How to Balance WW games.

[JaredL]

matrix,

For ordinary games, durron's chart is good.

For special games with powerful characters, just to use a cliche, it's more art than science. Sometimes it's pretty straightforward - vote buyers, an extra kill, and so forth. Other times it isn't (pumpkin, evil seer, neutral characters).

I would recommend looking at games in the past for characters that are similar to yours. Read them and ask players who played in them how much that role impacted the game. Especially useful is the perspective of the person who played the role. One important thing to note is that they often won't do what you expect. A good example of this is the Tokyo!! character in the anniversary game that just finished. He had to power to one time make himself unlynchable. We expected him to wait until some point in the game when he had a little heat or really wanted to make a point and then use it but he used it immediately on day 1 to clear himself as a villager. So try to think of other ways that players would use the character. Naturally, you're probably not going to come up with whatever convoluted strategy that luckay or nich would come up with but thinking it through a little more will be hugely beneficial.

Roles like Tokyo above are particularly difficult. They are powers that come in extremely handy if a certain situation arises, but are quite weak if it doesn't. If you can, it will help overall game balance if the special power helps to balance the game. So maybe some village power that is quite useful when there are a lot of wolves relative to villagers but could otherwise not be good (something that randomly kills people would be roughly what I'm talking about here). Otherwise you have to do some sort of EV like calculation and determine how likely you think such a situation will come up.

I think many game mods have reached the same conclusion. If you are going to err in any direction, favor the wolves.

I think I'll make a modding post later with more thoughts.