u/Fosphos

I'm running BotC games on local weekly board game meetups. So I have some returning players (who by the way don't have a lot of experience too and have only played TB), but also at least 2-3 new players every time. Lately, there has been a lot of interest in the game so I have nearly maximum number of players in every game (13-14). And while it is cool on one hand, on the other hand a huge problem is that with TB, a game with this number of players takes ages and not everyone is comfortable with committing 3 hours to a single game. Besides that, it is more stressful to run and more disappointing for the losing team. So I am considering whether it's a good idea to try running BMR instead for the next session, since due to the possible number of deaths in the night it will probably be twice as fast. As far as I understand, the other options that I have are: (from most to least preferred)

- Put Doomsayer in play
- Make someone a Gunslinger
- Try a custom script that's quicker than TB but not as complicated as BMR
- Reduce private chats / public discussions / nominations time limits
- Turn down extra players?

But playing BMR feels like the best solution to me. What do you think about this?

The description of the Gardener fabled says "The Storyteller assigns all players' characters". But often, manually assigning each character is an overkill, and could be used to meta based on that. I feel like in most cases it's much better to just manipulate the bag slightly, for example remove the evil tokens before giving the bag to the player who absolutely refuses to play as evil. This way, they still get a good character, but random, which is more fun, and everyone else still gets fully random characters. But I feel like I need to inform players that the bag is manipulated, but saying that "The Gardener is in play" feels wrong too, because again, the description says that I must assign all characters. Maybe there should be a lighter version of the gardener, or maybe the description should be changed to something like "The Storyteller might assign some players' characters, or limit the characters they might get randomly."?

Edit: sorry, I should have probably been clearer about my context: I am playing/storytelling in person, and usually majority of the people in the game are beginners or at least new to the group. Obviously I can see how having a known always good player is a massive unfair advantage to the good team, and if I were running a meetup with a more established group of regular players, one of which always asks to be good, I wouldn't accommodate them in that way. I only had this request twice, and it was from new players who asked me in private, so it wasn't hard to do given that I usually get players to draw token in the night anyways. After thinking about it more, in the future I'll probably just announce something like "I might have to slightly adjust the token draw process in this game to accommodate certain players", since "The Gardener is in play" sounds obscure and confusing to new players anyways, especially given that I am not going to use it exactly as it says.