TIGD Wk 4: Role Selection

Thanks, Richard, for another great opening article. You are, as far as I know, quite right that few games so far have used this mechanic, yet because each has been so excellent, and, as you mention, one of them, Puerto Rico, is The Greatest Game Ever, it seemed like it was worth devoting a week to this up-and-coming mechanic. Another motivator is that many of the designers here have expressed interest in using the mechanic in some form or another.

I think that Role Selection has a lot of the same advantages as Action Point Allowance, in that it allows a variety of different kinds of actions to be taken. Unlike Action Point systems, however, in which you parcel out a few actions during your turn, Role Selection is far more interactive, as it says "these are the actions that the group as a whole will be able to take".

This adds great tension, but it is flexible in that it can create different kinds of tension. In the case of Citadels or Verrater, the tension comes from "I hope I get the role that I want to use" -- the "scarcity" problem. (Of course, there's also a "who picked what?" "headgame" element, which I'll leave alone for now...) In Puerto Rico, the tension comes from the relative order of the role executions: "I want to Trade my Coffee before someone makes me Ship it". And I suspect that there are other kinds of tension that the mechanic can be used to create. But in all cases, it's a great route to interactive tension, as opposed to Action Point systems where the tension must come from somewhere else.

One "weakness" in Role Selection can be the potential for table seating order effects; if only X roles are available, then the order in which players choose roles is very important. This has been handled various ways, which I'll leave for others to discuss.

It's hard to say whether Role Selection will become as used (or overused!) as auctions, since they accomplish such different aims. But I would suspect that because of the flexibility of the mechanic, it can be dropped into almost any context plausibly, and can be exploited to create great tension, meaning that for better or for worse, we're probably going to see a lot of games with this kind of mechanic.

Other games that I might put in this class include Lowenherz and Age of Mythology.

-Jeff

Scurra wrote:

Agreed, although I think we also need to think about what jwarrend wrote:

For example, I'm working on a game where there are a number of actions (which could be considered to be defined by roles). The first action chosen can be done a total number of times across all players equal to the number of players. The next action chosen can be done one less time ... and so on ... However, there is no need for all players to do the same type of action ... for example ... using the role is Peurta Rico, we might have ...

Player 1 - Builder (4>3)
Player 2 - Craftsman (3>2)
Player 3 - Builder (3>2)
Player 4 - Captain (2>1)
Player 1 - Builder (2>1)
Player 2 - Trader (1>0)
Player 3 - Builder (1>0)
Player 4 - Craftsman (2>1)
Player 1 - Captain (1>0)
Player 2 - Craftsman (1>0)

[Admittedly this idea was inspired by a discussion here on BGDF in (randomly) putting a number next to each of the roles]

Thus, the key concept here is scarcity of certain actions as defined by the players.

That said, is this role selection? We have different roles that define different actions as in Peurta Rico, but all actions don't need to be taken as a bunch. Also, not all roles can be taken each turn like in Peurta Rico ...

If you want to argue that what we're calling "role selection" is really, in every implementation, composed of sub-mechanics that are more primitive, I won't necessarily disagree with that, except to say that under such analysis, almost any mechanic can be reduced to something more primitive. After all, "roll and move" is "roll" and "move", which are techically distinct operations.

However, I wouldn't go as far as you did and say that it's inappropriate to group the games together as belonging in the same family. I'll expand on this below.

I wouldn't really consider "Citadels" to be what one commonly thinks of with "variable player powers". When I think of "vpp", I think of Cosmic Encounter, or other games in which each player has some ability that "breaks" one of the game's rules or gives special abilites over and above the standard mecha. This is sort of the case with Citadels, for the reason you point out, but the differences are much more profound than the similarities. There's no question that Citadels is closer to Verrater than to Cosmic, particularly given that the role selection mechanic was lifted from that game! And the action selection mechanic of PR is a logical descendent of the character mechanic from Citadels and Verrater. It seems very uncontroversial, to me at least, to say that PR, Citadels, and Verrater all use a similar mechanic; sure, they use it in different ways, but they still form a "family".

Again, this may be accurate at a level of mechanics primitives, but I would say that PR and Tikal, say, an Action Point game, bear almost no similarity whatsoever, certainly in comparison with Citadels, which you're arguing is a totally different mechanic.

As you read in Richard's summary,

Now, I claim there's no element of conflation here; he's just describing a mechanic. What you're saying is that the specific implementations of the mechanic Richard describes go in different directions, and thus can be more adequately understood in terms of other mechanical descriptors, but I wouldn't say that because of this observation the games fail to be described by Richard's descriptor. In other words, if you want to differentiate the games at a fine-grain level, that's fine, but at a coarse-grain level, they're certainly similar enough that we can approach them similarily and try to understand the overall mechanic that Richard describes by exploring its various implementations.

I'm afraid I have to agree; PR pulled together these and a bunch of other mechanics that people have been playing around with in designs for years, but PR represents, I think, the culmination of those mechanics into the "perfect" game (or as close as one is likely to get). Curiously, as Seth observed in our other PR thread, PR's greatness isn't even due primarily to the role selection, yet inevitably, games that use role selection will get compared to PR -- and dismissed as inferior. (c.f. Age of Mythology). There's plenty of room left for role selection, but it's always going to need a twist. Curiously, the one that GeminiWeb describes above seems like the logical "next step" to Puerto Rico -- action selection with the restriction that *almost* all players will get to take the action. Another direction for this mechanic is one that I'm going in in a couple of games, in which you add a cost structure to taking the actions.

But, no question, designing the next "Puerto Rico" will be tough, because it will, I claim, need to pull on a different family of mechanics, some of which probably don't exist yet.

-Jeff

jwarrend wrote:

Hmmm ... looks like I'm starting to think like jwarrend (Aside - jwarrend, should I be worried?). I was just about to make a comparison to Tikal, where a role selection mechanism could be added where each role ("treasure hunter", "digger", etc.) had different action point costs for the different actions ...

As it turns out, Everest is a fine game with the Action Points, but maybe that's an example of how to look at something and see if Role Selection would work for it.

- Seth

Maharaja is an interesting case. The roles are not chosen every turn or something like that; they are auctioned off once (or simply drafted, depending on which variant you use) at the start of the game and, theoretically, you keep them for the rest of the game. The role of a player can change during the course of a game and it probably will, several times, but you have to "waste" an action to do it. This puts the uses of roles (or special powers) in Maharaja somewhere between that of Cosmic Encounter and Citadels.

I feel that the use of roles in Maharaja is not an integral part of the game. It is not hard to imagine the game without the special abilities of those roles. In a sense, it's only a nice way of determining turn order and breaking ties with some extra gravy. I wouldn't be surprised if the special abilities of the roles were added late in the design stage.

- René Wiersma

But that's why I was arguing that Citadels and Puerto Rico are different: in Citadels, only one person can be the Assassin during any particular round, whereas in PR one of the tricks of the game is that sometimes you want someone else to choose a certain role so that you can take advantage of it without having to choose it yourself.

(btw, sorry about missing your earlier point about phase order, but I was trying to tie it in to the Action Point comment I made.)

I was saying that Citadels is Variable Player Powers, not Variable Phase Order. [All the roles in Citadels do indeed "break" the rules: the difference with CE is that they don't do it to such an extreme extent, and that's because the roles change hands every round so you can't let them do that.] I certainly think that Citadels doesn't belong with CE in terms of other factors such as variable player order within a round, which shows you why grouping games together is always a mistake ;-))

I don't completely disagree, but again, we're not trying to group games so much as isolate mechanics and understand them. Viewed from that lens, do you agree that Citadels and PR can both be said to be "role selection" games, as defined by Richard above? If so, then we can talk about them in light of both their similarities AND differences. But saying that they're just fundamentally different is not accurate, particularly given the "evolution" that the games represent.

Then I must apologize, because I am clearly not understanding you at all. Your initial post said that considering the character mechanics of PR and Citadels to both be describable as "Role Selection" mechanics represented conflation of two different mechanics, the mechanics you're calling "Variable Player Powers" and "Variable Phase Order." What I'm saying is that your point is entirely semantic; saying PR is a "Variable Phase Order" game does not preclude it from also being a "Role Selection Game." I mean, come on...the role selection mechanic Puerto Rico was obviously lifted directly from the Verrater/Citadels family, but given the "twist" that now, everyone gets to take the action. That may retrospectively turn out to be close to "variable phase order" games, but it doesn't mean there's no such thing as a "role selection" mechanic, which is what you seemed to be saying.

Here:

If you want to say that these different approaches have different effects on player experience, different attendant problems, lead to different play styles, etc, I would heartily agree, and I'd hasten to point out that this is exactly what we want to discuss here! How these games, using a similar base mechanic, veer in such different and interesting directions. But if instead you want to say that the games can't intelligently be understood as "role selection games", and that we should break this discussion up into two separate discussions, I not only disagree, but I claim the whole thing is something of a red herring. In these games, we have a rare opportunity to watch a mechanic emerge and evolve, with each implementation using the mechanic in a different way but still in a recognizable way. Let's take advantage of what we can learn from such an evolution as designers, and not split hairs over "technically, this game should be in category A while this one should be in category B". We agree that categorization attempts are always somewhat forced and doomed to fail at some level anyway; nevertheless, there are still commonalities that we can understand and learn from. Let's do that!

-Jeff

You know, I never really saw the similarities between "Puerto Rico" and "Citadels" until I read some comments on the Geek about "PR" using a role selection mechanic similar to that in "Citadels". Yes, you pick roles in both games, but they have a very different function in those games.

Strange as it sounds, but, much like in "Maharaja", the role selection mechanic in "Citadels" isn't the core mechanic in the sense that the game wouldn't work without it. The role selection presents the most interesting decisions in the game and it really wouldn't be fun without it, but you would still be able to draw cards and/or get money to build those buildings and the game would still technically function.

Compare this to Puerto Rico, where each role (with the exception of the prospector) is needed for the game to work properly. You can't toss out a few roles and add a few new ones, because then you run the risk of breaking the game's core system.

To me it seems that during the design of "Citadels" the role selection mechanic came first and the money/building mechanic was added to give meaning to that role selection mechanic, whereas during the design of "Puerto Rico" the basic actions and underlying mechanisms came first (getting plantations, building, adding colonists, producing goods, shipping goods, selling goods) and the role selection mechanic was chosen as the mechanic to be able to execute all those actions.

Of course, I'm not sure if that is the way in which those games were designed, but it sure does look that way to me and it would explain why two games with a similar mechanic, play and feel so differently.

- René Wiersma

This leads into Richard's point about "open" vs. "secret" selection of roles. The game "Lowenherz" has a "role selection mechanic" of sorts where there are 3 actions available, and each player has 3 cards, with which he selects which action he wants to take. (and when 2 players pick the same action, they have to negotiate or else "fight it out" to see who gets it) Now, when the game was being explained to me for the first time, I assumed that this meant that players would select their roles simultaneously and secretly. But, not so -- it is face-up, going around the table. Thus, you choose to enter a conflict, rather than happening upon one. It's such a simple difference, but it leads to a game that plays dramatically different than the one I thought was being explained.

Citadels is like that; the game completely hangs on the secrecy of the selection, and the divorce between the players and the roles. That's why I felt that Citadels isn't a good example of VPP; not only do the roles change hands, but the actions associated with the roles are tied to the other roles. The Assassin says "I'm going to kill the King", not "I'm going to kill Scurra, that miserable wretch!"

But rather than revisit that debate, what I want to point out is my surprise at your claim that the game can be navigated smoothly without engaging in the "head game", by which I assume you mean the idea that when I'm picking my roles, I try to analyze who's likely to have picked what roles before me, and who's likely to pick which roles after me. I confess to not having played a lot, but my impressions in playing were that this "head game" is absolutely essential to winning; that someone who can't do it well will find themselves missing a lot of turns or a lot of gold; but of course, this is little more than an impression. Now, I would say that one need not play it to an incredibly deep level, but I do suspect that everyone plays it on some superficial level. Example: All players have 1 Gold, except for Joe who has 7 Gold. Now, which player is going to be a target for the Thief? And thus, wouldn't it behoove the player who wishes to select the Thief to try to figure out who Joe might pick? (and conversely, for Joe to decide what role he's "telegraphing" and avoid that role?)

At any rate, I think that the inability to directly attack a player is where the headgame comes from, and I think it's a cool aspect of the game. I think it makes the game more interactive than the PR system, but then, the powers are more interactive as well; there is no analogue in PR to the "soldier" ability (destroy another player's building), for example. However, I've always felt that PR was a very highly interactive game; it's just the interaction is more indirect, which I find in some ways more satisfying.

A curiosity in this discussion is that we seem to be gravitating to Citadels and PR. Has anyone played Verrater or Meuterer? Since they're the games that started this whole thing off, it seems like they're worthy of discussion as well. They're a bit more obscure, but having the advantage of being completely contained in a box of cards, meaning that you get a pretty robust game for under $10; a pretty substantial accomplishment, and one that's spurred me to try (thus far unsuccessfully) to make a game out of just a single deck of cards...

As a completely unrelated note, I saw Citadels in a local game store for $60 the other day. Yowsa! For comparison, I think they were charging $45 for PR. I think the online stores are calling me...

-Jeff

To me, anyway, discussion of "this isn't a homogeneous thing" is just as valid a discussion point as any other. In fact for me it's more valuable than anything else.

-- Matthew

After reading Jeff’s clarification of what a Role Selection Game is, I’m wondering if a mechanic I’ve been thinking about using for some of my games even qualifies as Role Selection. Maybe it would be useful to the discussion if you guys were to comment.

Imagine a game of Puerto Rico in which each player has his own set of role cards. On a player’s turn he could play any role card he had not already used. The next player can use the same role card from his set or choose a different role for himself. After a player’s entire set has been used up he picks up all of his cards and continues as before.

Am I describing Role Selection, or is this some sort of Action Allowance?

Wow! It's amazing how much discussion occurs when I'm asleep down in Oz!

I'm relatively new to the various rules of thread etiquette, but to add in my 2 (Australian) cents in ...

The key for me is summarised in jwarrend's comment:

Well, I think this thread has been great for that, whether or not it has deviated a bit from the original definition, largely in part because its forced me to look closer at the mechansim of 'role selection' and understand the possible ways to implement it.

I really like the fact that we have started classififying different sorts of examples (e.g. variable phase order, variable turn order, varaiable player powers) not only because it opens up different ideas as to what is possible based on our own limited experience, but also because it encourages us to embrace the differences and explore how they can be combined ... or entirely new interpretations can be incorporated into game design.

For example, an old Puerta Rico discussion sparked the idea I mentioned previously where the order the roles were selected impacted on the number of times the action could be performed across all players. (Whether the game I'm incorporating it into will work is of course a whole different issue ...) Without that earlier discussion however, I probably wouldn't have even considered such a mechanic (particularly as I hadn't even played PR at that time ... have now played it once).

... so where I am going with all this?

By all means use Richard's definition - it was a great starting point for the discussion and we need to control the scope of our discussion somehow. However, also bring up other ideas which might be related ... and if they are too different or too 'out there', we can set them aside for another week and have a whole new thread just about them.

And Richard - thanks! You've obviously succeeded in getting everyone thinking about role selection and that's what matters!

Also, for those who missed it, the point of this post was to note that value of trying to understand the different ways to implement role selection in a game and the associated impacts on the mechanics.

It's funny, I also have a game that works pretty much in this fashion, although with a couple of twists. I don't know whether I'd call it "Role Selection" or not. As Richard observes, the games we're talking about here all have in common that each Role is available to the entire group only a limited number of times. And as David (Scurra) points out, part of what makes these games work so well is the psychology element.

That said, I think it's a fine mechanic, and could lead to an interesting game, whether or not we call it "Role Selection" or not. I'm inclined to say we wouldn't, but that's only because doing so would require modifying the definition a bit. That being said, I think the point your post does raise is the question of what characteristics are essential to what we're calling "role selection", and which are merely incidental.

But again, I think it's legitimate and desirable to talk about the subsets!

Yeah, I wonder if it wouldn't be interesting to have a series, or a single discussion, perhaps on "watershed games"; games like Verrater that may not be that well known but that pioneered a mechanic or concept that was subsequently used extensively in other games.

Now that's a very interesting and crucial observation. It does seem that what we're calling "role selection" does lead in all the cases we've discussed to a head game at some level or other. What is it that motivates the headgame? I would argue that there are (at least) two dominant factors. The first is the scarcity problem; if only one player is going to get each action/ability, then making your choice not only means knowing what you want, but calculating what others want and possibly depriving them. The other is the sequencing problem, and that, interestingly, leads to a commonality between Citadels and PR (and there's the same thing in Lowenherz, as well). In each case, your role choice is motivated in part by which actions take place before which other actions. The games do this differently, of course, but in Citadels, you may find yourself wanting to choose Assassin so that there's no way the Thief can steal your big pile of gold; in PR, you may find yourself wanting to Trade your Coffee before someone forces you to Ship it. (In Lowenherz, sometimes you'll choose a less powerful action simply because it occurs first in the turn sequence). What other factors can motivate the headgame?

Now I see your point. It's actually an interesting point; I suspect that if you chose "foolishly", you could get hammered (for example, if you always choose the role that is most obviously the one you would be expected by others to want). But making your plays *randomly* may actually work in some cases. I agree, that is a problem, if it works; but I haven't played enough to know whether it does.

I think that Lowenherz solves this by pushing the headgame to a different place -- when two people choose the same role, they must negotiate, or, failing that, must "duel" by simultaneously selecting an amount of Gold to put up, with the winner being the one who put up the most gold. But you're right, the head game doesn't come from "I wonder what everyone else is choosing", although it's still there at some level; if I'm going to choose first, do I pick a role that's less attractive but perhaps is less likely to be contested by other players?

At any rate, I think your observation is spot-on. What makes this mechanic so interesting and successful is the head game that comes out of it. In that sense, Setarcos' game above probably has a head-game of its own, but it's probably a different kind of head game than these games. The question becomes, I guess, when using Role Selection systems, should we keep the "spirit" of these games or is it only the "function" (an interesting means for choosing actions) that matters? I suppose it depends on the game...

Nice observation!

-Jeff