Board Thread:Role Ideas (Neutral)/@comment-30757827-20190322205511/@comment-28112409-20190324000241

Cultists having a leader makes them worse than Vampires. No one would enjoy Mafia or Coven if their entire gang died along with their Godfather/Coven Leader. The concept of your faction leader dying and the rest of the faction is dying is on the opposite of the "fun" spectrum because it polarizes the results of the faction.

With cultists, you can only either win in an incredibly OP fashion by recruiting protectives or the jailor and become an invincible demigod while the deaths of the other cultists don't matter because you can recruit one every single day, or a jailor executes you/the town lynches you/the sheriff finds you and everything goes to waste. The occasions where there is "strategy" in the role are just a speck of dust in the middle somewhere. This binary range of results is the exact same issue Retribrokenist has.

You're not factoring how hard this role fucks town over. It recruits daily and lets cultists keep their abilities, meaning they can still claim themselves as town and the only way you can actually bust them out is via sheriff, investigator or psychic which is such a horrible mechanic because you're relying on luck to get the right roles from the rolelist to counter these cultists specifically. If the sheriff/invest/psychic reveals and finds a cultist, that's also the end of town because the leader goes straight for them and now the town has no counters to the faction whatsoever.

In comparison, any role can work against mafia and vampires strip the abilities of a converted townie away so that they're not so impossible to find or fend off. Cultists do not have anything balanced about them, making them extremely unfun to play against as a townie because you stand absolutely no chance. People would just sit there and hope the cultists recruit them because town is so fucked.

More strategy is irrelevant when your faction's power goes through the roof even when you press random buttons. It's wildly imbalanced to be able to add town abilities into the cult and let them use it, and implementing the role would only highlight how much better vampire + vampire hunter was in terms of filling the conversion concept.