Wow this weather is fucked! Hunker down, chew an orange, take a salt tablet, douse yourself in vitamin D and tiger balm, and enjoy this week’s installment of Mechanic Monday.
Funny thing about social deduction games. Does anyone else get this? Whenever I play Resistance: Avalon, or any other members of the lycanthrope organized crime family, I find myself getting stuck in the role of pretend good guy, and I can’t shake it even after the game’s over. Like I spend the rest of the evening, long after a winner is declared, trying to stop myself from speaking in pointless friendly lies. They break my brain! I don’t know why it is, or if it’s related to the way that, despite having a decades-long background in improvisation, writing, and performance, I sometimes struggle with role-playing games. I think it comes down to the fact that for my brain, games are a particular type of challenge; I tend to go all in for moon-shots and big bets, I’m not the best at playing my opponent or bluffing in anyway, I try to minimize chance and maximize efficiency but oftentimes I lose track of the big picture or get hobbled by my experience-based biases. Couple all that to the part of the brain that handles acting and naturalism, and you just get all sorts of short circuits and misfires. The contents of my skull are a disparate mess, y’all.
Despite being piss-poor at such endeavours, my mind does still like to mull over these designs from a behaviour-modeling standpoint. Couple that with my love of subverting expectations and design constraints as a source of inspiration, and we have today’s mechanic: a hidden role social deduction game for 2.
Possible Defector
In Poisoner’s Dilemma, both players are on a mission to poison the members of the noble family of House Upas. But there’s a rumour - only a rumour , mind you - that one member of the Conspiracy is secretly in the employ of House Upas, and will protect them and poison their enemies instead. At the start of the game, shuffle the four Allegiance cards - 3 Conspirators, 1 Loyalist - and give each player 1 face-down. If both players are Conspirators, then they must work together to poison all members of House Upas by the game’s end. If one of the two players has the Loyalist card, they win if the plot to poison all the members of House Upas fails.
So some context here: I picture the base of this being a co-op game where skilled players win 60-75% of the time. Two players who both know themselves to be Conspirators and worked perfectly together should struggle to win. This gives the Loyalist cover - so what’s to prevent the Loyalist from playing too obviously? Perhaps players can, at certain points, declare that they believe the other player to be a Loyalist, thereby ensuring (if they guess correctly) that no one wins. I also thought about the numbers - I originally thought about it being 2 Conspirator cards and 1 Loyalist, but realized that that meant a ⅔ chance of there being a competitive game. I want ½ or better. Of course, this presumes there’s only 1 Loyalist - perhaps there are two Loyalist cards, and a slim-chance of double-defector, with a different win condition (or only 1 Loyalist gets paid and must out the other first?) Lots of possibilities here. What I most want to create is the sense that the default state is a reasonably challenging co-op, complicated by the chance that it is in fact competitive. And I feel that the theme is reasonably well-suited to the social experiment. We’ll see if this takes sufficient root in my mind to develop.
Well that’s all the time I have this week; come back next Monday for More Mechanics! Stay warm! Drip your faucets! Shovel before you salt! Keep your pets close, and check in on your elderly neighbours! Call 311 if you see a homeless person in danger, or if your landlord doesn’t have your heat working!
Funny thing about social deduction games. Does anyone else get this? Whenever I play Resistance: Avalon, or any other members of the lycanthrope organized crime family, I find myself getting stuck in the role of pretend good guy, and I can’t shake it even after the game’s over. Like I spend the rest of the evening, long after a winner is declared, trying to stop myself from speaking in pointless friendly lies. They break my brain! I don’t know why it is, or if it’s related to the way that, despite having a decades-long background in improvisation, writing, and performance, I sometimes struggle with role-playing games. I think it comes down to the fact that for my brain, games are a particular type of challenge; I tend to go all in for moon-shots and big bets, I’m not the best at playing my opponent or bluffing in anyway, I try to minimize chance and maximize efficiency but oftentimes I lose track of the big picture or get hobbled by my experience-based biases. Couple all that to the part of the brain that handles acting and naturalism, and you just get all sorts of short circuits and misfires. The contents of my skull are a disparate mess, y’all.
Despite being piss-poor at such endeavours, my mind does still like to mull over these designs from a behaviour-modeling standpoint. Couple that with my love of subverting expectations and design constraints as a source of inspiration, and we have today’s mechanic: a hidden role social deduction game for 2.
Possible Defector
In Poisoner’s Dilemma, both players are on a mission to poison the members of the noble family of House Upas. But there’s a rumour - only a rumour , mind you - that one member of the Conspiracy is secretly in the employ of House Upas, and will protect them and poison their enemies instead. At the start of the game, shuffle the four Allegiance cards - 3 Conspirators, 1 Loyalist - and give each player 1 face-down. If both players are Conspirators, then they must work together to poison all members of House Upas by the game’s end. If one of the two players has the Loyalist card, they win if the plot to poison all the members of House Upas fails.
So some context here: I picture the base of this being a co-op game where skilled players win 60-75% of the time. Two players who both know themselves to be Conspirators and worked perfectly together should struggle to win. This gives the Loyalist cover - so what’s to prevent the Loyalist from playing too obviously? Perhaps players can, at certain points, declare that they believe the other player to be a Loyalist, thereby ensuring (if they guess correctly) that no one wins. I also thought about the numbers - I originally thought about it being 2 Conspirator cards and 1 Loyalist, but realized that that meant a ⅔ chance of there being a competitive game. I want ½ or better. Of course, this presumes there’s only 1 Loyalist - perhaps there are two Loyalist cards, and a slim-chance of double-defector, with a different win condition (or only 1 Loyalist gets paid and must out the other first?) Lots of possibilities here. What I most want to create is the sense that the default state is a reasonably challenging co-op, complicated by the chance that it is in fact competitive. And I feel that the theme is reasonably well-suited to the social experiment. We’ll see if this takes sufficient root in my mind to develop.
Well that’s all the time I have this week; come back next Monday for More Mechanics! Stay warm! Drip your faucets! Shovel before you salt! Keep your pets close, and check in on your elderly neighbours! Call 311 if you see a homeless person in danger, or if your landlord doesn’t have your heat working!
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