It is extremely rare to see converted Unseen roles influencing the game. This is bad, because it means that BD rarely needs to bother considering them, and it generally makes gameplay more repetitive and less interesting by minimizing the impact of a bunch of Unseen roles.
Part of the reason they tend not to have much impact is because they rapidly get turned into Assassins when the previous Assassin gets caught - and the general fact that this, coupled with the three-person Unseen limit, means only 1 non-MM, non-Assassin Unseen can exist at once.
I’m wondering if it would be better off if the Unseen limit was 4, and the Cult limit was 3 (after all, the Cult only has one “fixed” member in the Cult Leader.) In my experience it is fairly rare for the Cult to hit 4 people, and they’re designed around the idea of sacrificing members - which rarely actually happens as a result of their high limit. But if it does have an undesirable balance impact, it could be balanced out by other changes.
My more general question is whether people think it’d be worth trying to balance this in as a way of possibly letting converted Cult roles show up more.
(Alternatively, the Unseen limit could be raised to 4 without reducing the Cult limit, but IMHO it’s good for them to be a bit different. Or we could raise the Cult limit to 5 - if they reach 4 and then pass two more nights without losing anyone, they’ve probably won anyway - but, again, a high Cult limit sort of goes against their sacrifice theme.)
I really like this idea. It always feels like there is this vast array of unseen classes that never get used. While on the other hand, cult can have more members but all with less specialized classes.
It’s probably better to raise unseen to 4, since it would be a big nerf for cult to only have 3.
Maybe, but I’m not sure. Are unseen win rates too high, currently? Obviously going to 4 would be a buff, but I think it’s within a safe-ish range. If it does turn out to be a problem, there’s a lot of possible nerfs to the Assassin or Mastermind that could slow them down a bit (eg. reduce the Mastermind’s Foresight charges, which mostly seem to help them find the Prince - that would be a fairly mild tweak to use as a starting point, anyway, one that’s unlikely to break much.)
I don’t really agree with this logic. I mean, sure, it’s not wrong (I’ve gotten away with ridiculously obvious defiles because people aren’t used to considering the possibility), but conversely, the fact that those evil roles are so rare means that BD doesn’t often need to worry about them, which makes deductions for BD generally safer. Yes, sure, sometimes you can eg. slip a defile past them because they don’t know to expect it, but most of the time you dont have a Herbalist when you need one, so BD’s assumption that defiles aren’t happening is safe and makes the game easier for them.
Basically, I feel that it’s better to have those classes appear often enough that BD has to worry about them.
Also, the way the limit works means that BD knows that there can’t possibly be a converted Unseen role present after an Assassin’s death - they won’t be one capable of using a night ability until the night after next (since they’d have to be converted that night). And it is completely impossible for the same converted Unseen role to continue to exist past an Assassin death - the Unseen could maybe happen to convert the same role (though it’s very unlikely), but you know with 100% certainty that whatever converted Unseen role there was disappears when the Assassin dies. And Assassins die the fastest out of Unseen roles due to knights, bears, observers, princesses, etc.
This means that often, BD dismissing the possibility of a converted Unseen role isn’t them making a mistake, it’s irrefutable fact. I don’t think that the value of people occasionally extending that logic too far and ignoring the possibility of a converted role when one exists is worth having so many situations where the possibility can be trivially and legitimately disregarded.
Beyond that… maybe more importantly. With this change, converted roles would be a bit more present, but individual ones would still be rare (you still have to convert one of the at most two Physicians to get a Herbalist, which will still be pretty rare.) So I don’t think that BD will become too paranoid over it. You’ll still be able to slip eg. defiles past them.
I mean, it’s a balancing act between “can slip Defiles etc, past BD because converted roles having a chance to use those abilities is rare” and “never actually get to do so because it’s so rare that you almost never actually get to do it.” It’s no use saying you can occasionally catch them off guard when, in fact, you can almost never catch them off guard because the opportunity really does only happen once in a blue moon. And I feel right now we’re too far into the “almost never happens” territory. With this change individual converted roles would still be rare and unexpected, but common enough that Unseen could sometimes exploit that fact.
Plus, all that aside, the possibility of having a converted role who could hang around and use their ability repeatedly seems more interesting (even if it would still be fairly rare.)
I think the balance is pretty good right now. While I would also love to see more action from the converted classes (and have thought about it in the past), they’re basically a temporary bonus to the Unseen’s base abilities. Which is fine, since on a basic level, the Unseen’s powers are kill + convert. The converted classes can temporarily help, but those two powers are paramount. Increasing the number of Unseen to 4 would certainly require serious rebalancing in other areas, considering BD have enough trouble getting rid of 3 (including MM). I don’t find the annoyance of not getting to use converted abilities to be detrimental enough to make big changes to accommodate getting to use them.
