While thinking about the whisper meta, I realized that a big part of the problem is how kings write down huge numbers of claims and info, which comes out all at once when they die.
And that got me thinking… do kings really need a log? Unlike other roles, the king’s position is public. They have guards to protect themselves, and other BD protectives know who they are if they want to keep them alive.
That means that if a BD king dies, it’s almost always either their fault, or the fault of the rest of the BD. Either BD voted to lynch them (which means BD or the king screwed up), or BD failed to protect them, or the king failed to protect themselves. In any of those circumstances, it’s a serious failure by BD, and they deserve to be penalized for it. Unlike, say, a Sheriff or Observer dying (which is often random, and therefore deserves a log reveal to blunt the impact of it), a King’s death is never random.
Conversely, because the king is already public, they usually have no reason to sit on information.
If the king wants to act on information they have, in other words, they should have to do it when they’re alive; if BD screws up (or the king screws up) and a BD king’s life is cut short unexpectedly, they ought to be penalized, and having no log reveal is a good way to do that.
With a Cult or Unseen king it’s even simpler. They shouldn’t be helping the BD (and an accurate log almost always will.) They could lie in their log, I guess, which is a bit interesting, but this rarely happens and wouldn’t generally lead anywhere interesting when it does, since BD knows to view it with suspicion. And with Neutral kings, it would depend entirely on their whims, which is bad - it’s better in all these cases to just have the king’s log disappear.
They should probably still have it just for personal notes, since the existing notepad isn’t quite big enough and the notebook is well-suited to writing stuff down. It just wouldn’t be revealed when they die.
This also allows evils to try and kill the king to make information the king hasn’t revealed yet disappear, of course, which I think is generally a good thing.
