayor the opportunity to divine which ancillary group a player belongs to once per night. That'll give each player another agenda instead of the regular 'they're a wolf, vote them out' or 'I'm a wolf. Eat them' - it'll also give the Mayor a bit more of an advantage beyond deciding who gets lynched in the event of a tie. If a new mayor is elected, perhaps they should get the old Mayor's records too which will expose any of the lies the previous mayor had perpetrated in order to further their own cause. Though, fitting that into the setting could be complicated (by nature the villagers/wolves are opposed in our setting) so perhaps it'd be better to have a Type A and Type B for both villagers and wolves. If that ends up being the case then the sets should match up so that a Mayor's investigation wont reveal the identity of a wolf. I'll get to work on sorting the roles out later tonight, of course we can always drop one or two if we don't get enough players.
The mayor would get killed the first night. You now described him/her as the "seer", the person capable of divining other players identities. The seer is always the wolves first and most important objective, seeing that he/she can find out about their dirty little secret. The seers identity must be unknown at the beginning of the game.
Not the same as the seer, they don't learn another player's identity and instead just if they're of 'group A' or 'group B'. It's fairly useless as the villagers still want to win, as do the wolves. Perhaps the whole mechanic is a bad idea, I don't know. The mayor is an elected role, it can be anyone including a wolf. Villagers usually elect someone they see as reasonable and trustworthy as their purpose is to serve as a tie-breaker for lynch votes. Mayors can be unelected or a new one elected at any point in the game, it's completely different and independent of the other fixed roles.
