There were smaller "mega"games that I couldn’t get tickets to that I would try again. The one I did was around 60 players and 2 game-runners so that was part of it to. I’d totally be willing to play a similar type of game with 10-20 players which seems more manageable.
Also part of the problem was it really became a political game to the exclusion of any gameplay so the like two tables that buddied up right away won because they pooled resources the entire game. I didn’t even know that this had occurred because I was sitting at a table on the other side of the room playing a mini-game to trade unaware that none of it could possibly impact anything because of the secret alliance. I’m sure those two tables had heightened enjoyment but it basically came at the expense of everyone not in their alliance because of how obfuscated the majority of the experience was.
I have witness sever mega games at PAXes, but never participated. The ones I saw seemed extremely gimmicky. Conceptually they are just incredible, but the reality doesn’t match up. A certain optimistic/naive flavor of player just can’t resist, and is so super enthusiastic about playing in it. That kind of person is going to have a fun time because their devotion and adherence to the spirit of the game will be a curtain concealing a tiny man behind it.
I see no meaningful difference between the mega games I have seen and games like Two Rooms and a Boom; a game I have the same feelings about. A blob of people engage in some swirling social activity with the flimsiest of rules to frame their interaction. Some people engage and matter much more than others. Somehow the people running the game reveal the result after a period of time. The end.
I also played Two Rooms and a Boom at Pax 2018 with the SUSD boys (Matt Lees and Quentin Smith) and had a ball of a time as an assassin speficially tasked with killing 1 person, completely separate from the main team objectives. Two Rooms and a Boom had me directly interacting with all of the other players and a coy bit of physical interaction with many ways you can reveal your role if you so choose to anyone else. I was able to succeed and kill my target because as a neutral actor one of the teams was like, oh I know who you need to get, work for us and I’ll tell you. I did, and he did, and we both won.
I feel like because it was more socially oriented that it was actually more successful as a game and an experience going in.
I think I played that one too; Was pretty underwhelmed by it. The one I played in was a game where we were on another planet. My group was picked as one of the two trade consortium that had a totally separate win condition.
On the other hand, I have played a game of watch the skies and it was a fantastic time. I ended up on the alien’s leadership team and pulled some absolutely crazy nonsense that the staff was really happy to help run with it and we ended up going for drinks with the Australians at the end of it.
I really think mega games have a fantastic opportunity to be really engaging experiences and the Watch the Skies game really sold me on the whole experience. Unfortunately, I think the mega games at PAX just weren’t as thoroughly tested.
One design problem is that these games either require significant facilitation or extremely simplistic and self-enforcing rules. Escape rooms solve this by making the room itself physically facilitate via hard/technical controls.
I won’t say the one I played in didn’t have flaws, but it did address most the of issues y’all are talking about.
In short, Rym is absolutely correct; significant facilitation is the only way to make this kind of thing work at all. I think there was in total a team of 8 or so volunteers running this one, with around 50 people playing. I paid what works out to around 40 USD to play (lunch included) and the event ran from around 9:30 to 5:30. This was a completely standalone event, not at a convention.
Effectively it works as a giant role-playing game (hence why I put it in this thread), where the facilitators are acting as a collective GMing team, which is a factor that allows various actions to be relatively open-ended.
If people were going for strict win conditions and there was a strict notion of winning or losing the game it wouldn’t have worked so well; different teams were given broad motivations and goals to play towards just as you might in a normal RPG.
It was definitely a rather political game, but that was kinda the point and I think that worked well.
I don’t think I’ve ever been thrilled with a big ass convention game. Not my thing, I think. Even that one game where everybody got in line and they could only take a single action that everybody seemed thrilled to play was not my thing at-all.
My reaction to playing in like… Living Greyhawk… was that “oh I like the idea they tell you they’re going to do, but not the implementation.” That’s why I started Living EN World, which was a persistent shared play by post game. Basically we had character creation rules, and judges who were “above” the GMs to kinda try to keep people within a certain power curve and possibly inform GMs when their different games were overlapping, all in play-by-post. What ended up happening though over the years after I left is people became way more interested in the… leveling characters by GMing (which I didn’t really want) and other sorts of self-aggrandizing insular stuff. I just wanted a bunch of people to have characters that were compatible so when their game ended or died they could port it to another group relatively consistently and eventually you could build a reputation/step into another groups game/etc as things happened.
I’ve run some like 20 person murder-mystery parties. Those usually went better and a lot of people could just enjoy the theming/costuming and stuff. I definitely didn’t have some “guess who dun it, ha ha” moment, it was more of a social activity with several different thematic elements. It worked way way way better than the wanna-be detective mysteries I’ve played in and stuff like escape rooms.
The exact same criticism could be made of RPGs generally. The main point of an RPG is exactly what you’re referring to as the “curtain”.
So yes, insofar as megagames are designed and played as board games, absent a focus on the core RPG-ness, I think they are doomed to face the problems you mention.
This sounds very similar to what Happened at the Watch the Skies game I went to, and it was pretty obvious that they were a practiced group of individuals. TBH, that game is what sold me on the idea of a short form style LARP being a legitimate game form, but it’s possible I would have been much less engaged if I was the scientist for Germany or something.
If you consider a mega game to be an RPG, and you don’t really care about the mechanics of winning or losing or anything, then there is still another problem.
Most of the mega games I have seen arrange players into factions or teams of some kind. However, there are few meaningful individual roles. Most players are just “member of team X.” Some players in that default role may participate more or less, but effectively their entire group is just a single player.
The mega-ness of the game is a false construct. We could play Monopoly with 4 teams of 10 people each controlling one pawn per team, but that’s not really a 40 person game. Most people are going to stand around doing nothing, hardly even playing.
A true mega game would need to have rules such that each individual player must meaningfully contribute and turn the arc of the game in some way. For a good example, look at Parsley games when played with a large group. Every single person in line is truly playing the game. It actually is a big game, not just a game with a falsely inflated player count. See also Hanabi, just make it bigger.
In the one I played, every team member had a specifically assigned role; for most of the human teams it was Scientist/General/Diplomat/Head of State with four separate zones, Lab/War Map/UN/Spy Control, in which each player type would take their actions.
The game functioned broadly as four interconnected minigames but actions by each player on each team within their respective minigames definitely had the potential for major impact on the game as a whole.
In principle you could still say they still functioned collectively as a “single player”, but people weren’t standing around doing nothing. Between coordinating with teammates, and taking actions and politcking with the other people in your own “zone”, the timescale was such that most people who were actively engaging were busy pretty much the whole time.
We are amidst an armistance in the greatest war. The governments of the three nations are negotiating a peace. Meanwhile, the militaries of the three nations are posturing for when the war resumes in earnest, to be ready to win it.
No open conflict can happen unless the government summit breaks down and negotiations fail. So while the politicians bicker, the submarines hunt.
Players are either in the government, in the military high command, or are serving on a submarine crew. The latter literally play Captain Sonar against other sub crews.
Basic gimmicks:
There are rules for open warfare (abstracted), but they can not be used unless real war breaks out
The military leaders want to be in position to WIN the war if it breaks out. But they don’t want war to break out if they are not in such a position.
Military leaders can direct submarine crews to deploy on missions (always against another submarine crew). Once a mission begins however, the military leaders CAN NOT COMMUNICATE with the submarine crews unless they surface and do a thing.
Politicans can embed written orders or information in submarine crews given to the captain. Spies can do the same for the other roles.
I’m not going to type more here, but I have the whole thing in my head. It would work. But it would be an advanced game that requires players to invest.
The key is that the whole game is just politics and social interaction. There’s only one minigame: the subs. Everything else is highly abstracted.
I mentioned this somewhat before, but the biggest game I ever played in was The Gnomish Industrial Revolution of Oerth. I think it literally broke the GM multiple times.
This remind me of Space Camp. There were like 3 groups, one group would be the shuttle crew, and the other two groups would run ground control. It would rotate so each group would have a chance on being on the shuttles.
Most “Mega game” remind me more of Project Management exercises than actual games.
I mean if you wanted, you could take all of the rules Battletech has come out for Planetary Invasions and drill down to the basic game level.
So you have the CO, head of Aerospace Operations, head of Ground Operations, and then you have the various company and/or lance commanders playing games of Battletech.
Our scientist was super engaged, though she did play a pretty major role. In the game I played there was an issue where “sciencing” allowed cooperation between up to 4 players per science project, but there were 9 teams, so due to that issue (and presumably getting out-politicked) one of the scientists got kinda left out initially.
In short, I think that “megagames” can work—the one I played in broadly did, albeit with some hiccups—but they require significant investment in terms of design, running the game, and playing it. I pretty much agree with belkalra here; it seems like the ones people play at conventions generally fall well short of the bar.
Sounds like it’s the kind of thing that could work, if people were indeed invested, though it’s hard to say without seeing it properly fleshed out and mulling it over further.
Would there be any somewhat open-ended component that would be GM’d and narrative in nature, or are you thinking of something more purely mechanistic? The question that arises for me is what the substance would be of what the politicians would be bickering about, and similarly what kind of stuff the written orders would consist of.
Either way it would definitely be fun to plan out and analyse from a game design perspective, at least.
As someone who has played a lot of Puzzle Pirates back in its heyday, here are the issues.
Let’s say you are in a role that is lower in the hierarchy, like an engineer on a sub. If you just concentrate on your sub, you can have a lot of fun. Captain Sonar is a great game on its own. However, you are far away from the top, so you might feel disconnected from the actual objective. What did you actually contribute to that? What did it have to do with you? The game really has to surface exactly how much that player mattered to make them feel connected to the big picture.
Now let’s say you’re in a higher position, much closer to the real game objective. It’s a very frustrating job because the things those lower end people are doing do matter, but you can’t really control them very much. Yeah, you give orders or whatever, but your success or failure is largely out of your control. If all of your soldiers suck at the game, you lose even if you were the best at your job. There isn’t much agency at the top of the chain of command.
I think a better idea that is effectively the same is to remove the chain of command. Yeah, it’s less cool this way, but more fun for everyone. The way it works is really simple. Let’s say you have 11 games of Captain Sonar running simultaneously. Each game has a red team and a blue team. Every win is a point. First team to get 6 or more wins, wins the bigger game. Basically exactly the same, without the troublesome farce.
I won’t say that wouldn’t be fun, but it definitely wouldn’t be “mega” in that there is effectively zero interaction between the separate Captain Sonar games. So no, it’s not at all the “exact same thing”.
You have a point in that having a chain of command introduces very difficult design questions about how to make it engaging at all levels, but I also won’t say it can’t be done.
Skimming this discussion, I kinda was hoping someone would take it to other direction and minimize mehcanics and rules, focus more on roleplaying and characters and invent larping.
You’re ignoring that when wrangling 10+ people to play a game, some participants may desire to have minimal impact on the outcome so they can still participate while not feeling like their lack of skill causes the team to lose. For the second part you’re criticizing the concept of leadership more than anything else.