Niteshire Ideas (again)

[Arktis]

Due to the recent troubles (again), all the ideas for spicing up and possibly improving the Niteshire game were unfortunately lost.  So if you wouldn't mind, please repost what you can remember.

 

I had a few lists myself, but I will simply summarize them:

 

1.) A change of setting might be nice for role playing, such as a large starship or a mysterious secret underground complex, maybe a huge castle with hidden passages, etc.  The ideas are endless.

 

2.)  There are a huge number of different fiend types we can use, and of course you can just make something up.  For example, if I wanted to write funny deaths, I might have a fiend that controls the laws of probability.  It would make for some very interesting attacks.  Of course, we can also use something from a TV show, like Cylons.

 

3.) There was also the topic of multiple fiend types in the same game and the issues/difficulties presented in concealing when one of them has been voted out.

 

4.)  There was a small debate about jobs with actual in-game skills and whether or not this would mean people would get targeted based on their abilities.

 

5.) Depending on what type of fiend and setting is chosen, the rules can change.  Someone had an interesting idea about using Aliens movie-like xenomorph parasites (I forget who had that idea) and spelled out how they might like to see it effect the gameplay.  Though I don't like the idea of special skills very much, I did like the idea of having the fiend move from player to player, killing each one as the round is over and giving the infected person the choice of who to infest next.  I have to admit, that sounds really neat.

[GorunNova]

Yeah, the special skills would be hard to manage and distribute, plus would need serious tinkering and experimenting to get right.  The intention of having some players being clearly a danger to the alien, and having others capable of protecting him (at a cost, of course), was to make the whole thing more tactical... but also, unfortunately, more complicated. ;)

 

Anyways, the idea was that the alien is a 'parasite', and the 'parasite' passes from one victim to another, killing the original victim in the process.  The next victim in the line becomes the 'killer', choosing the next host, and the players have to figure out who's the new victim.

 

As an analogue to the 'seer', was a covert 'alien hunter' that can scan one crewmember to determine if he's the current host or not.  Simple 'nuf, there.

 

The reason I talked about various abilities for various crewmembers is that when the alien jumps to someone new each round, the game degenerates into 'random choice'... it really needs some characters with skills to narrow down the options to give the crew a fighting chance against the alien.

 

Then again, how about this... Every round, instead of a vote, the crew can choose to 'scan' one player with the ship's medical scanner, and if they pick right the alien's discovered and the players win.  To make things more interesting (and mimic the 'two werewolf action' of the original game), the alien could have one free 'jump', fleeing the discovered host (without killing him) and taking over one of the other surviving players picked at random by the person running the game.  This eliminates the problems of an alien hunter that has to keep his or her identity secret, while allowing players to test for the alien's presence.  It also leads to a longer game, given that the scan doesn't kick players out of the game. ;) Unfortunately, it also means that the alien would lose the moment it's down to two players, so maybe let the alien win if there's only one crewmember left (i.e. requires two or more crewmembers to be able to subdue and eliminate the alien)?  This variant wouldn't need a vulnerable 'alien hunter', too. ^^

[gathererhade]

Yeah.  The scan one player per turn, would work.

I think...  Not sure what it does to the probabilities of each side winning.  :)

 

Maybe for special skills you can have one or two players who are "security" and so able to interrogate the logs to see who the dead/infected player was in contact with in the hour they died (ie narrowing down the suspects, even if it only down to half the crew).  These guys/gals, of course, would need to be secret & leave the info lying around for someone to 'find' - or program ships computer to release the info.  However, if the alien infects one of them, it can scramble the system, taking out that ability for the rest of the game.  If two security, each would know who the other was & could privately discuss tactics, ideas. 

 

To hone the idea of players generally getting clues & getting more player interaction, each member of the crew may be able to get one bit of info from the moderator after each death - only one of which is relevant - the rest are red herrings.  Then they can discuss it and try to work it out - the alien, of course makes something up to throw people off the scent as they would know what the 'REAL' clue is.  Clues can run the range from the stupid to the highly plausible - but sometimes the real clue can look stupid.  ;D

 

Thoughts.

[kyran]

we need more clues and less red fish

 

[Megalith]

yeah the last game was way too confusing, i don't think anyone had any idea what was going on or what they were supposed to do... not that that necessarily is a bad thing and it kinda reminded me of an rpg i used to play with some mates years ago called paranoid where the players had no idea what was going on but the gamesmaster would introduce things to them as needed. i'll see if i can find it as it has some great ideas that would work with this. Paranoid did however need character sheets to play and these where generated randomly by the gamesmater prior to the game start. it included abilities like machine empathy, hacking skills, strngth etc (about 20 catagories) having a character sheet does help in knowing what is going on if niteshire goes along this route. i must say tho that the original game needed no character sheets and had very simple rules and imo played better... just my views tho

[Amnot Borg]

I never could figure out how to play. I just randomly picked someone besides myself.

[Ulysses]

actually it worked better when it was in the village I thought

[TFMF]

Which is why we're back in a village for NiteShire 4 :P