Hi all of you,
During the drafting of the Treason Act I typed a document. Design Journal, intended to show publishers the reasoning behind the Act of Treason game mechanics. If the publisher wants to change the Treason Act, I need to be able to support my position. The document serves as a reminder to myself of the reasons behind some of my choices. What I can and cannot change and why.
In the interest of helping future designers, I am happy to share this document. This reads as a FAQ, trying to answer questions a designer or publisher might have for me – which I think is the best way to structure something like this. it’s a good way to sort through the creative process and map out the choices you’ve made.
As a designer, if you have a solid reason behind each question asked, then that’s a great start! If not, then you need to seriously consider a redesign, or at least be prepared for the design to not work when tested. If something works and you can’t explain it – that means you have to work harder to find out what the reason is! There’s a reason for everything! If something is broken, you need to find out why! If something works, there is great benefit in knowing why! Everything has a reason, so you should be able to create a document like this – but for your game, or any other game worth its salt. You have to be able to explain it Why.
There’s quite a lot of text from the design document so I’ve divided it into four parts that I’ll release as I see fit in the coming weeks. I’ve changed it a bit and added a few sections to keep it up to date. Unfortunately the first part is less interesting in terms of design than the others, but hopefully it will give you a clue as to my frame of mind when designing Act of Treason.
—
Treason Action Design Journal
by Tyson Bennett
Summary:
This document provides an overall look at the mechanics and design choices behind Act of Treason.
Design Goals:
I feel Act of Treason has achieved this design goal – Act of Treason should be easy to understand, yet challenging to master. This game should offer a slight increase in complexity when compared to existing games in the genre, but offer more depth in terms of strategies and tactics that can be taken to win.
What are Similar Games and how is Act of Treason different?
As mentioned, Act of Treason is inspired by Mafia, Werewolf, and The Resistance. When creating Act of Treason, my goal was to design a game that mitigated the “flaws” of these games while expanding on what makes these games fun – social interaction. I feel Act of Treason has achieved this goal, allowing players more meaningful tactics and choices when it comes to social interactions and deception.
To name a few improvements:
• Players have multiple ways to influence, through individual actions, respect, and, most importantly, social interactions. If a player is eliminated, it is most likely due to his actions, and not due to luck (although luck can play a small role). This is different from what Mafia says, where players have very little influence on the game and luck can play a big role. Players can vote in the Mafia to try to change the outcome, but for most players, that’s it. Act of Treason has taken steps to ensure that players have a high level of influence on the game, and that that influence never completely makes them Traitors, Loyal, or Inheritors. I have seen amazing tricks to deceive others. One example is pretending to be an Heir (albeit a loyal one) to provoke Traitors into attacking and exposing themselves. Or you can pretend to be the Heir (as a Traitor) to avoid being eliminated by his loyalists. Another example is dropping an extra card into a Tribute and then lying about it afterwards to allay suspicions that perhaps you were the one who caused the Tribute’s failure. There are many strategies that can be done in Act of Treason!
• The length of the game gives you time to investigate and allows you to build a case based on historical actions, and other historical evidence. Compare this to One Night Werewolf where players are given almost no time to investigate, but more importantly, there is almost no action or historical evidence to use. The most striking difference here lies in skill vs. skill. luck between these two games. Act of Treason allows you to utilize your skills more as it allows for increased game length to gain evidence and position yourself for the endgame.
• The length of the game in Act of Treason also has the advantage of building tension slowly, a good example of this is in the modern video game called Playerunknowns Battleground (PUBG). PUBG games last up to 30 minutes with the map size decreasing as players are eliminated. Due to the investment of time and effort and increased intensity, the end game can be very intense and rewarding. This is similar to what happened in the Act of Treason. As the game progresses, players become more emotional about the outcome – there is a lot of time and effort invested and there is still a lot of potential for change. Like pubg, investment, time and tension often lead to very interesting end results. Due to the nature of Act of Treason, play times may vary slightly. A short game can be caused by a Traitor or Heir making a mistake. Longer games are almost always caused by players taking part in longer and more interesting conversations – trying their best to persuade, trick or deceive. Longer isn’t usually a bad thing in Acts of Betrayal, and instead long games keep players fully engaged and invested in the outcome which is a good thing. In other words some of the best Act of Treason games can be the longest.
• Mechanisms are implemented to help ensure that players are eliminated at approximately the same time in the Act of Treason, near the end of the game. This is to ensure that players do not have to sit for long periods of time. Compare that to Mafia, where a player is eliminated early based on little or no evidence, or The Resistance where despite there being no ‘elimination’ players can be taken out for many rounds at once, thus eliminating them artificially.
What do I think is the weak point of the Treason Act?
• The upper player limit is rather high with a minimum of 5 players required. While this doesn’t have a detrimental impact on the game and is suitable for large groups, it does mean it may be difficult to organize a game together for some people. This seems to be the nature of the Treachery Act, and I can’t find a suitable solution to get the player count below 5.
• Act of Treason is a little more complex compared to some of its predecessors such as Mafia or Werewolf. Again, unfortunately this is the nature of the beast. I plan to make Act of Treason a more socially tactical game – and to make that happen, the complexity will likely increase. I’m proud to say that I’ve taken great steps to reduce complexity so it doesn’t become more complicated than it needs to be. I imagine most boardgamers are up to the challenge of Act of Treason (there are certainly more complex boardgames on the market). While more casual or younger players may have difficulty in their first few games – they can definitely learn with due diligence!
Why are there Heirs?
Heir is arguably one of the most important mechanics in the game. The act of Treason is not the same if there is no Heir. I played around with variants that didn’t use the ‘Inheritor’ mechanic and they failed, quite spectacularly. The main reason for having an Heir is so that the Loyals don’t want to kill anyone – One side needs to fear unnecessary killing while the other side needs to take advantage of it. In short, this is one of the dynamics of Traitor vs Loyals + Heir – Loyalists don’t want to kill in vain if they hit Heir and lose. Without an Heir, the game turns into a bloodbath.
Additionally, the Traitor and the Loyal both have reasons to pretend to be Heirs, and the Heirs have reasons to pretend to be Loyal. This means that all three types of characters have reasons to act similarly or act as other characters, and this makes it difficult to identify player loyalties from their actions alone. This allows for major acts of deception and intrigue that we see in Acts of Treachery during gameplay.
This all happened because there was an Heir. As you can see, the Heir is the core character of Act of Treason.
Why is there Player Elimination?
You could say that Resistance or Avalon there is no player elimination, but I think there is. If a player is removed from the rest of the game (by being thrown out of check) because they are suspected of being a Traitor, then it is almost like they are out. They are not actually removed, but they may as well be removed – the effect is the same.
Act of Treason attempts to fix this by delaying elimination until the end of the game, where you don’t have to wait as long before the game is over and you can start another game. While elimination can happen early, this is rare, and comes at a cost – other players have to risk their lives and Tributes become harder to pass thereby accelerating the loss of Kingdom Power. The chances of being knocked out early and having to be out for a long time are very small.
I often tell my playtesters that killing the player will trigger the end of the game. It all went downhill after that. This is how it is designed, and this is how the game is played very often.
Tune in next time for the following:
Why 5 to 10 players?
How is this game usually played?
Why is there a Manager?
Is the Management Role too strong?
What stops the Steward Role from ‘bouncing’ between two players?
Gaming Hub
Game online adalah jenis permainan video yang dimainkan melalui jaringan internet. Game ini memungkinkan pemain untuk berinteraksi dengan pemain lain secara real-time, baik itu dalam bentuk kerja sama, kompetisi, atau eksplorasi dunia virtual bersama-sama.
