As poor Freshmeat just died on night one in WW Classic, I just had another idea for a protection system for veteran players.

The last one got shot down because it was considered that people might get upset depending on how they were rated, so now I present my new scheme:

The Village Militia

Every player except the wolves get an additional bane action every night. If a player is attacked by wolves there is a chance that the attack will fail that is calculated as follows:

(number of players baning target) / (original number of players)

So in a game with 30 players, say 6 wolves, if all the villagers and good guys protect Shadow then an attack on him has a 23/30 chance of failing (assuming a villager got lynched).

By night X when there are only 10 players left of which 2 are wolves, such an attack, assuming the same protection applies, the chance of such an attack failing would be 8/30.

Assuming that there are three people likely to be protected (seems typical), and a few selfish/forgetful people, then in a game with 30 people at the start, the probability of an attack failing is more likely to be in the region of 6/30 or 1/5 on night one, and will decrease from there.

This also gives villagers more of a reason to take part in the game, although we don't seem to have as many problems these days with people dropping out as we did when WW first started.

On the downside, it allows the seer and baner to both come forward. The villagers can protect the baner while the baner protects the seer or something. So to even it out the wolves would need some extra advantage of numbers or something.

What do people think?