Wildcard Roles
This design document was once relevant, but was deemed unsatisfactory before being implemented into Ephemeral Space.
The following reason was given for its removal: "Wildcards as a whole are an aspect of multistation oriented thinking that no longer fits ES's wider design. In particular they don't mesh well with Masquerades, and create isolated pockets of gameplay separate from the wider game."
A portion of the station, at roundstart, are selected to be Wildcards--pawns in the round that are external to the main crew experience. These can include things like:
- Solo free agent roles (shitty pod guy)
- Antagonistic team roles (pirates)
- Neutral team roles (asteroid inhabitants like ashwalkers)
- Helpful solo/team roles (traders)
- Grey team roles (swarmer drones)
Wildcard roles are never considered part of the crew troupe at roundstart, are not part of the typical role pool, and have goals of their own that may lead them into conflict or cooperation with the crew and other wildcards. Gameplay for them should be crafted so that they have reason to interact with things that will affect the station's inhabitants in a nuanced way, but they do not necessarily need to directly interface with the crew in "roleplay".
Notes: It probably makes sense to select some roles first, and only shunt players off into the wildcard pool if they only selected roles that are already fully saturated, or once an adequate number of each role has been selected?
Wildcards will often be humanoids with the same capacity as the station crew, in which case they may opt into having masks. Specific wildcard roles can decide whether they will roll masks, and what subset/weighting of masks they should use. Wildcards may also be nonhumanoid, in which case they should not roll masks.
When the round starts and the players who will be put into the wildcard pool are selected, they are given a selection of wildcard roles and allowed to vote on which to play.
Notes: I don't really know what the voting mechanism for this should look like, to be honest, but I want the wildcard players to have a good degree of freedom over what wildcard they get to play, since they didn't get to be part of the crew.