Josh’s comment about the Mafia Game is pointed and accurate; the feeling of “are you one of them? Are YOU?” is exactly what I want to capture with The Things?. My problem with the Mafia game is that it goes to the trouble of according credibility to certain people (the police, sheriffs, what-have-you), then fails to support that credibility. Nobody can verify your role until the game’s over. (And of course, as Josh mentioned, resistance to execution, which is what the dice-slotting system below is for.)

It may be obvious that my real problem with the Mafia Game is that I never draw a Mafia card, and I always die first or second, because I come off as too eager to kill someone. Of course I want to kill someone! I want to kill the Mafia! I hate the Mafia Game! But I still play it when given the chance, because paranoia is fun.

The one-room-fewer-than-players idea is solid: four areas (say mess hall, lab, barracks and “outside”) provide enough variability in networking to allow for different board configurations, while guaranteeing that at least two players have to be hanging out together. But I want an armory too. Everybody wants an armory.

What can you do, mechanically, when left alone in the armory? In the lab? Outside? There should be some incentive for players to go to each room, and some (possibly different) incentive for Things to do so; that should be enough to make players worried enough to follow when anybody goes off by herself.

This post goes under “treatments” and “rehabilitations,” because here’s what I’m thinking for conflict resolution in The Things?: Yahtzee!.

Starting conditions: Every player has 5d6 and a hand of at least five cards. Any red card in your hand means you’re a Thing.

Whenever a player declares a conflict (on herself or other players), and assuming that conflict isn’t vetoed, everybody rolls their 5d6. The player with the highest total gets initiative, and describes the stakes of the conflict from his end–basically, “if I win, x happens.” (Ties are broken by a 1-die reroll, player’s choice of die, and three players together can veto anyone’s stakes.) Other players state their stakes clockwise around the table, then everybody gets to reroll as many dice as they like.

After that reroll, you start looking to put your dice in a box. Is everyone familiar with Yahtzee!? You try to make your dice conform to certain “hands,” many of which resemble poker hands, like a full house, four of a kind, etc. There are also catchalls like “total all your 3s” and “Chance,” which is a total of all your dice if they don’t fit into any other category. You can only use any given category once; if you can’t fit your dice into a category at all, you have to put a 0 somewhere.

The first group reroll is a freebie, but subsequent rerolls have a cost–cards from your hand, which go into a pile in the middle, face down. Each die you reroll costs one card, and you must describe a character action to accompany it. Any other player can grab that card from the middle and reroll up to two dice, describing her character’s reaction; in doing so, she takes the risk of becoming infected by the acting player. The cards grabbed for reactions don’t go directly into your hand, but stay face-down until the conflict is ended. All this happens simultaneously–throw or grab cards as you please, or declare that you’re done by putting your hand face-down on the table (on top of the reaction cards you grabbed, if any).

Whichever player gets the most points out of their category (”total all your 3s” is obvious, but a full house is worth 25, and a five of a kind is worth 50) wins the conflict; her stakes come true. Whichever player has the highest end total of dice–independent from the special scoring categories–wins the conflict in-character, and must describe how her character wins (”I block the door”) and how the winning player’s stakes come to pass (”but you go out the window”). These two players may or may not be the same person.

Finally, every player picks up his hand–now including reaction cards–and draws up to five, if necessary, from a deck of all-black cards. Any red card in your hand means you’re a Thing now. If you are a Thing, you can’t use your last red card for a reroll.

a) Does this make sense?

b) How do Things get more than one red card? Maybe there should be one deck of all black cards and one of half red, half black; when drawing back up to a hand of five, players could grab the necessary number of cards from both piles, look at both, decide which one to keep, and put the other one aside in an out-of-play discard pile.

c) Each (pregen) character will have one or two special abilities related to this process–like “Set Your Jaw: use ‘total of all 4s’ as many times as you like” or “Devil’s Luck: you may reroll up to three dice on any reaction.” Those are lame, though. What are some good special abilities?

This is an embrionary idea. It was derived from the idea of grabbing all tokens and cards and whatever from every board game you have around and playing them all together.

In this you’ll be taking two board games and playing them at the same time.

* Rules of each board game are mostly unchanged. You’ll only be adding rules for the interactions between the two games.
* In your turn, you play a turn for each of the mixed games in any order.
* If you win one of the games you win the mixed game. This may change if it proves problematic.

Magic X Settlers of Catan

* Hold your Magic and Settlers cards together. (You could even use proxies and/or cover them with card protectors so they’re all alike.)
* If played as Magic cards, Settlers cards have special rules as written below.
* You can trade Magic/Settlers cards as per the Settlers rules, for either cards in your Magic library or Settlers trade items (I.E. two wheat, one mountain and one Dark Ritual to the bank in exchange for one sheep)

And here are the rules Settlers cards are considered to have if played as Magic cards: They all cost 0 mana to play.

Timber: Green Sorcery. Generate two green mana.
Ore: Black Sorcery. Generate two black mana.
Sheep: White Sorcery. Generate two white mana.
Wheat: Blue Sorcery. Generate two blue mana.
Brick: Red Sorcery. Generate two red mana.
Knight: 2/2 Colorless creature, cost 0.
Road Building: Search your deck for a Land card and put it on play, shuffle your deck afterwards.
Invention: Draw three Magic cards.
Monopoly: Colorless sorcery. Name a card. All players must hand you all cards with that name they possess.

I want to write a very small roleplaying game, inspired by Kevan’s The Things and the equivalent BlogNomic dynasty, which I never thought got a fair shake. The game will not be called “The Things.” Instead, it will be called “The Things?”

I want to write an odd roleplaying game, in the following ways:

• There is no Dungeon Master (viz. the name of the blog).
• There are five pre-generated characters, one of whom each player must pick. You must have exactly five players to play. You can’t play the same character you played last time.
• The game is designed to be played, start to finish, in three hours.
• There are monsters in the game–probably. Whether the Things actually exist, in any given game, depends on the players’ choices and on their luck.

I’m going to start dumping info into the game page now, but I want your ideas, either in these comments or on the game’s talk page. Given the above criteria, how can we make this a fun game?