Mod Planning and Game Running - A Basic Guide

Necro

The below is meant as a guide to help both new or even current WW game mods in how to plan and run a game of Werewolf.

Disclaimer: People can take as much or as little of the information provided as is necessary, and is only based off my own planning and running process. Others are quite welcome to chip in with their own experiences and tips!


The first part I’m going to deal with is Game Planning. I’ll be using one game as an example for effective planning and running.

See below for the core points you should consider when thinking about running a game.

Theme: The first decision you want to make in deciding to run a game is to decide on whether you wish to use a theme or not. All ideas flow from the source, so setting down on paper what your outlying theme is will help guide you on that path. It is NOT essential to have a theme btw, but from my own personal experience it helps you in the next step.


Complex VS Vanilla: The next stage of planning is to determine whether you want to run a ‘vanilla’ game – one with basic roles VS a ‘complex’ one – one with all the bells and whistles and new (or not) mechanics.
Vanilla games can have a theme, but they won’t have some of the uber-complicated roles as seen in the WW thread. And it also completely possible to have a themeless complex game. There is no wrong answer, the important part is to define both.


Core Mechanics: The next step is to outline what you want your game to be centralised around.
In the case of a vanilla game, you can more or less skip this step as you won’t have any major things going on in the background. You should, however – define the start and end of your days: ie munch and lynch times. This will give you a better idea in how to plan the timings for your game.
In the case of a complex game – it’s very different. Along with the timings, you will need to decide the central overarching concept to base your game on. Recent examples include the One Ring from LOTR – or the Camp Leader from I’m A Celeb. These will dominate your gameplay, and a lot of discussion especially in the early stage will be focused on them.
Once you have your core mechanic for a complex game, you will start to find roles, or prizes, or other possible items begin to revolve around this. I can’t stress this enough when it comes to the core mechanic. Every time you introduce something new into the game, ensure it does not conflict with it.



Co-Mods and Communication: This is point 4 here, but it could equally be taken as point 1, if a group of you come together to decide on the above. Either way, communication is king. You can do it through a variety of methods: Some use WhatsApp for instant communication, others use Discord, you can communicate via email or even through the PM system here on boards if you so wish.
But it’s important that all mods are aware and agree the direction in which the game is going. And even as a new mod coming on board to help someone experienced, all opinions are valid. They might not be correct all the time, but trust me, we all make mistakes and can sometimes love our babies (or games) too dearly to see the possible flaws. If you see something, no matter how small that looks awry, say it. At worst you’ll learn why it’s done that way, and in fact you could be saving a game from being broken.
Another handy item to have is a master spreadsheet for all the goings on in your game, the roles, the players, the timings – you can even have the lynch form linked in here if you run both through Google. It will be your guide and easily updated by all co-mods.
Communication, Co-operation, Co-mods – the three Cs that are vital in a successful game being ran. And don’t worry about the little disputes that might happen, I’ve lost count of the small disagreements I’ve had with my co-mods over tiny little aspects of the game. We all got over it eventually… I think


Balancing: Moving on, we now have to balance the game. For those unsure of what I mean, it is weighing up the roles of good and evil you want to include, and making sure that all sides have equal opportunities to be able to win the game. This can be very difficult at times, particularly in complex games with loads of roles.
There are balancing spreadsheets online for Werewolf available with a quick Google, however I dislike them as I’ve yet to find one that includes a Serial Killer (a lone third party wolf). But they’re handy for new mods who are concerned about balance. I’ll go into this in my example in the next post in further detail regardless.
It is best to have a set number in mind for the amount of players you want to have when balancing, and then leave room to scale up or down depending on sign ups. Initially I always planned for 30 players, but I found that a bit testing tbh in trying to get the requisite number of sign-ups. Nowadays I am less ambitious, and build my games for 25 people, with the ability to scale if necessary.


Sign-Ups: Which brings me into point 6. You can do all the planning in the world but it won’t do much good unless you get the players to play your game! Once the game before yours concludes (or indeed earlier if you like), you can post your sign up sheet and allow people to join your game.
It’s possible at this stage depending on numbers you may have to revert back to point 5, but if you have your balancing done correctly, it should only acquire minor – not major adjustments.

Backrooms: There’s another thread here regarding the creation and setting up of backrooms. I won’t go too in depth into it here. Once you get the keys to the backroom site, I’d advise however to go to the Admin panel, and check the Groups created, in particular the dead room group if you plan to re-use that. If there are users still attached to the group, remove them or delete the group unless you want them to see your game/pre-plannings. Do the same with other groups you don’t delete just to be certain as well.

And finally.... but the most important point of all....


TROUBLESHOOT – This point is actually relevant after every step of the process. Add a role? Troubleshoot? Change the balance slightly? Troubleshoot. Have a player wanting to sub? Troubleshoot. Work through everything and leave nothing to chance, and your game will end up going off with (hopefully) no issues.

The above are the seven steps in basic form to use for planning your game. I’ll get into the running of the game in a later post, but for now I’m not just going to wax lyrical on how to do things – I’m going to show you.

Necro

So in this example I’m going to show you how to set up a themeless vanilla game, for 25 players.


Step 1 and 2 are listed above – Theme: None and Vanilla. That’s two parts done now.


Step 3 is that I have to work out how long I want the game to run. The best policy is the standard Sunday-Friday, as it seems to suit most players, so I’ll stick with that.
This will also be tied into Step 5: Balancing, as I don’t have much in the line of mechanics to work out. I’ll be skipping point 4 for the purposes of this example, I don’t have any co-mods. Nobody loves me


I’m going to run the game starting on a munch Monday morning at 10am, with a lynch each night from Monday at 9pm.

Now I need to look at my balancing as I am planning for 25 players, and don’t want to over-run my allotted timeframe.


So in terms of roles I’m going to add a seer and an apprentice (assigned, not picked), a vigilante, a bodyguard and a priest.

5 village roles so 20 players left.

Next my evil roles: I’m going with a team of 5 wolves, for now anyways. So we have….


5 wolves
5 roles
And 15 normal villagers. That looks good to me.



But… will I finish in the allotted timeframe?
Well, let’s work that out shall we.
Now I need to look at my static kill points, as well as my variable kill points.
Static kill points are kills that will happen every day – power actions aside. Those are the munch, and the lynch.

In this currently I have 2 static kill points.


Variable kill points are kills that may or may not happen depending on the player – they could be a vigilante, prizes like bullets, etc.

In this game I have a vigilante, so I have 1 variable kill point.


So in total I have 3 kill points.

At that rate let’s run the numbers:
Game start: 25 players.

Monday: 3 deaths – 22 players.
Tuesday: 3 deaths – 19 players
Wednesday: 3 deaths – 16 players
Thursday: 3 deaths – 13 players


13 players going into Friday, regardless of alignment of the players. That’s quite high, and would be hard to run off over a single day to finish on time.

So, I have two options, well three really:
I can:

1. Add speed days to reduce numbers
2. Add a majority vote rule
3. Split my evil teams to reduce numbers.

I’m going to try and split my teams first. So instead of one 5 person wolf team, I’m going to split it into 4 wolves and one SK.


Now my static kill points move to 3 (munch, SK kill and lynch)

My variable is the same at 1 (vigilante kill).

Let’s see how that works out:

Monday night: 4 dead – 21 players
Tuesday night: 4 dead – 17 players
Wednesday night: 4 dead – 13 players
Thursday night: 4 dead – 7 players.


Much better. And just to ensure that my numbers are lower in case of the SK or vigilante dying early, I’ll add majority voting from day 2 which means I might have an extra lynch.

I can now be confident that with these numbers, my game will end by Friday.

In terms of balance then, I have 5 evils in 25 which is 20% of the roster. This is a nice figure to work with, and I can reduce or increase my numbers depending on sign ups.


Speaking of, I’d better post my thread as Bob’s game has now finished. All goes to plan and I actually end up with 28 sign-ups – wow, I must be popular! Or they just want to play WW.:pac:


But now my numbers are screwed – I planned for 25! What should I do? Do I tell sKeith, Pter and quickbeam as they were late to the party, to sit on the bench? Or do I just run as is?


The answer to the first is: Maybe. If you’re set on 25 then that’s fine, it’s your game after all.
But in this case you need to be clear when posting your sign up thread that numbers are limited to 25. Otherwise the dawdlers might wait a few days before signing up and then – OMG! There’s no space. ‘But you never told us this, etc.’ To save arguments, if you want to limit sign ups, specify when posting your thread. Then it’s tough titty to the latecomers.


The second issue is a little different. 28 players run off over 4 days will work out a bit tighter, and your evil/good ratio is a little askew.

So, what to do? Well, you can simply add an extra wolf to the scenario, now the wolf team has 5 wolves and the village gains two extra. That’s an ok solution, though my numbers may be a little awry come Friday.

Another option is to split the wolves into smaller teams.
So team x, team y and the SK.
You might want to even up the teams and drop the SK, but don’t forget your static kill points, which is what you need to increase here.

So, you can go with a team of 3, a team of 2 and a 1 person team, there’s your balance still intact and your kill rate increased. Let’s have a look:


Monday night: 5 dead – 23 players
Tuesday night: 5 dead – 18 players
Wednesday night: 5 dead – 13 players
Thursday night: 5 dead – 8 players.


And now you can see with a subtle change my game will finish on Friday anyways. There might be a drop in the static kills if one or two evil teams are killed off early but coupling this with my majority voting option gives me confidence the game won’t over-run.


Now, some might look at my above example and see the multiple teams, and say ‘this is not vanilla’ and you’d be partly correct. Multiple teams is generally not a feature of a vanilla game – HOWEVER – in terms of the effective and preferred timescales of the games on Boards, this is the only way you can run a vanilla 25 player game that is more or less guaranteed to finish within the Sunday-Friday way of playing games here.

For a purer vanilla game you would need to reduce numbers to around the 15 mark to allow the same timeframe to play out.


For a complex game, I’d have to write pages on how to develop a core mechanic, but actually there are good examples of complex core mechanics on COP. I’d advise having a read of the mod rooms of games such as LOTR to get a better grasp on how to develop these.

If people want I can run through the thought processes on developing something like this, or indeed I can run an experimental game with the pre-planning out in the open on a thread here on boards if it’s something people would be interested in.

Necro

So, you’ve done all of the above, brought it together and have your players – now you just have to run it. There are a number of vitally important aspects of running a game, but actually – most are before it begins.

If you have everything in place, and a mod team that are using the three C’s as mentioned above – then during the game the only thing you should have to worry about is the timing. There are other factors – but I’ll get to them later.

Creating the OP – This is, imo – one of the most important stages in the whole development of a game. The Opening Post of your game will outline the rules, the roles (if you want) and is essentially a player’s bible for the game about to start.

You can begin to develop your OP as early as stage 3 of your planning phase, and the OP requires constant updating and monitoring so that it evolves as your game does.
Games before have been brought down over very very simple things in the OP. Timing, naming of characters – you name it, players have found ways to do it. The best advice I can give to you on creating an OP is to make it as black and white as you possibly can, with no ambivalence.
For those who like secrets – that is not to say you can’t hold things back from players.
But everything in your Opening Post should be crystal clear. Particularly the win conditions.
Again, refer back to my previous note when dealing with the OP – TROUBLESHOOT everything.



Randomisation Process: Here is how we determine what the players roles will be for the game. I take my list of players, paste them onto the random.org list randomiser, and also do the same for my roles.

This ensures everyone has a fair opportunity of getting a good, bad or indifferent role. For anon games you’d also take the anon accounts and jumble them up using the same method.

Here’s an example:
My list of players is:
sKeith
Pter
Quickbeam
Sullivlo
Triceratops Ballet
Kolido
Drumpot

I take my list of names and jumble them up like so:

1. Quickbeam
   
2. Sullivlo
3. Kolido
4. Triceratops Ballet
5. Pter
6. Drumpot
7. sKeith

Then I take my list of roles which are:
Wolf
Seer
NRV
NRV
NRV
NRV
NRV

And now I jumble these like so:

1. NRV
2. NRV
3. NRV
4. NRV
5. NRV
6. Wolf
7. Seer

Before matching the corresponding numbers together.
So you can see that Drumpot is now my wolf, and sKeith is now my seer.


On randomisation: Personal advice is to wait as long as possible to do the randing process – two days or even less prior to the launch date of your game. The reason for this primarily is dropouts. Another, particularly in the case of where there is a pre-game questions thread is that you might accidentally give not enough or too much information based on your handlings of one player or another.



Lynch Form: Another part of your preparation, but actually not the most difficult. Thanks to Google, we can create multiple forms in moments if necessary. On the form you’ll need a place for the player to enter their name/anon account, and an identifying code so that you know it is them – this will be sent in the role PM, which we will discuss in the next point. The identifying word can be anything – dog, madra, banana, fruit, etc. Just make sure you have a list of the words corresponding to the players you send them to.


Lynch Form Creation: To create a lynch form, go to Google forms using a quick websearch. You can select any template, the end result will be the same. Edit as you see fit, but the main things you need are:


Player name Field

Unique Code Field (Do NOT use the word Password in this field or Google will delete your form, security issues. Use codeword, code, identifiying word – whatever else).


Player List: This field will be multiple choice, make sure all players on the sign up sheet are enlisted prior to game start.

If you are starting on a munch, it would be smarter to keep your lynch form closed until the munch happens, at which point you should remove (if any) the dead player prior to opening.

NOTE: To ensure game integrity, I find it best to include all player names alphabetically. Werewolf is a game of paranoia and suspicion, and if your lynch form list looks any ways different you could accidentally give a player the wrong idea. Of course, maybe you want to do that


Role PMs: Another massive part, and probably the most important of your preparation process. This is how you communicate what roles the players are to them directly. It can be time consuming, especially due to the Boards limitations of 5 PMs per 10 minutes, but in a way that is beneficial as you can check and double and triple check that the information you are providing the player with is correct.

A good idea is to preview every PM you send as well to make sure the information is not garbled, particularly if your PMs are preloaded on COP.

If you do choose to preload your PMs, ensure that whatever you refer to your NRVs as (humans, villagers, NRVs, etc) is noted in your OP. You can even post the NRV PM for clarity under the OP to avoid any gamebreaking type scenarios.

After this, you should now be good to launch the game! Players have their roles, the OP has been posted, your lynch form is set up. Now all you have to do… is run it. And that’s up next.

Necro

Now your game is live and the players are posting up a storm, accusing each other left right and centre over the way their ‘I’ looks as opposed to someone else’s.

You can sit back, relax, and let the game flow.

The major points you need to be available for are your static kill points – ie: your wolf/SK kills and your lynches.

There might be other variable kill points you need to keep an eye on in terms of a vig kill or answering peeks, or indeed other variables such as contests, prizes – whatever you have inserted into your game.


You don’t need to actively follow the game thread tbh. You can, and a lot of mods do like to keep up with it, but it is not essential.

The best way to run your game is to set up a separate thread/sheet in your mod room on COP/on your spreadsheet and record the actions ordered by the important parties.


I’m going to break it down to three different areas in how to run the game:


Running a munch effectively: This generally happens in the morning, and you will need to have eyes on the wolf rooms to ensure that the correct person is killed by the wolves/other evils.

Generally an order can be accepted by game mods up to 1 second prior to the announcement of the munch, so you need to refresh this at 10am to ensure that they haven’t changed. Those pesky wolves!

Same goes for other actions that happen at night so if you have a bodyguard you need to check they haven’t changed to a different target as well.

Don’t panic about the timing.

Players can be impatient, but bugger them. If you need 5 minutes to prepare your post, you can do it in advance, but the game won’t collapse if you’re 5 minutes late in posting a munch.

It works best from my own experience if you have one mod running as a spotter on the wolf rooms/other rooms and another ready to post the announcement.

Sometimes that isn’t possible though and you might have to run it solo – that’s where multiple tabs come in handy. Once the player(s) is announced as dead, you can flick to your lynch form, remove the name and open again for the next days voting.



Running a lynch effectively: Lynches are a little more complex. Or at least they were until quickbeam developed a handy spreadsheet that can automatically tabulate your results. For those who prefer to do it by hand though, you will need about an hour to be able to calculate the votes and update as the later ones come in.


Again, with voting up until the last second before the announcement, a lot can change in moments, particularly in a large game where 15 people could theoretically change their vote in the last few moments.

But fear not! The lynch can be intimidating, particularly in early days to new mods. That’s why we generally have 3 mods on the go, one to do the results, one to do the announcement, and one to do any backroom permissions.

Again the three C’s are vital here, and in particular your communication method. Discord or WhatsApp are instant, so in a scenario where myself, sKeith and quickbeam are running a game, I could immediately be told by my lynch calculator quickbeam that Stu Redman has been lynched.

I announce it on thread following confirmation, and sKeith does the backroom side of things. Again, you can also run this entire operation solo – but it just might take a bit of extra time.

And never mind the narky players in that situation, ensure you get it right. That’s the main thing.



Other Actions: So above you have the static points that don’t change within a game. The other actions – well they require a bit more attention.

If you have an any time kill for a vigilante or SK, one mod will need to be available to keep an eye on the associated rooms. You can switch in and take turns, but it’s important that these actions are acted on as soon as possible when they are posted.
Same with peeks, prizes and contests, they require extra attention from game mods.

If you read this and find yourself worrying about them though, don’t. Any of these can be made happen at a static time, you just have to plan it.

If it suits you to have the vigilante only kill at night, put it in the rules – it’s your game!




And that's essentially it. The rest you pick up as you go along. I hope this guide gives some help to anyone thinking of modding. There's a lot to go through, but in order to run a fun, successful game with the least amount of stress possible, the planning is necessary to do so.


And now I'm done, if any other experienced mods wish to post their thoughts in here, feel free to do so!!