YMMV / Werewolf (1997)

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: "Follow the Cop". In games known to contain both a Cop (targets a player at night and learns whether they're scum) and a Doctor (targets a player during the night and prevents them from dying), the most obvious town strategy is for the Cop to immediately roleclaim so the Doctor can protect them every night while they search for the scum, and the townies to no-eliminate every day until the Cop tells them who to kill. The most obvious response to this is for a member of the scumteam to fakeclaim Cop, giving them a 50/50 chance of killing the real Cop depending on whether the Doctor guesses wrong the first night but definitely dooming their fake Cop to be outed and eliminated at some point in the game. Because of the extreme prevalence of this strategy, most mods no longer run games containing both a Cop and Doctor without some measure to Nerf it; from not revealing roles in advance to giving the Cop a modifier that ruins investigating if the Doctor protects them.
• Fan Nickname:
  • In addition to each "flavor" of the game having their own rolenames, the uninformed majority is generally called "Town" and the informed minority "Scum".
  • Role variants for the protective and investigative roles are often referred to by "Sanity"—for example, a "Naive Cop/Seer" is an investigator whose always told anyone they investigate is Innocent.
• Funny Moments: Certain remarks of the One Night: Ultimate Werewolf app's announcer.
  I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand...
• Game-Breaker:
  • The "cult" role — an anti-Town faction which pressgangs townies into joining them during the night. Mods frequently attempt to run a cult game because the idea is just so interesting... the problem is, if the cult isn't exterminated quickly, they end up gaining an insurmountable lead and the town is stuck playing whack-a-mole at best. The even more broken "cultafia" variant (where they both recruit and kill; usually switching from one to the other after the death of their leader) is at least so obviously broken that it's rarely attempted.
  • Certain setups contain a "breaking strategy", in which due to the mechanics of the available roles, there is a course of action which obviously provides a far higher winrate than any other. The classic example is "Follow the Cop", contained in games with a known Cop and Doctor and no method of interfering with either — the Cop immediately roleclaims, the Doctor protects them every night while they investigate, and the vanilla townies sit on their hands and wait for results. As you may have gathered, breaking strategies tend to be boring, and setups known to have one tend to be discontinued.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The MafiaScum.net wiki (which deals with Werewolf and its variants) considers several roles, modifiers, and mechanics "bastard" or potentially bastard, as they tend to be more annoying than fun. Some bastard roles are still usable in non-serious games for the chaos factor, but others are frowned upon even then:
  • The Death Miller is pro-Town, but its alignment is shown as "Mafia" upon death. This is seen as an arguably overpowered form of misinformation and an unwelcome source of distrust in the moderator.
  • The Doomed Townie passively dies on Night 1 no matter what, which is very unfun and makes the player's participation borderline pointless unless they have a nice power to balance it out.
  • False roles amount to "your role PM is a lie", which is very annoying and might get you accused of lying about your role in a game where the Town eliminating people for lying is common.
  • The Hated modifier decreases the number of votes needed to eliminate a player, which is generally not fun to play as. Additionally, if the Hated player is a Townie, it hastens the situation where the Town has to make a correct elimination to avoid losing.
  • The Jester wins if eliminated, which is disliked because it's too easy to accomplish — it's telling that you can win on Day 1 by being so inept or annoying that the Town votes you out just to get rid of you. It's also disliked because it punishes the Town for eliminating someone who isn't of their alignment.
  • The Percentage modifier makes the player's role only work a certain percentage of the time. This is hated for adding a major, uncontrollable element of luck that might end up negating the player's skill.
  • The Usurper wins if it outlives its allied Mafia Godfather, which is a problem because it undermines the team aspect of the Mafia — the Usurper has to work towards the Mafia's win condition while also getting its Godfather eliminated at some point.
  • Alignment-changing roles share the issue of damaging the game integrity because of how they affect players' strategies to win. Two examples are Judas and Saulus: Judas is originally pro-Town, but pulls a Face–Heel Turn the first time it would die. This often leads to ugly situations. Saulus is the opposite: originally scum, but pulls a Heel–Face Turn the first time it would die. The problem is that if this happens, Saulus can simply tell everyone who their former scum allies were unless said allies are either hidden from Saulus or forcibly replaced after Saulus's conversion.
  • The Cult is a notorious mechanic for multiple reasons:
    • It relies on alignment changing, with all the game integrity issues that leads to: if a Townie gets recruited, it renders their previous pro-Town actions useless, and if the Cult gets out of control, players will try to get recruited to win with the cult rather than fight it.
    • It has balance and swing issues. The Cult Leader can often recruit new Cultists as fast as the Town can eliminate them, which means that the Cult can win even if Cultists are eliminated constantly. Additionally, the Cult can get an advantage by recruiting the Town's power roles.^note Cultists typically lose their other abilities upon conversion, but it still deprives the Town of its power roles. On the other hand, if the Cult Leader dies early, the cult becomes a non-issue because the small remainder of the Cult can't recruit more players and has to awkwardly survive to the end with no special abilities. Attempts to avoid this problem include killing all the Cultists if the leader dies (which can be frustrating for players who die early), allowing Cultists to recruit more players if the leader dies (which makes the Cult almost impossible to wipe out), or giving the Cultists a factional kill (which is also near-impossible to balance).
    • It interacts awkwardly with the Mafia, as a recruited Mafioso can simply tell the other Cultists who the other scum are. The most common method of avoiding this is to kill the Cult Leader if it tries to recruit a Mafioso, but this is frequently seen as annoying if it happens early. Making the Cult the only anti-Town faction isn't great either, as it makes the early game boring: hunting for scum is difficult to impossible because there are so few of them, and trying to identify pro-Town players is pointless because anyone can suddenly become scum.
  • The Mentor is a weaker Cult (it can only have one Mentee at a time, but they do have a factional kill), and is disliked for similar reasons: it's an alignment-changing role, and it's swingy because it depends on whether the Mentor survives (the Mentee dies if the Mentor dies).

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