[SETUP] Rebellion

[NorwegianboyEE]

I'm envisioning a setup which i'm calling "Rebellion"
(There might exist something similar to this, but this was an idea i thought up myself just now)

Roles are the following:

The President

Patriot

Loyal Citizen

Rebel sympathizer

Rebel

Rebellion leader

The amount of players should be about 13.

At the beginning of the game the following roles will be assigned:
1:

President

1:

Patriot

1:

Rebel sympathizer

1:

Rebellion leader

Remaining players (Approximately 9, though less or more can be in play):

Loyal Citizen

The president is declared at the start of the game, his goal is to remain in power and kill the rebellion leader before he converts his loyal citizens into rebels and topples him. The loyal citizens and patriot are on the sides of the president and they win if the rebellion leader is killed. The president cannot be lynched.

The goal of the rebellion leader is to kill the president and take control of the country. The rebellion leader may each night choose to convert one loyal citizen into a rebel. The rebels have their own PT and will know who the rebellion leader is. When the rebels are equal in number or outnumber the amount of loyal citizens, there will automatically be instigated a coup to topple the president.
Once the coup starts, the rebels are declared by name publicly. (The rebellion leader will be mentioned as a rebel, but not that he is the rebellion leader) The president will then be given the chance to kill one of the rebels that participate in the coup against him, if he kills the rebellion leader the coup will fail and all the rebels are executed. If the president kills a normal rebel then the coup will succeed and the president as well as all of his loyal subjects are executed.

The loyal citizens are on the side of the president as long as they remain unconverted and will win if the rebellion leader is lynched. If a loyal citizen is converted into a rebel his win condition will change overnight and he must co-operate with the other rebels to kill the president and make the rebellion leader the new leader of the country.

The patriot is always on the side of the president and any attempts to convert him will fail.

The rebel sympathizer is a citizen that secretly wants the rebels to win, though he may not have any contact with the rebel group unless he is recruited. His win condition is the same as a normal rebel. If the game ends in the rebel's defeat he will lose the game as well. He will not participate in the coup and his slot is counted as a loyal citizen slot unless recruited.

Days last for X hours, nights last for X hours. The president is allowed to vote, his vote will be worth 1.5 that of the regular vote. So if the vote pool looks like this:

[3] Mary: Loyal citizen, Loyal citizen, Loyal citizen.
[3.5] John: Loyal citizen, Loyal citizen, The president.

John will be lynched instead of Mary.

Note: If any player is killed during the game, they will still win the game as long as their "side" wins in the end. For example: If a rebel dies, yet the rebellion is successfull, that will still count as a victory for him. Same goes with loyal citizens winning as long as the rebellion is destroyed.

Please tell me what you think about the idea and whether or not there are flaws in this setup.

[callforjudgement]

You didn't ban the Cult from converting the President, which is obviously the correct move. I'm assuming that that's a mistake.

This is basically the same mechanics as a Cult Recruiter. It's not necessarily broken (although many players dislike cult games, many other players like them), but it's hard to appreciate just how powerful a standard Cult is: if the recruiter (the Rebellion Leader in this case) doesn't die quickly, they almost always win.

Your cult is probably more powerful than a standard cult; it has one disadvantage (town get one last chance to kill the leader upon reaching parity), but two advantages (the sympathiser, and the fact that they start with two members rather than one). Additionally, how large the disadvantage is is fairly random (if the leader is a competent player who would almost always be converted, their presence on the list of rebels won't be a surprise, if the initial rebels are really bad players who nobody would want to recruit, their presence will be a surprise and it'll be about 50:50 whether town guess the correct one). As such, this game is probably highly cultsided.

Fixing this probably just requires slowing the cult down somewhat. For example, you could slow down the pace of recruitment to 1 every 2 nights, or 1 every 3 nights; I'm not sure how far it would have to go to be balanced. Alternatively, you could give town additional powers to slow the cult.

[popsofctown]

I think you might be underrating the extent to which this is different from Cult Recruiter. Killing a Cult Recruiter isn't usually a "flag" condition, if a large number of cultists have already been generated, even without a nightkill they can win nightless mafia. While losing repeated use of the cult ability is devastating, the later converts should be the most troublesome ones to catch.
The way I expect this would influence the dayplay, is, in standard cult recruiter I think slots that have played scummy across the whole game, the earlier the better, will get lynched, but in this game virtually all lynching would focus in people who were scummy day 1, because that's just what the win condition is. Lynching a cultist is only a temporary delay for the progress towards parity. In fact, if there's no gap in my logic, you could claim "N1 convert" and become unlynchable to the extent everyone believes you, because spending a day lynching a convert has the net effect of trading it for a different convert overnight, but losing one town controlled vote.

I guess you can kind of say the same thing about a standard cult game but I assume any "standard cult game" has multiple vigs or some such balancing it and making "lynch the growths" viable.
This setup definitely needs town power but after it gets rebalanced I think it plays slightly different from cults due to the flag mechanic.

[callforjudgement]

Cult Leaders are often Flagbearers in practice, though. That doesn't seem to stop them (and when cult wins – which is usually – it's typically with the leader alive).