It’s an oft forgotten and unexplored concept, but there sometimes is a need to use your enemies rather than eliminate them from play ASAP. The NK can, in some instances, be of tremendous use to the BD. Most notably in the mid-game where threat of Unseen/Cult majority is looming but not quite there. At this stage the evil faction want the NK dead. The NK is the only threat to their victory, as their dominion over the BD is only a matter of time.
With this in mind, I take you to a particularly frustrating game that I played yesterday:
I rolled Good King. Prince died early, whispers went to me. Our sole Paladin at this point (the only Paladin claim in the game) had also died. The investigative claims were lacking. Day 5 comes along. Not a single cult had died but a lot of BD have (but not enough to lose majority, very much on the brink though).
A Knight claims they CS’d someone and they survived and so accused them of being the Reaper. The accused very quickly gets voted up and they also claim Knight; Reaper for sure.
I decide to force pardon this Reaper, and promptly get accused (by what turned out to be a member of the cult at the time) of being an Evil King. BD and Cult collectively vote me up and execute me. I bought the Reaper 2 days, but he eventually gets executed. Cult go on to win with majority (they had a merc too so it was slightly faster than usual).
Was I wrong to force pardon that Reaper? Let’s consider the scenarios a moment:
- The Reaper is killed. The main investigatives are already gone and risky executions need to be made for BD to make progress. Given the 4-5 vote influence the cult has, this will very likely not pay off.
- The Reaper lives, and gets to run free a couple of extra days and I’m not executed. Odds of them hitting Cult and sapping their vote influence is fairly high depending on whether the Cult has an Invoker. If cult do, it backfires greatly. There is, however, a bit of comfort in knowing that it’s in the Reaper’s interests to start thinning the Cult out to prep for their own win given the Prince is out of the picture.
Before I force pardoned, I asked myself “which option creates the most likely conditions for a BD win?”
To me, Option 1 just falls flat barring extraordinary luck. Option 2 has a good chance of falling flat as well, as it did in my case, but there was a route to victory hidden amongst the chaos that such a decision caused. Since there was such disagreement over my choice with the players in the game, I thought I’d put it out there. Seems a fair amount of players find not killing an NK they find ASAP an alien concept.
