The “point” meta is cancer. I know the reasoning is to prevent the king from slamming prince. But that’s stupid, because even if he doesn’t point he can’t decide fate exe without the permission of the majority, which is implicitly given when anyone is voted up.
In other words, if you don’t want someone to get executed, whether by vote or the whim of the king, don’t vote them up.
But the meta is so well established and its proponents so stubborn that reasoning with them is pointless.
So in order to preserve this awesome ability (which in my opinion is one of the defining aspects of this game, and certainly the coolest and most distinguishing feature of the King class), I propose making it impossible for anyone to confirm whether the king has ever actually clicked decide fate or not.
And this can be done by not consuming the single use of Decide Fate unless the king’s decision actually contradicted the majority vote at the time he clicked it.
So if King clicks Decide Fate, and his decision agrees with what was going to happen to the guy on trial anyway (get executed or get pardoned), the Decide Fate button becomes disabled for that trial instead of actually doing anything. And when the trial ends, it is enabled again.
So if anyone says, “D2 vote someone up and tell king to slam exe/pard so he can’t do it later on prince”, King can say, “I did but it didn’t work”, and nobody can call the king a liar because nobody knows what the majority vote was when king pressed the button, except for the King himself.
Actually … there is a problem with this. Since everyone is notified when someone casts a vote (although not how they voted), if King claims, before anyone cast any vote, that he clicked decide fate exe but it didn’t work, he will be proven a liar since the default outcome of a trial is pardon (all abstains).
This technically isn’t a problem right now because voting is very buggy in the sense that public notifications of “x voted” or “x changed their vote” or “x rescinded their vote” are unreliable and often don’t appear.
But a more elegant solution would be to give everyone the option to change their default vote (change it from abstain to execute or pardon). Nobody would actually ever use this obscure feature (it would theoretically be accessed in the settings menu), but the fact that everyone knows it exists would kill any attempts to use this cheap vote notification tactic to force king to prove whether he is able to use decide fate.
And make point a passive of course so DF can’t be disabled that way either. Additionally making room for giving king a new awesome day ability.
TL;DR
Point becomes a passive.
Decide Fate becomes disabled for the duration of the trial if you attempt to use it in agreement with the current majority vote.
This makes it impossible to prove when king can use decide fate, so he can’t be forced to waste it D2 in order to neuter him for the rest of the game.