Post by Judge Sam on Aug 15, 2009 4:09:03 GMT -5
In this game the Watcher got to see if anything happened to the person of their choice. If they got hit by a role, they'd receive yes, otherwise, they'd receive no.
What do you think about this role? There are many variants of it that are standard in mafia. I was eager to bring it to Spies because there's a lot of potential and interesting information there. I wasn't sure how powerful it would be in Spies (remember investigations are everywhere in mafia yet I've whittled them down to almost nothing since they've proven to be way too powerful in this game) so I started off with the least-powerful way of doing a Watcher. One person, no info about what happened to them, only a yes or a no.
I asked a friend Todd before the game what mafia games do with these kind of things here's what he said:
Two types of watchers typically: tracker and watcher.
watcher: picks a person's room to "watch" at night, and they will only learn about visits from other people TO that person.
tracker: picks a person to follow or "track" each night. Learns who that person visited at night. (Docs get tracked to their protects, spies with roles get tracked to the people they roleblock or whatever)
A watcher can get multiple results. A tracker can get 0 or 1.
A tracker is useful when you have suspicions. You can track the most suspicious person to see what they do.
Watchers and trackers add a relational web to the game. After a few days, properly played, you have a map linking 5-10 people in the game which people can use to create hypotheses about what's going on.
They're not only a way to catch scum--if a watcher/tracker improperly blabs, scum can learn who the power roles are. "Ohhh, so Brody went to Vince's house last night. That looks an awful lot like a doc protect..."
watcher: picks a person's room to "watch" at night, and they will only learn about visits from other people TO that person.
tracker: picks a person to follow or "track" each night. Learns who that person visited at night. (Docs get tracked to their protects, spies with roles get tracked to the people they roleblock or whatever)
A watcher can get multiple results. A tracker can get 0 or 1.
A tracker is useful when you have suspicions. You can track the most suspicious person to see what they do.
Watchers and trackers add a relational web to the game. After a few days, properly played, you have a map linking 5-10 people in the game which people can use to create hypotheses about what's going on.
They're not only a way to catch scum--if a watcher/tracker improperly blabs, scum can learn who the power roles are. "Ohhh, so Brody went to Vince's house last night. That looks an awful lot like a doc protect..."
There's lots of things I could do to make the role more powerful. I could: say:
Who visited them
How many people visited them
Roles of person who visited them.
From what I understand, there's not much I could do with the tracker since that is pretty straight forward "see who they visited." Though if I just made a tracker who got a yes or no if they visited someone... that would be a role investigation which is interesting cause I've done that haha.
(also note that in some mafia games the night kill is connected with one spy... like if a spy killed susie, and a tracker tracked the spy, they'd say the spy picked the girl who died. I don't think I would ever do that that just seems like an unnecessary penalty.)
So I'm wondering, was the Watcher useful? Not just Khaled can answer that haha. Did it help you out any to get information? Are there other ways it could be used to get information?
If you were to make it more powerful how would you do that?