That’s right: another article on hidden role mechanics! I really wanted to break apart what happens (or what needs to happen) when a player has to make a decisions in a hidden role game.

Nuance

The biggest thing to remember when giving a player a decision in a hidden role game is that it must have more to it than the surface decision. There must always be more than one reason to do something. This leads to more discussions, which are important to the gameplay, as well as giving evil players a better way to cover their tracks and good players a cost they must pay. So long as the decision isn’t “do something bad” and “do something good,” you’re good, but make sure you’ve played enough to know that it’s not just bad and good choices.

Always bad

I’ve described hidden role games before as co-op games where some players are rooting for loss, and one way to incorporate that philosophy is to make every decisions a bad one. The easiest way to do that is to have each choice have a cost. A high cost for a high benefit is bad, because it spends a lot of resources, but a low cost for a low benefit is also bad, since you get a low benefit. If something bad always happens no matter what, then it forces the good guy players to make engaging and difficult decisions, and gives the bad guy players multiple ways to impact the game negatively to try and maximize damage.

Unequal but Opposite

Remember when I said the decision shouldn’t be “do something good” or “do something bad?” Well, it’s okay to do it a little. In fact, it’s probably a good idea. If all options are equally useful, like if all the costs are tied properly to the results, then any choice is equally good and evil. This makes determining allegiances very difficult. There needs to be a little bit of imbalance; usually something that’s a little better for the evil side. It still can’t be 100%, and there has to be some amount of plausible deniability. Usually the tradeoff is random chance. For example, drawing an action card rather than repairing something means you get some random effect instead of a obviously useful ability, but hey, if the random effect is really good then maybe you were just a good guy hoping that would happen!

Group vs. Individual

The other popular way to give a player plausible deniability for making a choice that isn’t super beneficial is to give them something that only helps themself. This is always a great tool for causing discussion, because if you balance it so that the personal benefit is often of the same power of the group benefit, then you’ll always be able to give that excuse. But there’s just something so selfish about it that makes it seem evil. Part of the reason is just paranoia. In a hidden role game, the only person you can trust is yourself, so that means both A) when someone else does something for themself instead of the group (which includes you) it’s suspicious, and B) by giving yourself something, you know you are providing a benefit to the group you are part of. Those two are contradictory in an a hilarious and entertaining way.

However, the tough part is actually designing a way for players to benefit themselves. After all, if they are psuedo-co-op games, then there’s not really independent goals outside of the traitor team, right? Well, some games still have some form of scoring mechanism, especially games played in multiple rounds like Shamans or Saboteur, but the most common benefit is the power of choice. If you gain resources, you get to decide when to use them, even if you’re going to use them to do something everyone else wanted anyway. Maybe you get to pick who’s in charge next round. If you’re the only person you trust, then it’s giving you and your team a lot of power, which is always good for whoever is doing it!

Randomness

Before I conclude, I wanted to address the elephant in the room: randomness. It can be very useful but also ruin everything. Randomness is often used for plausible deniability: I didn’t put that card in, it must have been the random card! The issue is that if the randomness is too great or too influential, then the decision seems pointless anyway. If a player is working hard to do something and it fails due to randomness, they don’t care about the fact that their actions have been obscured enough to hide their intentions, they’re just mad! I think it’s really important than any form of randomness be a choice made by a player or group of players, usually a costly choice.

Conclusion

That’s a lot of words about a single aspect of a single genre, but I’m glad I wrote it. There’s a lot to think about when designing hidden role games. Remember that all of this applies to basically every decisions of the game, not just the important ones. In a hidden role game, every decision is important.