Alien RPG does short campaigns where everyone has a hidden agenda. In my opinion, the key to these in a TTRPGs is to ensure everyone 'seems' to have the combined mission at heart, at least at the start. Then maybe at the half way mark, it becomes clear certain players have alternative motivations.
In the three scenarios I've ran, two ended with characters killing each other. Which sounds dramatic and horrible but was good fun.
Hidden traitor games are great fun as board games. The safe space to lie outrageously to your friends is very appealing. In TTRPGs, I'm not a huge fan of any PvP, so having a hidden traitor is something I generally avoid. For me, RPGs are about telling a shared story, in which collaboration between players and the GM is vital, so having players (rather than just their characters) at cross-purposes is going to make that process difficult. And I think that's a reason why hidden traitor mechanics are limited in TTRPGs - the players end up motivated to win the game rather than have fun role-playing. It's hard to avoid metagaming or stay in character when that will mean you lose.
That's why focusing on individual hidden objectives is perhaps the better approach. Instead of it being a situation where some players win and the others lose, each player has the opportunity to "win". You could have objectives conflict: "destroy the generator" vs. "protect the generator", but the players are unaware that someone else has that conflicting objective.
Really interesting article on a fascinating topic!
Trophy Dark does secret/not-so-secret betrayal in an interesting way. The game is intended for one-shots and your characters start off knowing they're doomed, but they are desperate and willing to take ridiculous risks to escape their doom. Rather than gain more powerful as the game progresses, they decline as the journey takes its toll. The most important of this is tracked as Ruin. Ruin starts at 1 an goes to 6, representing how disturbed your character has become. At Ruin 6 your character is removed from the game, but may join the enemy in some way, so that's a pretty not-so-secret betrayal. What's more interesting is that at Ruin 5 the character can choose to "betray or sabotage" the other characters in an attempt to reduce their Ruin and of course they are highly motivated for it to go unnoticed, or at least not be attributable to them.
I like the idea of hidden role cards. Even outside of betrayal games, there could be non-conflicting roles that the characters may have other reasons to keep secret. Lots of possibilities there!
Surprised you didn't include Shadows Over Camelot in this article, but you definitely hit a soft spot for me: hidden traitor games are a favorite of mine and the Battlestar Galactica board game is actually how I met my spouse. Will never get rid of that game.
I've heard of Shadows Over Camelot but unfortunately have no experience with it. I try to stick to games I either own or at least have had a chance to play. Interestingly, while writing this I noticed that I don't own many social deduction games!
Haha you know I'll actually have to ask my spouse, I don't remember.
Was also intrigued by your method of introducing hidden roles to Mothership: I think it's one of the best things the Alien RPG does with their box sets. In Cinematic Play they give each pregen a hidden objective (or maybe the cards are separate). I just remember when I played the hidden objective was one of the most interesting parts of the game.
I found three reasons why hidden role games are incredibly hard to design.
Firstly, if the game is _about_ deducing traitors, it's only fun when players are actively deducing the traitors. Consider hidden movement games: they are only fun if the pursuers are a step or two behind the hidden player, they are boring if pursuers have no idea where the hidden player is, and they end once the pursued player is found. Similarly, hidden role games have to perpetually keep (and rubber-band, if needed) the balance between known and unknown information, so that "the good guys" always have new facts to consider and new hypotheses to test, and the traitors always have a way to avoid being found out.
Secondly, "the good team" is by definition stronger than the traitors, which means that usually it's reasonable to pretend to be "the good guy". Without adequate mechanics that hide consequences of the actions, the optimal strategy for traitors is always make non-traitor moves, and spend the whole game waiting for the one perfect moment to reveal themselves. Any non-perfect moment wont do, because any non-optimal play will get player labeled as a traitor anyway, and it's reasonable to save this chance to do most damage. This makes for very static and abrupt experience, and also fails the first criterion (if everybody is making good-guy-moves, there's no information to consider).
Thirdly, in games where players can change loyalty as a result of opponents' actions (often because of some kind of The Thing-like infection), it's very hard to balance the team power. In many of them, bigger team wins, so there's no sense to NOT join the team that will grow to be the biggest eventually. This often turns the game into a race to become infected/turned/zombified, which can break the game altogether.
I love this article - thanks for posting it. I fully agree with you up to the last point. My divergent thought is it isn't hard to design semi-cooperative games, more it requires a different mindset.
The betrayal within the plot is the cornerstone of the one-shot adventure I wrote ages ago and eventually published this year for my game in the Quickstart book. If you're interested in understanding how I deployed it in a FRPG, I will be happy to send you a digital copy of the book! Hope it helps, best
With Dead of Winter specifically, I have come to the point where I really don't care about the secret objectives at all. On multiple occasions when playing, I've felt like I won if the group collectively accomplishes the main scenario regardless of whether I technically won or not. On one occasion, I even engineered my characters' own exile from the group so that everyone could have enough resources to survive one last round.
With that game at least, I think part of the problem is the disconnect between character and player. It's not the character(s) who have a secret objective, it's me (who controls a number of different characters), except I have no real reason to care about it. The Mothership and Nemesis examples feel more actionable because they're tied to a specific character that I'm playing/identifying with, and therefore have a reason to care about.
While I’m not a fan of semi-cooperative board games, I have used the secret hidden objectives in TTRPG one-shots for years and find them a fascinating addition to one-shot game play. Like you (and unlike other times I’ve seen people use secret agendas) I like them to be unknown to me too - the emergent gameplay driven by secrets can make each game wildly different! I’ve run the Alien introductory scenario (Hope’s Last Day) three times this year using that approach - taking the ‘agendas’ and turning them into random agendas (and making “you’re and android” into an agenda too, with instructions about the changes to rules for your character).
I'm surprised secret roles/backgrounds/agendas that are hidden to both other players and the GM aren't more common. Perhaps they are, but not in what I've personally read or experienced. Sounds like they work for you!
What do you think of the Alien RPG? You getting the 2nd edition?
I really like the Alien RPG (for one-shots at least). I think that the stress spiral works really well for mimicking the doom spiral in the films. I think it is important to remind the players to rest and take the opportunities to reduce their stress (especially if someone has the wise-cracking skill that helps people recover more).
I’m not planning on getting the 2nd edition because I only just bought the 1st edition this year! I’d been putting it off because it beat my game for the “Ennies Best Game 2020” title and I’d been a teeny bit grumpy about that for a while :-) However, a friend gave a good report of it, and when I looked at it I could see that it had some really good mechanics to support the theme, which is always important to me.
Ditto on the agendas hidden from both GM and players. I’ve never come across it used by anyone else or even suggested anywhere else. Until reading your article as far as I knew I was the only person who had stumbled into the fun inherent in that approach!
It's interesting that for all the TTRPGs I've seen that include this in a satisfying way, they seem to be bounded experiences -- Alien RPG's cinematic scenarios, your Mothership one-shot, Trophy Dark -- all of them are known to have pretty harrowing conclusions, take place in a relatively brief period of time, and anticipate inter-party betrayal as a core part of the fun.
My question is: How do you make this fun as part of campaign play? Can you have secrets like this in longer-form campaign? I've found in one example particularly, that when the party is set up to harbor long-term suspicions and secrets about one another, it can sorta mess with the party dynamic.
In terms of TTRPGs, I know the the Forge classics The Mountain Witch and Cold City do some stuff in this space. I've never played TMW and I'm kind of fuzzy on remembering how everything works, but I believe every player has a personal hidden objective and there's also a Trust mechanic where you can get helping dice from other players if you increase your trust with them, but then they can use your level of trust with them for lots of bonus dice if they're doing something to betray you.
Cold City is set in an alt-history supernatural horror post-WWII partitioned Berlin. The players are on a team formed from operatives from the different Allied powers investigating supernatural monsters that are the result of German experiments during the war, so you'll generally have a shared goal to stop the problems but also different national goals as the different powers are all doing stuff like their own Operation Paperclip to get control of the supernatural secrets. I forget if it has trust mechanics or not. I thought it was an interesting premise, but the time I played it kind of broke down because I managed to have my character get one over on the other characters by sending the monster back to my French contacts instead of destroying it like I said I was going to, and one of the other players was so pissed off by that that he had his character start doing stuff against mine that broke my suspension of disbelief (his character didn't realize he had been tricked, so there was no in-game rationale for the sudden overt murderous hostility). I think it was analogous to when some players in a take-that card game get over-the-top revenge-focused if anyone ever does anything to them, just an inability to treat things going against them as an expected part of the ebb and flow of the game.
Alien RPG does short campaigns where everyone has a hidden agenda. In my opinion, the key to these in a TTRPGs is to ensure everyone 'seems' to have the combined mission at heart, at least at the start. Then maybe at the half way mark, it becomes clear certain players have alternative motivations.
In the three scenarios I've ran, two ended with characters killing each other. Which sounds dramatic and horrible but was good fun.
Hidden traitor games are great fun as board games. The safe space to lie outrageously to your friends is very appealing. In TTRPGs, I'm not a huge fan of any PvP, so having a hidden traitor is something I generally avoid. For me, RPGs are about telling a shared story, in which collaboration between players and the GM is vital, so having players (rather than just their characters) at cross-purposes is going to make that process difficult. And I think that's a reason why hidden traitor mechanics are limited in TTRPGs - the players end up motivated to win the game rather than have fun role-playing. It's hard to avoid metagaming or stay in character when that will mean you lose.
That's why focusing on individual hidden objectives is perhaps the better approach. Instead of it being a situation where some players win and the others lose, each player has the opportunity to "win". You could have objectives conflict: "destroy the generator" vs. "protect the generator", but the players are unaware that someone else has that conflicting objective.
Really interesting article on a fascinating topic!
Thank you so much!
Trophy Dark does secret/not-so-secret betrayal in an interesting way. The game is intended for one-shots and your characters start off knowing they're doomed, but they are desperate and willing to take ridiculous risks to escape their doom. Rather than gain more powerful as the game progresses, they decline as the journey takes its toll. The most important of this is tracked as Ruin. Ruin starts at 1 an goes to 6, representing how disturbed your character has become. At Ruin 6 your character is removed from the game, but may join the enemy in some way, so that's a pretty not-so-secret betrayal. What's more interesting is that at Ruin 5 the character can choose to "betray or sabotage" the other characters in an attempt to reduce their Ruin and of course they are highly motivated for it to go unnoticed, or at least not be attributable to them.
I like the idea of hidden role cards. Even outside of betrayal games, there could be non-conflicting roles that the characters may have other reasons to keep secret. Lots of possibilities there!
Surprised you didn't include Shadows Over Camelot in this article, but you definitely hit a soft spot for me: hidden traitor games are a favorite of mine and the Battlestar Galactica board game is actually how I met my spouse. Will never get rid of that game.
I've heard of Shadows Over Camelot but unfortunately have no experience with it. I try to stick to games I either own or at least have had a chance to play. Interestingly, while writing this I noticed that I don't own many social deduction games!
Great story about BSG! Who was the cylon? :)
Haha you know I'll actually have to ask my spouse, I don't remember.
Was also intrigued by your method of introducing hidden roles to Mothership: I think it's one of the best things the Alien RPG does with their box sets. In Cinematic Play they give each pregen a hidden objective (or maybe the cards are separate). I just remember when I played the hidden objective was one of the most interesting parts of the game.
I keep hearing about the Alien RPG and it sounds really good. Maybe I’ll dip my toe into 2nd edition……
I found three reasons why hidden role games are incredibly hard to design.
Firstly, if the game is _about_ deducing traitors, it's only fun when players are actively deducing the traitors. Consider hidden movement games: they are only fun if the pursuers are a step or two behind the hidden player, they are boring if pursuers have no idea where the hidden player is, and they end once the pursued player is found. Similarly, hidden role games have to perpetually keep (and rubber-band, if needed) the balance between known and unknown information, so that "the good guys" always have new facts to consider and new hypotheses to test, and the traitors always have a way to avoid being found out.
Secondly, "the good team" is by definition stronger than the traitors, which means that usually it's reasonable to pretend to be "the good guy". Without adequate mechanics that hide consequences of the actions, the optimal strategy for traitors is always make non-traitor moves, and spend the whole game waiting for the one perfect moment to reveal themselves. Any non-perfect moment wont do, because any non-optimal play will get player labeled as a traitor anyway, and it's reasonable to save this chance to do most damage. This makes for very static and abrupt experience, and also fails the first criterion (if everybody is making good-guy-moves, there's no information to consider).
Thirdly, in games where players can change loyalty as a result of opponents' actions (often because of some kind of The Thing-like infection), it's very hard to balance the team power. In many of them, bigger team wins, so there's no sense to NOT join the team that will grow to be the biggest eventually. This often turns the game into a race to become infected/turned/zombified, which can break the game altogether.
Valid reasons why hidden role (and hidden traitor) games might be tricky. All good things to keep in mind! Thank you!
I love this article - thanks for posting it. I fully agree with you up to the last point. My divergent thought is it isn't hard to design semi-cooperative games, more it requires a different mindset.
Thank you!
The betrayal within the plot is the cornerstone of the one-shot adventure I wrote ages ago and eventually published this year for my game in the Quickstart book. If you're interested in understanding how I deployed it in a FRPG, I will be happy to send you a digital copy of the book! Hope it helps, best
With Dead of Winter specifically, I have come to the point where I really don't care about the secret objectives at all. On multiple occasions when playing, I've felt like I won if the group collectively accomplishes the main scenario regardless of whether I technically won or not. On one occasion, I even engineered my characters' own exile from the group so that everyone could have enough resources to survive one last round.
With that game at least, I think part of the problem is the disconnect between character and player. It's not the character(s) who have a secret objective, it's me (who controls a number of different characters), except I have no real reason to care about it. The Mothership and Nemesis examples feel more actionable because they're tied to a specific character that I'm playing/identifying with, and therefore have a reason to care about.
I think you really nailed it in that second paragraph! That's a really interesting way to think about it. Thank you!
While I’m not a fan of semi-cooperative board games, I have used the secret hidden objectives in TTRPG one-shots for years and find them a fascinating addition to one-shot game play. Like you (and unlike other times I’ve seen people use secret agendas) I like them to be unknown to me too - the emergent gameplay driven by secrets can make each game wildly different! I’ve run the Alien introductory scenario (Hope’s Last Day) three times this year using that approach - taking the ‘agendas’ and turning them into random agendas (and making “you’re and android” into an agenda too, with instructions about the changes to rules for your character).
I'm surprised secret roles/backgrounds/agendas that are hidden to both other players and the GM aren't more common. Perhaps they are, but not in what I've personally read or experienced. Sounds like they work for you!
What do you think of the Alien RPG? You getting the 2nd edition?
I really like the Alien RPG (for one-shots at least). I think that the stress spiral works really well for mimicking the doom spiral in the films. I think it is important to remind the players to rest and take the opportunities to reduce their stress (especially if someone has the wise-cracking skill that helps people recover more).
I’m not planning on getting the 2nd edition because I only just bought the 1st edition this year! I’d been putting it off because it beat my game for the “Ennies Best Game 2020” title and I’d been a teeny bit grumpy about that for a while :-) However, a friend gave a good report of it, and when I looked at it I could see that it had some really good mechanics to support the theme, which is always important to me.
Ditto on the agendas hidden from both GM and players. I’ve never come across it used by anyone else or even suggested anywhere else. Until reading your article as far as I knew I was the only person who had stumbled into the fun inherent in that approach!
It's interesting that for all the TTRPGs I've seen that include this in a satisfying way, they seem to be bounded experiences -- Alien RPG's cinematic scenarios, your Mothership one-shot, Trophy Dark -- all of them are known to have pretty harrowing conclusions, take place in a relatively brief period of time, and anticipate inter-party betrayal as a core part of the fun.
My question is: How do you make this fun as part of campaign play? Can you have secrets like this in longer-form campaign? I've found in one example particularly, that when the party is set up to harbor long-term suspicions and secrets about one another, it can sorta mess with the party dynamic.
I adore, giving players specific objectives that conflict with the rest of the group.
It is almost guaranteed that this is what will happen if I ever run a one shot.
Even for longer campaigns, I think there's something about starting the group out with minor but conflicting goals.
In terms of TTRPGs, I know the the Forge classics The Mountain Witch and Cold City do some stuff in this space. I've never played TMW and I'm kind of fuzzy on remembering how everything works, but I believe every player has a personal hidden objective and there's also a Trust mechanic where you can get helping dice from other players if you increase your trust with them, but then they can use your level of trust with them for lots of bonus dice if they're doing something to betray you.
Cold City is set in an alt-history supernatural horror post-WWII partitioned Berlin. The players are on a team formed from operatives from the different Allied powers investigating supernatural monsters that are the result of German experiments during the war, so you'll generally have a shared goal to stop the problems but also different national goals as the different powers are all doing stuff like their own Operation Paperclip to get control of the supernatural secrets. I forget if it has trust mechanics or not. I thought it was an interesting premise, but the time I played it kind of broke down because I managed to have my character get one over on the other characters by sending the monster back to my French contacts instead of destroying it like I said I was going to, and one of the other players was so pissed off by that that he had his character start doing stuff against mine that broke my suspension of disbelief (his character didn't realize he had been tricked, so there was no in-game rationale for the sudden overt murderous hostility). I think it was analogous to when some players in a take-that card game get over-the-top revenge-focused if anyone ever does anything to them, just an inability to treat things going against them as an expected part of the ebb and flow of the game.