Well, my duplicated thread has been sorted out anyway. You don't have to tell me what terrible things you had to do; all I need to know is that my people are safe. Wanna play in my game?
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This is my suggestion for the Lover role in my game:
There needs to be incentive for players to actually try and find their partner Lover, so that's why if they're both alive and they haven't found each other by the end of the game they lose. Otherwise people might just not give a shit.
I think it's important they do not know each other at the start because it makes co-operation too easy and I'm firmly against powerful JLs.
The fact that they can block nightly actions gives rise to many possible options and strategies for both sides.
I retained the possibility for them to change into cultists as a balancing mechanism, as two people who know they are both good, are hard to kill and can't be cursed is quite a powerful weapon for the goodies. It also gives the baddies an incentive to try and work out who the pairs of Lovers may be and if they are able to do so and kill one of them, it rewards good players and proactive behaviour by giving them an extra player on the baddie side with significant powers, for instance the ability to block scans by the seer or priest.
I'm not 100% sure whether to let them sleep around after they find each other, because it doesn't make much sense theme-wise. But I think I will as it gives a little bit more importance to the role, and if you're concerned about infidelity think of them as swingers.
Yet, I think it's still not an overly powerful role and is unlikely to change the balance of the game that much unless someone (not necessarily the holder of the role) is very clever and knows how to use it to their advantage, in which case I think that's a good thing. There is the possibility if they find each other early they can be used as mouthpieces for the JL, if they publicly announce who they are. But then they open themselves open to being killed/turned and compromising the JL. It's not very easy to kill them as you can't hunt them if they sleep around, but they can be brutalised, for instance. Overall I can't see any way it could be used in a really OP way.
Thoughts?
It's essentially a mixture of classic lover roles. There is quite a bit of detail, but once you get down to it it's not that complex and every part of it I have considered to be adding something to the role.
There needs to be incentive for players to actually try and find their partner Lover, so that's why if they're both alive and they haven't found each other by the end of the game they lose. Otherwise people might just not give a shit.
I think it's important they do not know each other at the start because it makes co-operation too easy and I'm firmly against powerful JLs.
The fact that they can block nightly actions gives rise to many possible options and strategies for both sides.
I retained the possibility for them to change into cultists as a balancing mechanism, as two people who know they are both good, are hard to kill and can't be cursed is quite a powerful weapon for the goodies. It also gives the baddies an incentive to try and work out who the pairs of Lovers may be and if they are able to do so and kill one of them, it rewards good players and proactive behaviour by giving them an extra player on the baddie side with significant powers, for instance the ability to block scans by the seer or priest.
I'm not 100% sure whether to let them sleep around after they find each other, because it doesn't make much sense theme-wise. But I think I will as it gives a little bit more importance to the role, and if you're concerned about infidelity think of them as swingers.
Yet, I think it's still not an overly powerful role and is unlikely to change the balance of the game that much unless someone (not necessarily the holder of the role) is very clever and knows how to use it to their advantage, in which case I think that's a good thing. There is the possibility if they find each other early they can be used as mouthpieces for the JL, if they publicly announce who they are. But then they open themselves open to being killed/turned and compromising the JL. It's not very easy to kill them as you can't hunt them if they sleep around, but they can be brutalised, for instance. Overall I can't see any way it could be used in a really OP way.
Thoughts?
"the remaining Lover will go mad with grief and become effectively a cultist for that pack"
But what if the other lover is killed by the village (lynched) or hunted by a goodie hunter? Which pack's cultist will he become?
But what if the other lover is killed by the village (lynched) or hunted by a goodie hunter? Which pack's cultist will he become?
Good question. He'll become Unattached. I'm still considering making him unattached even if he's hunted, I'm not sure which fits better.
If you are a lover and your "true love" gets hunted by pack A, wouldn't it make more sense if you attached to pack B? (of course this doesn't work in 1 or 3 pack setups)
And what happens if a lover tries to sleep with another lover, which is out. Is the first lover then told that nobody was home, so that must mean the second lover, or is the second lover prevented from going out?
That's happened before. I told the first lover that there was nobody there, so he figured out there was another lover.
My suspension of disbelief gets rather broken by this, since it implies any lover can find any pack if motivated by grief, but not at any other time...
This is a question I've been wrestling with, see that makes more sense and I'm considering changing it, but I wanted to try and reward the pack that hunted them in some way.
But then again, Falc raises another good point. I think I might just make them unattached cultist, (was that the original way the role worked?) would be a reasonable result?
Tamius's interpretation is what I'd go with as well. The lover can more or less work out that he tried to sleep with another lover, but not his lover. Of course that's only possible if there are multiple pairings in the game to start with.
It's not, though. I just need to hone it here before using it, which is why I posted it here. There's no actually all that much to remember.
I could use earlier ones, but the thing is they're kinda boring. There's a lot of roles that don't actually add anything to the game, that are less than the sum of their parts.
One remedy to this is to simply remove most of the roles, and only leave villager, seer, priest, wolf, cultist and sorcerer, and a handful of traits, but then that would be a little too spartan for most people. I just don't think we as community really analyse the roles we use as much as we should, and whether or not they actually increase the amount of enjoyment for everyone (not just the person who has the role). Change here tends to be reactionary, and roles are only invented or discarded after it becomes painfully obvious that something needs to be changed, and even then we focus more on treating the symptoms rather than actually considering the underlying issues. That's just my two cents on the whole thing.
Having said that, I'll put a little bit more thought into how I can streamline the role without making it completely redundant.
This's an old role which was used in dozens of games. That part of the role seemed stable in all the games I've read.
Yes. And it's also the reason why the role was progressively abandoned. Oh, that and WD committing suicide to help his lover win with the baddies.
There is potential in it, though. I'm sure you can see it. There have been games where the lover mechanism has lead to some fairly interesting events. The question is just can we fine-tune the good parts and remove the bad bits.
I will modify it, but stop pretending like you speak for the community. Nor are you infallible in terms of GM'ing.
If there is one thing you should know, it's that I'm not pretending.
I have a voice, and you don't have a chance at silencing me.