Some mechanics thoughts, in absolutely no particular order:
o Dogs. I thought it'd be fun to use dogs <somehow>, given the theme. Using them as a measure of voting power seemed natural. Additionally, any player that dropped below 6 would be scratched (like EC). I originally anticipated that it would happen to more than just one player and would become more quickly obvious ... but it never did.
o Dogs, II. Losing them to attrition was purely RNG, starting at a 0% chance first night, 5% chance second night, 10% third night, etc. I rolled it out of 100 and if a player rolled 1, I took 2 dogs away instead of 1. That happened multiple times, amazingly enough. Some people have bonuses that reduced their chance.
o Dogs, III. The wolves had the ability to kill/remove 4 dogs/day, split however they want. They appear to have focused on the voting aspect and not on the scratching aspect (I thought <somebody> would consider the fact that you need to have a minimum number of dogs.).... so they did not use them to get villagers removed from the game like they could have. I probably should have made it clear in the rules that you had to maintain 6+ dogs. I thought people would figure it out, but I guess not.
o Mother Nature (WTF). I couldn't do the Iditarod without Mother Nature, and it was fun to ask WTF to reprise the role. Her 'dog' number was a measure of her strength on any given night, and was a random number between 4-16. She was vulnerable to being killed any time it was below 9. But nobody persisted in investigating her to find that out. Since certain players (*cough*) are often investigated/attacked/lynched, I thought it was a sure thing her role would come out sooner. WTF's win condition was to play the game to 1-1-1 (villager-wolf-WTF).
o Player-driven objects. It was .. interesting. The favorite item was self-protective. MANY people submitted objects like that night after night. I really thought there would be more investigation, but I rarely had to not allow investigation because few people tried it. I thought I'd get a variety: from direct investigation, to alignment investigation, to "is there evil in cohort 2", etc.... but really we didn't get too much.
o In combo with player-driven objects, I thought the villagers would make better use of having a mayor who could communicate with each cohort. It would have been relatively straightforward for the villagers to assign out duties to each cohort: your cohort investigate, your cohort protect, etc. That would have made villagers more efficient. And since essentially anybody could be a seer on any night, there was little reason to hide the results of investigation. But people kinda stuck with the usual approach.
Thanks for playing, all!!! It was an interesting game. 🙂 Big thanks to DVMDream for co-modding. Our schedules worked out well - I got unexpectedly busy just when she was able to jump in.
Then vetgirl did. Then nyanko, who used the item I purposefully gave her (so that if I was suspected and my count was low, I could have a great alibi and "proof"of my good nature), did as well - tricky nyanko!
