Werewolf game suggestions

[BrianD]

I'm not sure this needed a new thread, but I didn't want it to get burried in the near-dead Werewolf IV thread.

I'm not sure what my actual suggestions are going to be, but I thought I might open this up to discussion. Do we need to set rules on the revelation of victory conditions or things we get in a PM from the game host? Clearly forwarding a PM to the thread is bad since the game is no fun if everyone can prove their roles, but is it bad to list victory conditions? Since victory conditions are specific to the different factions (in a game as complicated as IV), those conditions can be a good way to identify each other secretly.

Revealing dreams worked a bit the same way, but nobody knew that others were getting dreams, and it was possible that members of different factions got the dreams. This made revealing the dreams less than full proof of a role.

I'm mostly wondering if secret victory conditions could eventually become a problem.

I'd also like to suggest changing the victory conditions a bit. In the last game, Barkeep and I (as the werewolves) were awarded a moderate victory because we killed off all of the cult and avoided capture. In truth, we probably should have been awarded a moderate loss. A total loss would have been capture (since we considered that worse than death), but we still died. I don't think any level of victory should be awarded to the dead. If you can die and still "win", that gives too much power to a sacrifice and it may cause people to not try to fight death as much.

I think there would be more paranoia and intrigue if you had to avoid death to win.

[Swaggs]

Something that I think has a lot of potential is having one or two "swing" characters, that are neither good or bad, but only out for their own survival and take whichever side give them the best chance at doing so.

Something like an Herbalist (a noble reason) that is trying to get medicine back to his village that is overrun with disease or maybe Travelling Prince (for selfish reasons) and his Servant.

[KWhit]

Something I'm going to try in the next game I run is having every role be different (much like Pere did in #4) but make sure the wording of roles and victory conditions, etc. is different enough so that the meta-gaming many of us were guilty of is very difficult to acheive. Using the exact wording of the dream or of the victory conditions was probably shady gameplay on our parts and we should do what we can to minimize that in the future.

[KWhit]

I think there would be more paranoia and intrigue if you had to avoid death to win.
I agree with this too. I played to stay alive much more so than to kill the knights.

I had an opportunity to try to kill off the knights on the last two days, but it probably would have meant my death. I could have put in a vote for Swaggs last second on the next to last day and hopefully had it stick. Then try to talk my way out of it the next day. And if I couldn't do that, I was a hunter type character and could take Desnudo down with me if I were lynched. That way, I would have fulfilled some of my victory conditions by killing the Knights but I'd be dead.

It was a long shot anyway, but the way I saw it was role-playing-wise what is the reasoning behind trying something like that if it was likely to get me killed.

Now, having a supernatural type role where a certain outcome is worse than death might be cool, but probably shouldn't be the norm.

[Peregrine]

The wolves actually should have gotten a minor victory according to the guidelines I had set, because all they had to do to get that was not get captured. Possibly a very low bar to meet though. I agree that playing to live is better, but part of the reason I set their victory conditions like that is that there were only 2 of them, and I felt it was very unlikely that they would both survive.

Using the exact wording of the dream or of the victory conditions was probably shady gameplay on our parts and we should do what we can to minimize that in the future.

Keep in mind that I didn't reveal exact victory conditions to anyone in IV, I just told them generally what they had to do. Also if you're going to have a game where everyone has a role, there's a very important thing to consider. The games that have used this on BGG have in large part failed because the players realize at some point that their best bet is to just have everyone publically reveal their role. Once this is done, the people that declare duplicate roles are just systematically lynched. This is what I wanted to avoid in my game since with secret roles this was impossible. I would make sure if you have public roles for everyone, try to have duplicates of some built into the game and other roles which aren't used at all.

[Airhog]

1. The first person eliminated from the last game is guaranteed a spot in the next game :D

2. I liked the ghosts role, but here is a suggestion. How about giving the ghosts a minor power. You could allow them to haunt one person, and give that person a nightmare which does something. Maybe renders them unable to vote, or something. Of course the ghosts would submit a night action, and you would pick either the highest vote getter or randomly pick a name that was voted on.

3. Allow the ghostmaster to actually sway the ghosts vote 1 time during the game. Bascially if this is used, all the ghosts will vote for the same person.

4. Ruthless rules - Instead of people dying, have them turn into a wolf each night there is an attack. The villagers wouldnt know who was attacked each night. The object of the game would be for the villagers to survive X numbers of nights, a few nights longer than there are villagers. This game should start with just one wolf. No special roles for wolves. Maybe the villagers should have 2 seer's. I actually really like this idea. Maybe I should run a trial game. or something with it. :)

[KWhit]

4. Ruthless rules - Instead of people dying, have them turn into a wolf each night there is an attack. The villagers wouldnt know who was attacked each night. The object of the game would be for the villagers to survive X numbers of nights, a few nights longer than there are villagers. This game should start with just one wolf. No special roles for wolves. Maybe the villagers should have 2 seer's. I actually really like this idea. Maybe I should run a trial game. or something with it. :)
I thought of this myself. I was going to go with a vampire role that could create more vampires.

[mrsimperless]

Here is the boardgamegeek werewolf game entry. It has all sorts of resources linked from this page including variations, etc.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/925

[mrsimperless]

Dola.

Here is another link off of that same page that has another werewolf "evolution" if you will with links to all of the game logs. They basically started with vanilla werewolf as we did here and then tried to spice things up each iteration sometimes with great success and sometimes not so much. Some pretty cool themes in here!

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist.php3?action=view&listid=8038

I think Werewolf XI: Aliens sounds cool. Each player had a "public" and a "secret" role.