How to Balance WW games.

[soah]

25% of the players as wolves is pretty standard. This means that for the game to be close at the end, the village will need about a 50% rate of lynching wolves. (50% of the players in the game are eaten at night, the remaining players that get lynched are evenly mixed as wolves and villagers.)

Obviously, the village is in bad shape if it just lynches at random. That's why there are seers to give some help, and villagers can make reads to help them out - which is especially powerful later in the game.

From past experience we know how much to account for villagers using their brains and we know about how many peeks to expect from a seer. Confirmed villagers are really the key to the game. If you are designing a themed game, you need to remember that each village power role is essentially the same as a bonus seer peek in addition to whatever other powers they have. The more village power roles you have, the more you need to weaken the seers to avoid the village getting any easy lock on the game. To achieve balance, you want to try to estimate each character's power in common terms. For example, a one-shot vigilante is basically the same as giving the seer a bonus peek and giving the village a bonus lynch. If you're starting from a standard 17 player game and add the one-shot vigilante, then you should remove the seer's n0 peek and reduce the game to 16 players.

Giving bonus powers to the wolves may seem nice, but keep in mind that what seems balanced at the start of the game may not be balanced by d3. There have been some games where if the wolves lose a few players early, then their remaining powers are too weak to overcome all of the village powers... but if the wolves all stay alive a few days, they can use their powers to just steamroll their way through the rest of the game. Another side effect of this is that the wolves have to take more care to keep their strongest members alive, which can give the village much more information to work with later in the game if things have stayed even. And on a final note, if the wolf power is something like a double vote, then there is a good chance that they will end up being outed at some point or at least have their identity narrowed way down. Don't give the wolves powers which are going to end up hurting them.