Whisper meta costs

If nobody can whisper except evils, how does that increase poss claimspace?

The idea is that a few BD Social classes would have whispering enabled.

This would obviously take a lot of work to get right, but maybe I’ll sit down and hash out the details sometime.

And then you’d have the whole “instant confirmable” problem we already have that everyone has been going on about for days. I think your original point is right: whispers are all or nothing.

I’m all for changing whispers, but LIMITING whispers isn’t the way to go. We either fix it or drop it

I had a hilarious idea for a counter-play ability - Night of the Long Knives - Attack anyone who whispered during the day.

If the whisper ability was used in line with the design concept, it would be possible to have knights defend, physicians to heal, or observers to follow investigative classes that had whispered.

As it’s being used in the meta, 3/4 of the players in the game would be dead by day 3.

You never know. They might learn it’s not such a good idea.

If we consider the problem from a real-world point of view, the king would be up the dais on his throne and would be asked if they could grant an audience, or a messenger would approach, and an advisor or two would be at their side. Everybody else would be in the main room. He wouldn’t hear the whispers, and everybody would overhear them if anyone tried.

Maybe the classes appropriate should have a “Request Audience” ability and, if granted, they could whisper with the king, and then be released back to the main room (conceptually). The advisors would be able to hear what was said but not have permission to join in (prince, noble/its converted equivs) for example, OR the king could opt to choose who the advisors were). I could imagine the impact of that being the king demand the prince or his favoured class to out themselves though if it was literally as I described it, which is again not what we want to happen.

I don’t agree with the more drastic changes suggested here; I think whispering (even whispering to the king) is interesting and I’m against anything that would remove it entirely or make it completely useless. That would decrease the depth of the game, which isn’t desirable unless we have no other choice.

One option is to give evils more ability to hear whispers. I suggested giving Aristocrats / Apostles the ability to spy on the king in another post. In fact, it could be expanded to just let them hear all whispers, couldn’t it?

2 Likes

Not really. The first issue is that there is no guarantee that there will even be a noble to become the apostle etc. The second is that there is a low probability a noble would be converted early enough to hear the whisper meta whispers. (1 in 14 n1, 1 in 13 n2 etc, or 1 in 7, 2 in 13 if there’s 2). The third is that the whisper meta takes away the ability for players to switch up their claim as the game evolves. It’s useless having the same info as the BD/neut king if the king will simply expose where multiple claims lie and vote people up on that basis as opposed to bona fide investigative results.

If N2 a sheriff dies and you claimed sheriff, your cover is already half-blown. You can’t switch your cover to obs for instance, if you were forced to whisper a claim D2. Being able to hear the whispers won’t change that problem.

UN/CU and NK won’t even have the chance to share the info they learn, let alone act on it.