Mind Control for Practical Purposes

Earlier this year, I designed, organized and ran a campus wide Mafia game (Rules here). Surprising nobody other than myself, it required a lot of work and effort to keep on top of it. This was the first time the game was played, so I had to make rules decisions and re-balance the game while it was being played. As a designer, it is important to note that people are really crazy, and they'll come up with questions you wouldn't think of asking, much less answering. This is particularly pertinent when you are designing an open RPG as the question of "What can I do?" is often answered with "What do you want to do?". Eventually, however, they will want to do something outside of the rules that you have codified, and someone needs to decide how things should play out. For this, as I was running the game, the decisions fell to me.

One thing that I learned while designing and running Mafia Wars is that you want to be able to get players to do what you want without telling them to do that, or for more of a challenge, without even telling them that they can. The design shown in the rules linked, is definitely not what I would design now, but it has some good starts. In the Bartering section, it indicates that you can trade whatever you want for something else. If I recall correctly, one family traded baked goods for weapons.

Another game I worked on with a friend called Cheat (Rules here) has a similar deal. It is a pretty boring and substandard game without its special (and namesake) clause, that players can cheat whenever they want. The game rules don't explain what counts as cheating- anything that isn't legal is illegal. However, the beauty of the design is that the game gives players reasons to be manipulating the game state in weird ways, and if they aren't being focused on, gives them opportunity to cheat. With four players, it is impossible to keep track of everyone, so even at your most attentive, you can't keep track of what everyone is doing.

In playing Cheat with friends, some people did some really cool stuff that was purely deft manipulation of the rules in their favor. In particular, one player cheated on behalf of another so that the other player would get caught and punished. Another tried blatant lies and untruths in an attempt to cover up their intended cheat.

I'm currently working on another RPG where I want players to be able to create alliances and then turn on each other and kill them. Ideally, players (and NPCs) would have health and damage stats and I would indicate how to attack, but not specify that you can only fight non-players. That, combined for rules with grouping up with other players and looting their corpses for necessary survival materials, I believe would be enough instruction and incentive for players to (eventually) turn on each other.

At some point soon (hopefully) I'll be introducing that game, but until then, just play Cheat.