Between hidden roles and sandboxes

I've played two games this week that involved secret information.

First was my regular Mythic Bastionland game. The company of knights had planned to visit a town where one of them grew up. Although he's from there, this was our first session in that town. Before the session, I chatted with that player about his character's history. We decided, among other things, that when he left the town twenty years earlier to become a squire, he abandoned his fiancée. The fiancée character appeared in this week's session as a member of the town's council. We roleplayed some tension between them, but he chose not to share the background information with the other players until near the end of the session. It's was a fun note to add, but it didn't change the direction of the session.

Second was Cluedo Conspiracy. It's a hidden role board game which involves some players trying to stop a murder plot while others secretly try to execute the plot. We played with five players, so there were three good guys and two conspirators. In our first attempt at playing (we were all learning the game, and I was reading and teaching the rules) one player misspoke early on and revealed their role. We decided to reset the game and played through on the second attempt. (I quite like the game, incidentally. It's like a simplified version of Battlestar Galactica, much quicker to play.)

I think it's interesting to compare these experiences because they both involved hidden information, but they are at two ends of a scale:

• In the RPG, some information was hidden which informs roleplaying. When the information was revealed it didn't have much impact, except as a dramatic beat.
• In the board game, the hidden information is at the core of the gameplay. Much of the strategy of the game is based on concealing or trying to reveal that information. When it's revealed, it shifts the focus of play and impacts what choices players have afterwards. If the secret is revealed too early, because of a simple mistake, it diffuses a lot of the fun of the experience.

I'm curious to consider what might lie between these two ends of the scale, so I've been trying to deconstruct them a little.

In the Cluedo Conspiracy game, there is a binary division: Some players are tasked with killing Mr Coral and some with protecting him. It's adversarial and all-or-nothing. After the secret is revealed you have no common ground with the other team.

In the Mythic Bastionland case, you're playing in a sandbox so there aren't strict goals. Revealing that a knight once ghosted his partner could conceivably lead to some new objective, or influence how the group respond to a problem, but it is less likely to redirect the flow completely. Rather than the binary, team A or team B, it's team "here is some new information, do whatever you want".

One way to extend this is to have more than one strict objective. In the Cluedo case, you could have kill/protect Mr Coral and also steal/protect Mr Coral's treasure. You go from two opposing teams to (potentially) players with four different objectives:

• Kill the guy, steal his money.
• Kill the guy but because of another motive. Leave the money for his heir.
• Protect the guy, steal the money (I'm a thief not a murderer).
• Protect the guy, protect the treasure (we're trying to have a society here!).

In this extension, a secret could be revealed about a player without necessarily breaking the game into a completely adversarial contest. When you have some goal in common with another player, there is room to negotiate and coordinate.

Another extension, into the space between the two ends of the scale, is to make the secret information itself more complex. 

• I want to kill Mr Coral because his true identity is a war criminal.
• I want to protect Mr Coral so that he can be put on trial for his crimes.

This idea (more complex information) seems to tend towards play where players choose their own goals. But I'm trying to find the middle ground, not going as far as a sandbox, so maybe it looks a little more like this:

Your character has beliefs / alignment / bonds. Initially, you work with the information you have, and work towards the goal that fits those. As hidden information is revealed, you filter that through the beliefs / alignment / bonds and it updates your objectives. (This is very like roleplaying in a sandbox, but I'm imagining it as a little more mechanical / board gamey - character traits overriding player choice.) That might mean you switch from team "protect the guy" to team "kill the guy", when you get more information.

I had some more thoughts about why bothering with secrets at all, but that's kind of a tangent. Wrapping it up here!

Earth Resists: Skirmish map

 

A test map for Earth Resists (ignore the text on the bottom left)

(I believe this may be mappy enough to count for Prismatic Wasteland's map bandwagon.)

I first mentioned my X-COM inspired game here. This post collects some ideas about how I intend to handle the skirmish missions in the game. As I said before I want to lean into feelings of tension and drama rather than simulation.

The map above shows 6 locations in a North American city. This is the GM-facing version. The player-facing one would show the layout but the labels and numbers would not be present at the start (details are added to adjacent locations when they move around).

At each location there are two numbers – the top is Threat and the bottom is Cover. The Subway Station, for example, has Threat 0 and Cover 5. These numbers are known to the players (added to the player-facing map) for the location they are at, and for adjacent locations. It's information that helps them make meaningful decisions.

Cover

If a PC is at the Subway Station and wants to take cover, they roll a d6. If the result is less than or equal to the Cover number for the Subway Station (5) then they are in cover. Players can glance at the map and have a good sense of what the opportunities for cover are. But it's also not guaranteed, so there is an element of risk to balance. I'm hoping to create meaningful tactical decisions without needing a grid or defining a bunch of terrain detail in advance. There may be some ways to increase your odds of getting into cover (dedicate more time to it, have a relevant skill).

Threat

The world sheet mentioned in my first post also uses a number for Threat. I'd be tempted to use a different name for this idea in the skirmish map, but I kind of like the mirroring of things at the big scale and little scale.

If the PCs are at the Subway Station they can see the Threat is 0. This essentially means the Subway Station is safe. They won't be attacked there. Why include a safe location in a skirmish map? There are plenty of other things that could happen there – they may find civilians who need to be escorted out of the area, or interviewed for intelligence, or they may find some discarded alien technology that could be collected for research.

At the Subway Tunnel the Threat is 2. My current thinking is that after the PCs act, the GM can then roll 2d6 (one d6 for each point of Threat) and the result determines how the GM can act. The higher they roll the harder the move. Maybe a 1 is a sound of an ET moving nearby. Maybe a 6 would see the PCs coming under fire. This is kind of an initiative system, but I think if an ET shows up and is in an ongoing firefight, they won't have to rely on a Threat roll to take a turn – it's more about the unseen threats building.

Again, I like the idea that the players can see this Threat number and know what it means. They can plan an approach that tries to manage the risk.

This is a deadly game. Walking into a dangerous place, failing to get into cover, and getting shot, will likely cause a PC to be out of action. I need to do testing to see how likely that is, and how frustrating it is. But it's also designed so that new PCs can be generated very easily, so you could quickly dispatch another character from the entry point into the map (if you have enough personnel to allow for that).

Scene Transitions

I'm not sure how this will play, but I want skirmish missions to be played in parallel with other types of missions which I'm tentatively calling Shadow War missions. The skirmishes are the open warfare part of the game, and the Shadow War stuff is more focused on investigation and espionage. In a game session the GM will lay out the details of the two scenarios, players will select or roll up their characters (players will routinely be using more than one character), and then they deploy.

In the skirmish, when the PCs move from one location to another, we put the skirmish on hold and switch our attention to the Shadow War scenario. At an appropriate moment in the Shadow War scenario, the spotlight will move back the skirmish.

Example:

Seb and June are soldiers searching for ETs in the Subway Station. They see blast marks from energy weapons on the walls, and in the tunnel ahead they can see sparks and blinking lighting from a damaged train. The players look at the Subway Tunnel on the map, and see that the Threat is increasing in that direction. They decide to proceed. The GM then lays out the scene at a power plant in Australia where several engineers have gone missing. Two investigators, Dahlia and Rickard are talking to the plant director who seems likes he's hiding something.

I can imagine some players wouldn't want to shift attention away from a scene when things are getting interesting, but my hope is that multiple things will be getting interesting alongside each other. Might be tricky to work out, but I think it could be quite neat.

Earth Resists

I've been thinking for awhile about how to make an X-COM like experience in a TTRPG. I played a lot of the 1994 original back in the day, and the emergent aspects of play left a huge impression on me. I might dig into the detail of that in another post.

(I know there is already a board game based on X-COM, though I've never played it, and I would imagine there is some kind of similar RPG out there already, but I think it'll be fun to make my own stab at it.)

Here are the principles I've been trying to bring to this:

1. I don't want this to be a bunch of spreadsheets. Video games are great at simulating complicated stuff, but I want something very light. Vibes over formulas.
2. A feeling of being up against the odds, maybe even that you only have a slim chance of victory.
3. Investment in characters - surviving a dangerous mission is a big deal.
4. Extraterrestrials not being used as a stand-in for otherness among humans. I don't want to tell stories about people being scared of other people coming to their homeland. The working title, Earth Resists, is a nod to this - focusing on a united effort from humanity.
5. Expanding on the inspiration. X-COM is about resource management and tactical skirmishes. I want to explore some other possible aspects of resisting an invasion - uncovering plots through investigation, as one example. Maybe also exploring ideas about the organisation breaking apart but still functioning in some form.

The world sheet

Front and centre is a page showing a map of the earth divided into six regions. (I'm leaning into d6s for everything, unless something steers me towards introducing other dice.) A d6 can be placed on a region to indicate the threat (0 - 6). When you need to generate an event in a region roll d6 + threat (for a value from 1 to 12).

Reconnaissance (ETs studying Earth and humanity)
1. UFO sightings
2. Evidence of incursions at key locations
3. Reports of individual abductions

Panic (Direct contact, civilians under threat)
4. UFO landings
5. ETs sabotaging facilities
6. Mass abductions

Foothold (ETs establishing bases of operations on Earth)
7. Destruction of satellite / radar monitoring of an area
8. Construction of ET facilities
9. Xenoforming of environment

Total war
10. Military capability of a country destroyed
11. Critical infrastructure lost
12. Complete occupation of a region

One pressure on the players will be trying not to let the threat level increase in any region. But there may be times when they have to choose between protecting a power station in one location or rescuing civilians in another location. When they don't respond to an event, the threat is likely to increase there.

Morale

The second function of a region's threat is that it contributes to the morale of characters from that region. The best morale score is 6. When creating a character from a region with threat 3, roll 3d6. For every 1 rolled, reduce their morale by 1.

During play, events can trigger a morale check for a character. This is typical stress / insight type stuff, from games like Cthulhu Dark.

Character creation

Speaking of characters, I want them to be mechanically simple, but to have the potential for players to grow attached to them. I'm borrowing from Lasers and Feelings to have a single number for character stats. I think a lot of L & F hacks go for something cute with the labels for the number, but currently I'm going with Force / Precision. I think that can be meaningful when dealing with skirmishes and also stuff like a diplomat trying to convince a government not to withdraw funding.

So characters will have a morale score, and a single stat to cover all rolls. They'll also have a couple of skills (just words for things they are trained in).

There's no health points. I think injuries will be represented as a number of weeks to heal. (Ticking down healing clocks during an upkeep phase is sliding into spreadsheet territory, so maybe I'll try to simplify that - maybe no upkeep, but when you want to check if they are ready to come back into action you can do a roll for it.)

Missions

This is the bulk of the thing. One thing I'm currently considering is running two types of missions at the same time. Something like a skirmish, but cutting back and forth to a separate mission of espionage or research. Rather than having phases of play with very different focuses, mush it all together with some guidance for managing spotlight.

I'm also trying to resist my normal bias towards long-running games. This game could be well suited to a short campaign, where tension ramps up quickly, and you have to make a big swing at the end or lose the conflict. If it's shorter then the missions can be a little more directed / curated, rather than trying to have lots of generators for coming up with countless missions.

More on all this next time.