[Gaming] A question of structure.

[davywavy]

I've been thrashing out in my head a tabletop game with a structure based loosely on The Thing; a closed environment with a group trapped with an antagonist. The more I play around with it as a structure, though, the more I wonder how it can be made to work as an enjoyable - and runnable - game, and I'm after input and thoughts from you lot. I shan't go into specifics, but the setup is:

1) The characters are in a closed environment which they cannot leave. The antagonist enters this environment from outside.
2) The are not the only people in the group, but the group isn't large (i.e. a relatively plentiful supply of NPCs/cannon fodder/replacement PCs).
3) The antagonist has an objective (effectively it must seize control of the command centre for long enough to achieve it's objectives. It can do this through force or deceit).
4) The antagonist may or may not be able to possess bodies/disguise itself as people etc, depending on how well this could be made to work.

Now I've been wondering what the best way of putting the game together would be. Do I make it an exercise in paranoia like The Thing, where the monster can be anyone (even a PC), with lots of note passing and conspiring between players? Or do I make it a straight us vs. them game in which the monster slowly takes over more and more NPCs and the PCs have to fight them off/ root out infiltrators?

Certainly the second option is a lot easier to write (and run), but I'd like to at least think about how option 1 could be made to work (and by work I don't mean just play, but actually really work well).

Thoughts, please, chap(ette)s?

Comments

[davedevil.livejournal.com]

First of all pick yourself up a copy of Dread RPG, its an amazing horror setting for one offs like that using the Jenga tower for resolution.

I've done and played setup like this before and one of the key issues with it being the PC is that in short forms, especially one offs other players are reluctant to pick off other characters.

One way to ramp up the paranoia is to intermittently switch the PC to the beastly. So they are never sure when the player is the player or the monster. The NPC option is terrifying if they come from nowhere or you can make them genuinely scary in some way and especially if you set up good ties between NPCs and PCs to deliver emotional impact

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd been seriously considering the villain being able to 'body hop', thus allowing PCs to be the villain and then not the villain in order to keep the paranoia ramped up.

The reluctance of players to kill other PC's is one reason I wasn't sure about that solution, especially as some players can get over-attached to characters and PC-on-PC killing has ruined more games than it has improved in my experience.

[raggedhalo.livejournal.com]

If you advertise a game as being PC-on-PC-violence-positive then you can get around this somewhat.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

True enough - it is for CoC, so heavy bloodbaths are expected but I'm always leery about PC on PC conflict.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

I think body-hopping posession is the way to go, rather than a Thing style shape change.

Indicating to a Player that they are the monster is dramatically awkward, the chances of a player deciding to ham it up and give the game away is awfully high. How about this:

The creature does not posess a PC in the traditional manner, but rather by subtle influence - a Posessed PC believes they are acting perfectly rationally and acting out their own plans.

The GM performs posession checks privately. If a PC becomes posessed, any success roll that would result in information being given to them by the GM is delivered in a manner favourable to the creature.

e.g.

Gunther, the hard working engineer of Sealab fails his save roll and unknown to his player, becomes posessed by the Creature. When debating the best way to flush the creature out, Gunther's player rolls to see if he can find an engineering solution to the problem and suceeds.

Instead of giving a useful answer, the GM gives information that will help the creature (who is looking to get somewhere warm)- telling him that he should raise the temperature in Sealab - surely the creature cannot stand heat if it has been living down in the frozen reaches of the Marianas trench!

Later on, Gunther has been tasked with sealing all the doors in sealab - Alien 3 style. He makes all the necessary rolls and the GM explains that he has done his job correctly, although any observer will have clearly seen Gunther leave a set of doors unlocked.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

I should probably put a caveat on this to say that it would quickly descend into unworkable arguments if you don't have a good group of players/GM, however if your group is up for it, the idea of being unable to trust your own senses/thoughts is (imho) kind of cool.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

That's the big problem; it's a written adventure for...well, anyone. trying to write whilst anticipating it might be played by, say, some ex-cammies makes it *very* hard to do.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

That does rather move the goalposts doesn't it?

On that basis, I see two issues:

1. ensuring that other players do not know who is infected.

2. ensuring that infected players don't meta-game the thing to destruction.

The first one is probably a case of dealing cards to all players each time an infection takes place (or just when you want to screw with them) with one being the posessed/infected card. The same deal as the Battlestar boardgame but the cards are returned and redealt each time.

The second one is probably a case of dividing the creature's plan into individual tasks - instead of someone being told 'you're the creature, unleash the untold horrors in the basement' they get a card that says 'you're the creature, give the diary to NPC X then return this card'

It gives the Player a short-term goal which they can achieve without ruining the game, as well as giving them some insight into the plot. They get cookies for performing the task and then get their character back.

After that, the real difficulty is obscuring the creature's actions from the other players.

Of course, if we are talking LRP an infection 'token' that tells the person to excuse themselves and speak to the GM before recieving their individual task and being told to hand the token on as soon as possible after completing it.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I do very, very like this idea a great deal and may use it another time, but see below for the caveat.

[raggedhalo.livejournal.com]

When I read this, it made me think of the old Brainfest-style set-up of Marines vs. Zombies; each time a Marine died, they joined Team Zombie.

If you used some idea of objective-based play, and issued players with new objectives at preset intervals, then one could be possessed by the creature by virtue of having a creaturey objective. A variant could be that you simply break the creature's agenda into bite-sized pieces and give precisely that brief to someone possessed.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Broken-down objectives might work, actually. Good idea.

[raggedhalo.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. I've become a big fan of objective-driven play in recent years and I like to spread its freaky tentacles wherever possible ;-)

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Tsk. I've been writing objective-driven characters in my Freeforms for over a deacde :p

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Bang! has the thing with cards where everyone knows who the sheriff is, but nobody knows who the deputies, outlaws and renegade are (other than who they are.) You could do something where the GM and one/more of the PCs are one team, and everyone else works against them. Other than the GM laying out the scenario its up to the player taking the role of the anagonist to "win".

But then I'm a wargamer rather than a role-player.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

The difficulty with that structure is players (or the ones I know) have a tendency to twig the patsy almost instantly and kill them. I'd like the adventure to last at least until the end of the evening :)

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

It could work if you set it somewhere where everyone's trapped and they all have to work together to escape, but at the same time they can't let the monster out because it will Destroy The World or something. So they've got to try and keep (nearly) everyone alive and escape, but also work out who the baddie is and kill them with extreme prejudice.

Also if everyone has tasks to complete that are completely randomised, and at cross-purposes that might work too- if everyone has their own agenda they're all trying to double-cross each other at the same time as achieving their major goal, which should make it harder to work out who their real target is. You could have victory points and stuff if you really wanted to ramp up the paranoia- not only are the characters working against the Big Bad but they're working against each other too, but they can't work *too* hard against him or everyone dies.

Cutthroat Caverns does this quite well as a card game- you *have* to work together otherwise everyone dies. But at the same time you *have* to screw each other over, killstealing, nicking each others stuff, etc. Its a lot like Munchkin but without the silly jokes.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

Well thats easy enough - monster hops to its last host's killer. 50/50 as to whether this ends in a bloodbath or a mexican stand-off...

[fonnparr.livejournal.com]

One option might be to allow a body hopping antagonist (or even simply an unknown amongst the NPCs), but the objective for the players is to rescue as many of the genuine innocents as possible before they all get killed off by the baddie)
Sort of like the children's game of blink murder.
The players will always work out who the baddie is eventually, but are scored on their ability to keep everyone else alive.