Short Exercise: What do Prototypes Prototype?

After reading What do Prototypes Prototype?, I’ve come up with a few questions I’d want my group’s prototypes to answer in order to test the mechanics of my group’s social deduction game and the dynamics they produce.

1. How does the infiltrator respond to not knowing their role or the role of anyone else? Will it be too easy for them solve the puzzle of which character has been left out?
   1. This is an important question to answer because its response defines if this game is truly a difficult social deduction game. If it’s too easy for the infiltrator to identify the missing role, they can get by easily by pretending to be the missing person and then the game won’t be fun nor challenging.
   2. To answer this, we could prototype it by playing a revised version of Spyfall (which is just one element of the game we’re composing) replacing the location with a missing character as we’re thinking to do in our social deduction game.
   3. I’m guessing that the infiltrator’s character won’t be too easy to figure out, and that they will respond as we hope, as long as there are a lot of different potential characters in the pool and also as long as the characters are nuanced and have characteristics that overlap (i.e. just one yes/no question will not make it obvious which character you are).
2. How many “missions” should there be, and how many characters should be sent on each mission?
   1. This is important as this defines the race to the end mechanic of our game; we need to figure out the optimal number of rounds for one infiltrator to even having a fighting chance of winning.
   2. We’ll have to experiment likely from the model of the Resistance and then pare back. Perhaps we start with three rounds (the minimum for there to be a majority win) and then see as a group of players gets larger how many more rounds need to be included for the game to accommodate others.
   3. I’m guessing that 5 is a solid number because it’s simple in terms of having a majority win, and in the case of a tie there’s an opportunity for an extra sixth game where we can include extra bonuses or mods to make the game more exciting! 3 seems a little too short and inflexible considering that the amount of people in the game could be significant, and 7 seems too much (the game would be drawn out and maybe boring at the end)
3. How many roles should we include in the game, and how could we include relationship mods to make it more complex and interesting?
   1. The same way Secret Hitler allows players to unlock certain abilities as rounds pass, we want to integrate game mods as our players pass rounds too. This is important as I feel it keeps the game interesting and lively though the group is repeating the same steps over and over; I deem this critical to the game being fun and exciting. The number of roles could also define how difficult the game is for the infiltrator, and relationship mods could make it easier for the infiltrator to hide if other player’s have secret incentives.
   2. We could prototype this by playing Spyfall-esque rounds but with our character idea, and then perhaps between rounds adding particular relationships and seeing how it affects how those characters behave in terms of getting identified. This is the simplest way to do this outside of playing real game rounds.
   3. I can’t really guess a specific number, but I think maybe if the maximum game players is 5, maybe having 20 potential roles could be good? There needs to be a lot more for there to be enough nuance in the differences between characters.