lmp, you said this-
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Once the three primary gifted roles are filled, the remaining innocents become shirriffs, I suppose, so that they can play out the PMing and known innocent capabilities that this kind of game seems to call for, with a rather powerful evil enemy
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The enemy may be powerful- but not nearly powerful enough to face a village of shirriffs. That would make for a lopsided good guy win.
Let's look at how the game would be set up after all three gifteds had been assigned (after the third night).
The village population (lets say it started at 20) would be down to 16- two wizards, three wolves, three gifteds, and eight shirriffs. The eight shirriffs would step forwards and say "I know that these seven people and myself aren't wolves". And then, the good wizard steps forward and says "I am the good wizard, and these three people are the ones I chose as gifteds", and suddenly the entire village has the candidates for evil wizard narrowed down to four people, and they know that the other three are wolves.
And so, the village will lynch them and then the game is over. I mean- there would be no way for the bad guys to win. Every time a new wolf is made, the whole village will know about it the next day because they are all shirriffs. An evil wizard and three wolves versus a seer who knows who to dream of, a ranger who knows who to protect, a hunter who knows who to target, and a good wizard who knows who to pick would be bad enough, but then when you add an entire village who knows who to lynch each day- that's too much.
For my other queries, I am going to assume that you won't be doing that shirriff thing.
1) What if the evil wizard picks the good wizard at night? You have to have a rule for it, because if the mod pms the evil wizard back and says "You'll have to choose someone else" the evil wizard will of course know who the good wizard is.
2) If the wolves don't know who the other wolves are, they might consider killing one of their own. But obviously, if the mod is passing messages back and forth, the wolf who the others are considering killing would be sending strong messages opposing that kill choice. But really, how could you strongly oppose your death without the other wolves realizing that you are probably defending yourself, and thus letting all the wolves know who another wolf is? The idea of letting the evil wizard decide which nominee to kill would solve that, unless, of course, all of the nominees happen to be wolves, in which case, what happens? Does a wolf die?
3) If you don't let the evil wizard decide who dies and instead let the wolves pass messages, the wolves might choose to kill the evil wizard. Is that a scenario that you want to see in your game, or would you have a rule against that? But how could you make a rule against that? I mean, if the wolves pick someone and then the mod says "sorry, you'll have to pick someone else" then the wolves will know who the wizard is, and when one of them is turned back by the good wizard they will tell the village who the evil wizard is.
4) Once the evil wizard degifts the seer/ranger/hunter, can the good wizard simply pick a new one, or is that role over? If a new one can be picked, then I guess there would be a seer at all times, which doesn't seem fair. I mean, eventually the seer would pick the evil wizard and out him.
5) Voting records would be useless for finding wolves because none of the wolves would know who to lynch and who not to lynch. There would be no teamwork employed in this game.
It seems to me that the game is mostly a one-versus-one duel with a bunch of pawns in the middle, and the outcome would be based primarily on which wizard had the most luck (or the least amount of bad luck) on who they pick and who gets lynched each day, because as I said there would be no way to employ teamwork to orchestrate lynchings.
Not that it wouldn't be a lot of fun.
Of course, I'm not thinking terribly hard about this. You should just try it to see what happens. Maybe there are a lot of factors that we are overlooking that will make the game the biggest hit since WW- or perhaps some unforeseen loopholes and gaps will cause it to be a disaster that will live forever in infamy, which would be fun in its own way I suppose.