I am tired. What has happened has happened. It cannot be undone. It does not matter to me whether we end this in narrative contest or by procedure. This is currently the last game I'm alive in. Perhaps this is for the best. Perhaps I'm stretching myself too thin, like a certain Baggins remarked, like butter over too much bread.


Long rambling follows on this game, and on the subject of balance in general.
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It is, to my mind, too late for fixes. All any more fixes will do is sour the mood further. I should have spoken my thoughts on this earlier. I did not. I held my tongue when I should not have, and probably now I speak when I should remain silent; for that, you have my apologies narrators.

Frankly, I would rather just start fresh, put this whole round behind us, and move forward on a clean slate.

Narrator intervention ... is always a delicate thing, that can all too easily go askew. The problem is, once it's been done once, it becomes very difficult to resist the desire to do it again to 'fix' the imbalances that crop up, especially if those imbalances rise as a result of an earlier fix.

It is one thing to adjust the initial role distribution before the game is underway - this is practically a neccesity in some cases - had I left it up to the first set of random roles in Vampire II, the seer, fool, baner and half the special roles all would have been part of the masons (Yes - the random number generator actually produced that set of results the first time I attempted role assignment. Needless to say, I scrapped that and rerolled a whole new set).

Once the game is already underway, the risk a misstep becomes far greater. I understand that a slow death march does not an exciting game make - but when one side has legitimately come into it under the rules and the rules themselves are not fatally flawed (see Hogwarts Havoc) then you are doing a distinct injustice to the hard work and effort that that team put into it; and Alarra getting the mason list, however 'lucky' or 'stupid' it may have been was just part of CWSOTTs' irritating ... but sadly for us quite successful plans for keeping under the radar and keeping the good campers suspicious of one another.

The werewolf team has to be able to master the unusual art of crowd control while at the same time somehow managing to keep their points dispersed enough to avoid suspicion of 'wolf-wagons' - and at the same time, somehow manage to participate in enough wagons not to be picked off for not helping. The job, frankly, ain't easy, and bonus scries make it that much harder. Any asset that introduces extra power uses into a game has to be considered carefully because statistically you have to assume most such will end up in the hands of the villagers; while in the early game since a scry item is more likely to be used on another villager (again, by the math) than a wolf, and thus is fairly balanced against the random factor of assignment, in the late game, when trust networks are swinging and the numbers have decreased, every extra scry is worth incrementally more to the villagers - and unless the wolves have done a stellar job in avoiding being found, the odds are still heavily favoring a villager getting the item. Recruitment is just as good, since you then add another villager from the unknown list to the safe list - and in the end game, every confirmed safe name is one villager closer to exposing the wolves.

Figuring out a reasonable balance for these two issues is, of course, the more difficult trick. Scry items that have to be used as soon as they're received is one good step. (I think this is already done in _this_ game). Another might be to only give out "extra" scries and recruits during events that occur while half or more of the playerbase is still alive; the random chance element balances out more effectively early on. Meh. This should probably go into Werewolf Central. Fool scries are another way to introduce uncertainty, especially if the player doesn't know if their free scry is the genuine McCoy or not beforehand. Again, the balance issues change when you have one or more wolves who don't scry as such, or when an illusionist/witch is in play (though this is a wild card unless said role is autoassigned to one side or the other by definition).

Predefined roles are generally easier to balance - the odds are good they'll be killed off over the course of play before endgame looms near; go through the various threads - by and large, you'll note the life of baners and seers is ... ahem ... often brutish and short; when a role is attached to a player from the start, the reasonable risk of eventual exposure makes the insertion less unbalancing than a random scry or bane. Does this mean one ought never use random scries or banes? Of course not! It does recommend to scarcity however.

Meh. My train of thought is actively derailing...