Voting records window

Feedback/Suggestions
#1

I think the game is more interesting when publicly-available information is easier to manage and review - it leads to players being smarter and more strategic depth in general. If making this aspect easier turns out to buff BD too much, it should be balanced out by reducing their mechanical power or buffing evils so BD is forced to depend on social deduction from publicly-available information to win.

In particular, I think the game would benefit from a voting records screen. When clicked, it shows a table with the votes for each day for anyone who was voted up, as follows (The columns are player numbers):

First, a row indicating who voted them up to the stand. Anyone who was voting against them when they were sent to the stand has a yellow X in their box.

Next, a row for the trial, indicating guilty (red X), innocent (green X), and abstain (white X) boxes.

If someone has died, their number in the top and on the days they were voted up is colored in the same color that was revealed for them in the graveyard (defilement, facelift, etc. fool this just like the graveyard, of course.)

This makes it easy to see, at a glance, who voted someone up to the stand, who voted them guilty, etc, and allows people to look for patterns.

I could put together a mock-up if people are confused, but it should be pretty straightforward. Each trial has two rows (one for who voted the person up to the stand, one for the guilty / innocent votes). There’s narrow dividers between trials, and thicker dividers between days, with the day indicated on them.

Writing down voting records is the most irritating part of updating my journal, and worse, while tracking votes should be the most basic part of a social deduction game, most people don’t even notice who’s voting who up because it’s such a pain to follow. I feel that gameplay could be improved by making a single, easy, one-click record of all the votes like this.

Possibly, votes for king would also be preserved - list of candidates as rows, who voted for them as white X’s - but those would take up more space.

5 Likes
#2

/support

#3

Stopped reading the format, but that doesn’t matter because the initial idea is so good

1 Like
#4

I do support this general idea, but at the same time, I don’t think the current form captures the dynamic nature of voting all too well. How does it work if people rescind their votes, change their executes to pardons. Is there a solution to that that people can think of, or should that be read the traditional way? It’s also possible to just give this to nobles/king, however it is weird to give an easier UI for public information to just one class, but I’m just throwing out some thoughts here.

#5

I think that capturing every detail is going to be too difficult (and would lead to a hard-to-read window.)

90% of the time, though, the most important information is “who actually helped vote this person up” and “who voted guilty / innocent / abstain.” Maybe it could also indicate the order in which people voted them up by putting numbers in the boxes, but it’s not necessary and I don’t want to complicate the suggestion too much.