With Allies Like These: Cooperative Conflict
Group success, personal rewards, friction between allies, and conflict with enemies: there are many layers of in-game conflict in Blasphemess.
Selfish characters work to benefit themselves whilst struggling to keep the greater cause from running aground and ruining their individual reward. Differing ideologies butt heads over how best to accomplish a goal. Players on opposing sides agree to in-game conflict that makes for compelling stories.
How does the game encourage such play? What systems can we design to foster friction between nominal allies? How do we encourage players to be empathetic, and to engage in narratively fulfilling conflict in-game without spilling over into out-of-character problems?
Blasphemess is largely intended as a game of connections and groups. There is conflict on the grand scale, between different associations. There is also intended to be both bonds and friction between factions within those associations, and the individuals that comprise such groups.
Moments in play should include people feeling that they "are struggling together!"
After all, getting large groups to be collectively aligned takes significant effort. Friends and allies come with a wide variety of goals and approaches. To accomplish in-game goals, they'll need to balance all those.
Strategic Conflict in Blasphemess
There are three main sides in the conflict for Blasphemess: the associations for angels, demons, and transcended, as explained in the below blog post.
True
Within each association, there should be a unique "big-picture" strategic minigame for how their association affects the server-wide strategic situation.
For instance, angels may vote for what their supply lines send into the conflict zone, transcended might complete a to-do list of opportunity targets and a scavenger hunt to gather more resources, and demons have a hierarchy of positions with clear responsibilities to manage the economic engine that is their sovereignty.
These minigames feed resources into the conflict, and give players activities to do beyond day-to-day combat, role play, and logistics. It adds to the larger-scale conflict, and helps build to the crescendo of the server's war.
As the server/cluster goes on week by week, there should be more epic narrative beats ramping up until the final battle phase, just before closing. The action keeps going until the resolution is declared and winners are determined.
It's not just one winner. There is no singular win condition to the larger-scale conflict.
Instead, each association, faction, and individual character has a slew of objectives which may be met or failed or partially completed. Some objectives are at odds with those for opposing sides, but some goals may also coexist with the enemies' goals.
Individuals may have goals that run at cross purposes with the motives of their allies, such as characters who strive to achieve divinity. Doing so comes at a steep resource cost to their group, in a clear case of guns versus butter opportunity costs.
There is also the potential for characters that are explicitly traitors to their cause, and I have ideas for mechanics to support that without letting it become pure griefing. Bounty systems, blood debts, marks of the heretic, and more! But that is a discussion for a future article.
A Vignette of Demons Running the Show
At the moment, all this discussion is pretty abstract. Let's solidify understanding by looking at the Demonic Sovereignty and what this association might have as a strategic minigame in the Blasphemess prototype (and potentially future incarnations too):
With all the hierarchy established by the Demonic Sovereignty, it should therefore be obvious that the starting point is the sovereign demon. They are a non-player character (NPC) in the setting, and ultimately a set piece for game masters to use to tell the broader story of the world the cluster is set in.
The sovereign appoints the other top positions of the hierarchy.
There might be a weighted claim system for demons qualified past some threshold of activity. For instance, if three demons are vying for a seat, and two of them manage to qualify by appointment time, there's a pseudo-random selection made by the game to grant the title to one of the qualified candidates.
Which raises the obvious question: "What are the titled positions in the hierarchy?"
The first may be the influential "Minister of Titles," a demon whose two duties are allocating a portion of the Sovereignty budget, and lending weight to the sovereign's candidates for titled positions.
The goal with this role is to create a demon who is easily tempted into taking bribes and trading favours. Someone who is powerful not in their ability to get things done, but rather, for their ability to stack the hierarchy with right-thinking fellows.
Next is the "Soul Collector," the demon in charge of the census, manages a portion of the budget, and is ultimately responsible in-lore for the collection of soul essence to power the sovereignty's demons. This role should be fairly functional, providing information for other demons to know the state of the Sovereignty's economic engine.
Third is the "Blood Debtor," the third and final manager of the budget portions. I envision this title to be an odd-job role. For instance, the demon holding the title gains bonuses for hunting down traitors to the hierarchy. They may pick up other fringe benefits as well.
Then for fourth and fifth there are the two roles competing for budget income: the "Minister of War" and the "Minister of Industry." Both have similarities, in that they do not directly gain individual benefits or powers. However, each gets a couple minigames to manage. They can appoint other demons – lower in the hierarchy – to lesser titled positions, for a cost in soul essence. Balancing appointing new titles with maintaining the currently titled demons upkeep is their mainstay, but each minister role can also set policy for the Sovereignty to bring in more resources, such as demonic artifacts or new weapons.
The sixth and seventh titled positions are likewise paired in similarity. The "Mage of Rites," that is restricted to mage types, and the "Procurer of Slaves," which is the suitably evil role for an empire of demons. Both roles are only capable of spending resources the association collected. They serve as a sink to compete for budget with the ministers.
With all the roles established, how might the game play out?
Well, the goal is to keep the economic engine from crashing whilst still managing to benefit yourself and your friends. Bribes, favours, embezzlement, favouritism, and more should be fair game for demons. Backstabbing should likely be a formal affair, as the Sovereign does not want too much open, direct conflict tearing apart the empire.
Thus you can have loyalist noble demons, who strive to keep the system running smoothly. There might be greedy, selfish demons seeking to rise to divinity with embezzled soul essence. Or even titled demons who favour only their close factionmates, and refuse to deal with others as they stack the seven top demon roles with their friends.
There's room for all sorts of player stories to emerge around demons in a cooperative venture together. I look forward to seeing what people do with them.
A Cursed Problem: Centralized Decision-Making In Cooperative Games
There are hard problems in game design. Then there are cursed problems in game design, as explained in a wonderful talk from GDC:
Hard problems can be solved with creativity and effort, without losing any of the promise of a game. Cursed problems, on the other hand, require sacrificing some portion of the promised game experience.
In the talk, there's a cursed problem mentioned for turn-based cooperative games that he calls the "quarter backing problem." In this case, a single player can reason about the entire game and make decisions centrally to have better performance. The downside is that there's less agency for other players, as they become effectively just hands enacting the will of the centralized decision maker.
This cursed quarter backing problem is one to bear in mind when designing the strategic minigames for the different associations in Blasphemess. I want to tune the minigames to be somewhere in the middle ground of cooperative and self-enriching, so that participants are not encouraged to give up their agency to fulfill the "optimal" strategy.
That is to say, I need to design reasons for player characters to make decisions against the cooperative venture. There needs to be options that range from purely selfish to purely cooperative. Whatever characters end up deciding to do will tell us a little bit about themselves.
I think that's good for built-in character moments and narratives within the gameplay.
Safety Tools: Encourage Players to Talk to One Another
There's an issue with conflict in a game, such as enabling player versus player (PvP) combat: it's normal to dislike your opponents and to not talk to them, thanks to something called "bleed." This is a huge risk for toxicity, and it benefits from safety tools.
Bleed is where emotions and stress in the game "bleed over" into real life, affecting relationships between players, and can even affect the overall enjoyment of the game.
This is not limited to PvP, it can crop up in many places, including when there's betrayals in-game, such as people forsaking the cooperative ventures for personal gain.
Let's set up a hypothetical PvP scenario: there's a player who only has one character in a cluster, and only plays one side. They feel like they are being consistently targetted by the enemy hunters. This feels unpleasant to them, as if they're being unfairly singled out, and they're not sure how to get back to having fun.
If this player had friends who played on the enemy side, or had a different character on that side themselves, they could determine quickly what's going on with the hunters by asking openly. This could be the start of a dialogue.
One of the biggest safety tools, in my opinion, is getting the players to talk to one another. It can be for a variety of reasons, like (in the above scenario) to clarify an assumption.
Another scenario is that two factions want to engage in intense warring. If players are talking to each other, they can stay attuned to how each side and individual is feeling about the conflict. If the warring gets to be too much, they can scale back the efforts to keep the fun intact.
No-holds-barred, all-out warring that razes opposing sides to the ground is an interesting PvP promise, but most people cannot help but get caught up in the feelings of losing. It's such a risky business for toxicity, which is why I'm so adamant about having a focus on player versus environment (PvE) gameplay with some PvP to make it interestingly balanced.
Of course, the people who want to play a no-holds-barred PvP game the most are those seeking to dominate and win, and are thus often those least equipped to handle losing. Losing is necessarily something that will happen roughly 30-50% of the time (if balance is tuned well).
Thus another safety tool worth considering is game-enforced bumper rails on all-out conflict. Things like having comeback mechanics to rubberband groups getting quashed consistently, grace periods, and guidance on spreading out targets so that it's not directed at any single players or groups.
The Willingness to Engage with the Fiction
My most memorable interactions have almost always been because of other players engaging in the shared fiction of the game.
Things like the zealous angel who became my angel-killing angel's rival. The zealous angel had a whole arc of being worn down and crying about their inability to take down my angel-killer, due to my character's toughness. Then there was the bittersweet breakthrough moment when they managed to stop my angel-killer for the first time, with coordinated help.
Or the time the chronically backstabbing faction called upon allies and enemies to join them in striking a random target, only to send the raiders through a portal into a trap in the middle of the ocean.
A large amount of fun is in knowing that the backstabbing faction members were going to backstab, but playing along in-character anyway. Going through with it gets a better story out of it. Players and their characters can act all surprised and offended by the betrayal, and it could kick off another event, or retaliation against the backstabbers.
Conversely, when people are too dead set on metagaming and playing to win, they won't engage in obvious traps like that. They're less interested in the story beats along the way, and more interested in the accomplishments leading up to "victory."
I personally find this to be a minor tragedy, and I'd much rather seek out players who engage with the fiction for a twisting and compelling story.
This is because the aim of Blasphemess is not for some players to win. Instead, it's about enabling everyone to explore interesting stories.
Closing Statement
This cooperative conflict is one of the loftier design intents of the Blasphemess project. We'll see how much of it actualises, and how players respond to all these intentions. I'm hopeful about the strategic minigames being a great opportunity for stories.
I'm trying to develop Blasphemess in a lean manner, and pivoting based on the community feedback is one major part of that.
As ever, though, there needs to be a game first before a community can be truly established. The more safety tools I can build in, the healthier the community is likely to be.
If you have any thoughts on safety tools in running online game communities, feel free to send them my way – via Mastodon, or comments on this blog!
