I think the idea of a Neutral Royal Guard is intriguing. I’m not so sure about the execution done here.
Allow me to throw in a revised version, just to see how it settles.
Royal Guard - Neutral Offensive
Win condition - See the starting king survive until the end.
Passive - Long live the king - Whenever a player is elected king, if you elected this player, your win condition changes to see that player survive until the end.
Day ability - Silence (2 charges) - Target player is silenced for 20 seconds.
Day ability - Guard Influence (1 charge) - Decide an accused player’s fate (including your own). If used while you are accused, you will be pardoned.
Night ability - Night Guard (inf. charges) - Target player becomes death immune for the night. Learn the classes of everyone who targets your target. You are immune to occupation, redirection, and framing while using this ability and Gossip/Intrigue wont return feedback from you. You cannot target the same player 2 nights in a row.
Night ability - Swift blade (2 charges) - Attack target player. If they have Royal Blood, you will commit suicide.
This seeks to play an influential role who seeks to defend the king. The King is usually a role that no one really wants to defend, so it would be interesting if they acquired a neutral role who works to save them.
The Royal Guard is quite powerful, having very good abilities that seeks to make him a protector and information source to the king.
It is very difficult to secure the starting king’s survival through it all, so I picture a way to salvage the win condition was needed. At first I wanted to limit this passive to the first ever elected king. However it is quite unique to have a living player with no means to acquire their win condition. So instead I thought he could work to have the newly appointed king become executed, through the slam-ability.
It would be interesting to have the Night Guard ability redirect their attacks to a king you cannot win with, instead of occupying them, as a conditional alternative. However I figure the ability is worded enough as it is.
The Silence is mainly there to silence players who accuses the king or yourself and potentially can work to cut off Assassin bleeds and Prince jails (on you).
The Slam (Guard Influence) is there for the ability to safe-guard a King, yourself or to frame an elected king that you did not elect. In addition, the existence of this ability makes it less clear who pardons or executes a target. This muddies the waters on who used the slam; a king? a Sorcerer? or the Royal Guard? If used to pardon the king, it is pretty clearly the Royal Guard, but at that point it doesn’t matter too much for the Royal Guard, as long as their win condition lives.
The reverse Stone Wall + ultra-Overlook (Night Guard) is there to protect the King and to give you information to either work into a claim or to feed to the King.
(Knowing which classes players are means you can know who to stab safely come later in the game and you can use the info to claim invest classes or if you spoil a kill, you can go for a support claim.)
If you use your information to reveal evils and the king is Evil, you are endangering your own win condition, at which point you are also at risk of becoming a target for the Evils and wont be alive to elect a new king. Therefore you have to approach carefully.
I don’t think it’s right to have an Occupation immune attacker, so instead of making a passive OCC immunity I weaved it into the ability while also making sure you are not getting framed results. Additionally it struck me as a very unfortunate situation if you target someone along with a Noble and they get all your juicy information, so kinda a band-aid solution to make Gossip not return feedback.
The stab (Swift blade) is there to turn the tide in favor of your king and to close out the game quicker. To avoid that you just start stabbing left, right, and center there’s only two charges and if you hit a Royal Blood (Prince, Princess, Noble, Drunk) you take your own life. That way you wont just kill the Prince once you learn the king is evil. However come late in the game, you might want to take that trade to give the evil king a chance to win.
In addition to the class itself, the mere existence of this combination of abilities makes it more difficult to tell when a player is force pardoned if it was the Sorc/King/R.Guard who did it. Similarly an Assassin might try to cover as Royal Guard and “confirm” themselves by using a Silence.
It is a very strong class, so it should probably not show up that often, but the win condition is difficult enough I wager to allow the strong abilities.
