The King is a good leader but he is also not necessarily BD.
That’s the point. Throne of Lies is a game about deception, trust, and cooperation; if you want to take a leadership role, you should have to either convince people to trust you, or should have to rely on others to protect you, with significant room for deception in each. The King should be as good as a leader as the game offers; anyone who could be a better leader - like the Hunter - is a mistake that is distorting the gameplay and should be corrected so they no longer have the ability to abuse their abilities in that fashion.
Actually that is knight. He does those jobs much better than the hunter does due to determining who the obvious targets are and making them risky rather than just being a risky target himself. That and his cold steel is unlimited use and instant which make is less conformable and better at dealing with an immediate threat.
Games like Throne of Lies have multiple classes that serve the same role, both because it makes gameplay more interesting and because it makes it harder for people to trivially deduce what’s going on. The Knight and the Hunter are both Killer roles, and both serve that same basic purpose. They are not Social roles, and shouldn’t generally serve to lead or unite the BD in even minor ways, since giving someone both the ability to kill, the ability to protect themselves, and the ability to lead results in individual people taking over the game and reduces strategic depth by making trust, deception, and cooperation less important.
Actually. Scratch this. The leader of the faction is that factions most competent member. Any class should be capable of leading but just some are better than others. Remember that there is exactly 1 BD class that doesn’t have any of the traits I said were needed in a leader.
Sure, but I think it’s particularly important to avoid leaders who can protect themselves, since that drastically reduces the amount of cooperation and trust that BD needs in order to win. (The King should be top-tier and unique in that respect, since he’s sort of intended to be ToL’s big unique thing, and since there’s various factors balancing him out.) I’d have no problems with Hunters being as good as eg. a Court Wizard at leading, but it’s something to be very, very careful about - not something to be celebrated and protected. Changes that make the Hunter worse at taking a leadership role (and generally more reluctant to reveal, and less trustworthy when he does) are a good thing.
I mean, to some extent this is a matter of taste. But I don’t think the ToS veteran was a good role overall, and it would be one I’d focus on revising into something else when making a new game. It was absolutely never intended to be a leader, absolutely hurts the game when it manages to do so, and “leader Veterans” or “leader Hunters” are mistakes that ought to be corrected.
Do you feel having “power” roles is a good thing, in general? I think they serve one and only one purpose - they make it so it matters who evils target (since they want to find and kill them rather than less important roles.) Power roles that can defend themselves don’t accomplish this and shouldn’t exist. The game should rely on cooperation, trust, deception, and interaction between people, not on one showboating player in a super-class handling everything.
But beyond that, I feel that Throne of Lies is meant to have the King as the leader - that’s the basic concept behind the game and what makes it unique among social deduction games. Having secondary classes that can act as leaders is generally a bad thing, and doing so should require multiple people working together. The Hunter is utterly unfit to be a leader role in this respect, and his ability to do so should be completely and ruthlessly removed - cauterized out so not even the smallest trace of it remains.
I am absolutely opposed to the idea of leader-Hunters on every level. It goes against everything about the role, it’s actively bad for the game, it leads to boring gameplay as soon as a Hunter is confirmed (which, in practice, you know happens very easily as a result of his uniqueness even when he doesn’t use bleeding).
I mean, let’s take a step back. What do you like about leader-Hunters? I’ve explained in detail why I think they’re bad for the game and why the Hunter should be revised in whatever ways are necessary to make that impossible (ideally, at the very least, starting with removing the ability of a bear to protect him from conversion - something what would force him to eg. rely on the CW, who could use the buff.)
You haven’t really explained why you like the idea of of them being able to lead beyond saying that you think it’s how it was intended (which I don’t think is true and which, either way, doesn’t really matter.) Like I said, to a certain extent it’s a matter of taste (eg. do you like games with one person leading everyone else or not), but I’m curious what appeals to you about it - I pretty much took it for granted that everyone realized leader-Veterans and leader-Hunters are bad things that emerged accidentally from the way those roles worked and which ought to be removed if possible.
