Designing MAJESTIC 13
A little more than a year ago, Adam explained to me his idea for MAJESTIC 13. It was built off the old, debunked, but very captivating MAJESTIC 12 conspiracy theory. His idea was that instead of 12 old men, it would be a group of 13 factions that were charged with defending the earth from a covert alien invasion.
Adam didn’t know it at the time, but I have long been a fan of alien encounters and UFO conspiracy theories. I grew up watching In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy (watching that before I ever watched Star Trek), X-Files, and every other weird alien story I could get my hands on. I was always fascinated by the idea that some being would travel across the massive universe and find us on our tiny blue marble. Space is so impossibly large, but there is actually something hopeful in the idea that other life would find us in this vast emptiness.
When I started designing the game, our focus was immediately on covert action – military-like teams fighting an asymmetrical battle against a larger, more powerful single opponent – and the entanglement of government and the sheer size of this organization and its myriad factions being a part of the challenge.
My earliest notes are all related to the primary loop and answering the most important question: how do you make a fight of five people with guns against a single enemy interesting? When you’re dealing with that situation in an RPG, you have lots of options (and it was a challenge there for years, hence why D&D added Lair actions in 5e). Ultimately, in an RPG, you have a human in control of the monster, who can make interesting choices, say interesting things, and perform in unexpected ways. We weren’t going to have a GM for this, so the monsters had to have something else that would change what I call “the long tail.” Generally, when you have a one against many scenario, the danger level is really high right at the beginning. The single, large bad guy will do his most devastating things first (think a Dragon breathing fire) and put the players on the ropes right away. If the players stabilize, the fight slowly becomes less challenging and less interesting over time. It’s a direct downward line of danger and interest. I knew we had to change this so the fight was actually interesting.
Out of this immediately came two things early in the design, which stayed. First, the aliens would start with their simplest attacks and rotate into their stronger attacks, delaying that immediate sense of extreme danger. Second, and most importantly, was the creation of In Extremis. The idea of the alien hurting itself from its own fury, but becoming significantly more dangerous at the end of the encounter meant two things. First, that long tail wouldn’t be so long, and the players wouldn’t be just rolling through the final activations hoping to hit to bring the damage that will inevitably end the now boring encounter. Second, it would mean that the danger level would spike way back up, just when the players felt like they had everything under control. Doubling the alien’s actions when they are so grievously wounded means they go out swinging in a big way.
Many things changed from the earliest design. When it comes to the dice and the specifics of what we used, I actually started with D10s, but abandoned that due to the math curves I wanted out of the stats – rolling 2d6 onto the base stats meant numbers would be much more predictable, but that set the average too high for making d10s work with enough RNG that things weren’t automatic in one direction or another. I think the most important lesson I can impart to any would-be game designer is, never fall too in love with your own rules. The old saying, you can’t be afraid to kill your darlings, was very true as I was writing this and kept trying different mechanics until we found the set that worked.
During alpha testing, we also discovered that players weren’t moving as much as we had hoped. We had increased the danger, and teams would scatter from the aliens most of the time, but there wasn’t a general sense of exploring the space or needing to move around the board. Hence, we went back and that is when secondary objectives were born.
I was emphatic that secondary objectives had to be purely movement based; they couldn’t require actions to accomplish. Nothing feels worse than having to decide between your model doing something fun (shoot at the enemy) and doing something “necessary” (complete a mechanical secondary objective for some bonus). But when we tested with these in place, we found that team members moved around the board much more, using the game area and creating a much more dynamic experience, especially when combined with Monster AI that also favored lots of movement.
Speaking of the alien’s Enemy AI, this is the most complicated AI we’ve created, because we wanted the monsters to really act in interesting ways, but I know it’s a hurdle to learning the game. I think the biggest barrier to entry in MAJESTIC 13 is the Enemy AI and understanding how the aliens should act. It’s a lot to learn and remember. Though I and the other play testers all had it ingrained in our heads after a few games, I am well aware it can be very tough for a new player. Enemy AI is something I am very interested in exploring more in future games. Walking the balance between something that makes the enemy feel like they are acting rationally (and in an interesting way) versus the complexity of those actions is something I am going to really focus on, perhaps even having multiple options for how enemies act based on the type of play experience the player wants to have (think standard vs. advanced).
Overall, this game was a ton of fun to create, and I really hope you love it as much as we do. If you have any questions, join the Discord where other enthusiasts of the game are sharing their awesome teams and deadly aliens, while discussing their experiences with the game. We’d love to see you there!
