Category: The Gauntlet: How to Suck Less

So I’m working on my Anomalis project, in short, a science/catastrophe pbta game. I have vented some ideas around group trust mechanics and ended up with a new credibility mechanic which I’m fairly happy with as of now.

Players are scientists working in a secret lab where things start to go awry, which escalates into a disaster. Their employer is very demanding, forcing them to correct their ‘mistake’ or suffer consequences. If you’ve seen The Thing, the short Zygote, or played Half-Life, you know what this game is about.

In short, the credibility is a shared trait among the players, that rate their social standing in the eyes of their employer (who is also their primary stakeholder in their research project). It is a health track that during play is harmed by bad decisions and ill managed consequences from the catastrophe in question. When the credibility track reaches certain levels of harm, it is tagged with ‘backlashes.’ At a low level, a backlash is easy to deal with, but as it increases in severity, it becomes more of a problem. What I came to realize was that the credibility should be tied in the opposition (i.e., the consequences of the employer’s unhappiness). This way the ever-increasing opposition to the PCs stands in relation to their failure in dealing with previous consequences. I don’t know if this makes sense yet, but I’ll try to clarify this separately later.

Now I have made a draft over some moves I’d appreciate input on, based on a set of uses cases I made for the game. A lot of the gameplay will for starters deal with the interaction between the PCs and staff on the research facility (authority moves), but also for the actual research they might participate in before the catastrophe is actually happening (the lab moves). Later during the game, there will be a lot of other different types of moves, both survival and conflict oriented, but I haven’t dealt with them yet.

All sorts of feedback are welcome!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YFUyYakdp9vFX_4qP84zRXhbqTDHz6p9qqdy0lKqUPI/edit?usp=sharing

I have also put this is the Slack channel #design_feedback if anyone there want to share their thoughts.

Thanks!