Design Week 7 - One V. Many

I would say there are several things that define the advantages players have in groups and on their own. It reminds me of 1 vs 100 (the quiz show) where 1 person and 100 other people are competing for money. Having analysed Zatacka with Sean earlier I can suggest that part of it is the team work and micro management, and other factors that make it beneficial to be in both situations:

On your own it is:

- easier to manage where you go

- easier to strategies

- harder to avoid more obstacles if everyone is out to get your

- harder to achieve your goal without assistance

In groups it is:

- easier to reach your target with everyone working towards it

- easier to achiever you goal with less resources in possession

- harder to manage everyone else

- harder to prevent self-pwnage.

Therefore a game I propose would be a first person shooter game. The person on their own has to reach a goal area, whereas the group are aiming to kill the player. Normally in games such as quake this would be pretty unfair if there was an arsenal of weapons each person had access to. So at the start:

- each member of the mob only has close combat capabilities and one ranged shot (ie one bullet)

- close combat makes another player stunned for 5 seconds.

- if the mob hit the solo player then the solo player is sent back to their base.

- the solo person has a net gun which they can use to stop the other players from moving for 5 seconds.

- this gun has infinite ammo, but can only trap one person at a time

Each side has 60 seconds to achieve their goals:

Solo: must reach the goal within 60 seconds

Group: must stop the soloist from reaching the goal.

Each time you stun a person you get 1 point. If the soloist reaches the goal then he or she is awarded 10 points. If the soloist doesn't make it and died, the person who killed them is awarded 5 points and becomes the next soloist. If the soloist doesn't make it, but didn't die, each member of the mob gets 2 points and the person on the mob with the highest score for that round becomes the mob. The winner is the first person to reach a total score of 30.

Having no ability to playtest it I cannot accurately predict how this would end up, but I would like to believe it allows for creativity and skill development and soloists undergo the challenge of dodging lots of attacks, and teams figure out interesting ways of working together. There would also be an element of back-stabbing as one person might forego the strategy in order to get ahead.