The theme is basically like the opening scene in the first Matrix movie, except with more people and some betrayal elements. Some group of coworkers or friends are being guided through some dangerous, randomly generated, puzzle like situation by an unknown omniscient caller.
One person plays the caller, and the rest play members of the party being guided. Each party member is trying to survive the situation with as many of their companions as possible, but will be hard pressed to do so without the caller's guidance due to hidden information . The caller knows everything about the game state and is attempting to guide certain randomly pre-selected members of the party to safety, while leading the others to their dooms. He can only communicate to the group as a whole, and only he knows which members he is supposed to save, and which members he is supposed to kill.
The caller must be clever in his guidance, in order to simultaneously lead his targets to death, and the others to safety. The party members must be discerning as to which of the callers instructions they will follow and which they will disobey in order to escape with as many surviving members as possible.
Each game will consist of multiple rounds, between each round the situation is regenerated and all eliminated players are revived. At the end of each round every surviving party member will receive a number of points proportional to the number of surviving players. The caller will receive points for each target which dies during the round, and each non-target which survives the round. After a preset number of rounds, the player with the most points wins.
What do you guys think? Has this been done before? Any feedback is appreciated.
I imagine the environment/puzzles will be represented by modular tiles, though I might go a more abstract route. I haven't really figured out the details yet.
Good point on the scoring system. Perhaps if the caller received points for saving non-targets, and killing targets, and lost points for letting targets live, and for killing non-targets. Then have the party members lose points for dying and gain points proportional to the number of survivors if they survive. Have it worked out so that if they all died the caller would lose points. That way the caller would have to be precise in with his killing in order to avoid losing points, and the party members would rarely have incentive to commit suicide since they would lose points.