Crime mystery in dreams last night- first dream, something about an envelope, I can't remember? Second one though, final dream, doing the whole "crash a bus with their corpse in it to make it look like they died in a bus crash" trope, but don't make it out in time after propping down the gas pedal, also perishing.
I'm still obsessed with murder mystery tropes and iconography after Glass Onion a month ago. Clue really is a terrible game, but it's just so darn intriguing! Weapons, suspects, locations- they barely manage to get it to make any sense in the Clue movie, but them's the breaks; it doesn't make diegetic sense, but locations and suspects and weapons are all really murder mystery trope-y and there are a lot of those in Clue and that makes it awesome!, in theme if not in gameplay. If only there were a way to offer up red herrings in here or something! And also if only there were more hedge mazes! And some other stuff...
I've been poking around with combining my ideas on improving Clue with my unrelated ideas on improving Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is another one of those games we keep coming back to in spite of the really crufty gameplay because of its strong theme. (The third edition came out just a few months ago, but I don't know much about it, whether it improves on or supplants some of the complaints I have here.) The haunt- or perhaps, the murder!- is one aspect that gets brought up a lot, the betrayal itself that always seems to leave one side or the other at a major disadvantage, but there are more problems than that. The chrome, the fiddly little exceptions exemplified by the cardboard bits and chits- there's a drip in this one room, there's an elevator that leads here here or here.
(Eurogames vs Ameritrash is a false dichotomy, an ossified product of early 2010's culture introduced into hobby gaming vocabulary by coincidence of timing between two broad trends in gaming happening to be noticed at the same time that internet connectivity really started taking off in hobby spaces... but this kind of thing, the Drip, is what the term Ameritrash was created to describe, heavily thematic exceptions to game rules laid out in components instead of being folded more elegantly into gameplay.)
It's the kind of thing, I think, that game-integrated apps were invented to supplant, in other words. I've also meanwhile been thinking about the affordances of such apps, things that would be not difficult but impossible to implement in physical componentry. The Forgotten Waters app could conceivably be replaced by a really really big deck of Crossroads cards, even the Search for Planet X app could be replaced with some sort of randomized booklet-length lookup table; but it would be impossible, flat out impossible even with closed envelopes, to have a hypothetical mechanic with secret anonymous bribes you can accept or reject, or a realtime English auction where you don't know who's even bidding but you do know what the bid is, or where it's a secret if anybody is calling or folding on the current bid. It can't be too app-dependent of course, else why not just play a computer game instead, but the app would need to be entirely essential.
So continuing from this idea- Betrayal at House on the Hill, one awkward clunk to its gameplay is the transition between the cooperative and competitive game modes as the haunt is revealed. All parties know who the traitor is, and that person has to leave the room and both parties have to read their separate instructions on how to interface with this new scenario, as the modes and gameplay diverge wildly from haunt to haunt. (Once again, the third edition has some revamped haunt rules which probably streamlines this, but I don't have firsthand experience with that and it's probably nothing to the extent of undoing anything I'm suggesting.) In an app-based Betrayal-like, it wouldn't even be necessary to have the identity of the traitor be public information. Or even have the traitor be a player character! Make the rules smooth and uniform, of course, so that everyone knows their role- that's essential, because if there's any confusion, well that blows the hidden bit doesn't it.
There are a lot of other ideas I'm fiddling with in the back of my skull, which make the game increasingly less Betrayal-like as new incentives need to be introduced in order to make the potential-betrayal hidden-role mechanic work smoothly. Character relationships, for one, where every member of the cast seems to have a history with each other in intricate ways, some of which may end up being plot critical, some of which may end up being red herrings. Put like that, it doesn't need to be House on the Hill-based at all! But that opening, like in chess the game opening, the start of the game the exploration of the mansion and its grounds, I can't get that out of my head in terms of murder mystery location tropes. The exploration aspect is too compelling for me to give up on- who needs how it works in Clue, which has its Tudor Manor/Boddy Mansion all laid out and known? Give me the delicious discovery of hidden passageways, the realization of the methods even to eavesdrop on secrets and scandal. The murder can even be triggered by some equivalent of Omen cards, like in the standard game (weapon cards, perhaps...), though possibly with some randomization thrown in as well, afforded by the app-driven nature of this aspect of the narrative. And so the mystery begins: whodunnit, of course, but also to whom- an NPC? or a player character? And that player would of course then have to step into the new role of an inspector showing up at the front doorstep...
It could even be considered a prologue to some certain ghost-based scenarios of Betrayal, who knows.
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