Goonhub
I think conspirators is an absolutely amazing concept for roleplay, but also agree that it comes up short in a lot of ways. People have done some work on them relatively recently, but I'm in full support of changing things up.
My main issues are that there is a lack of motivation to follow conspirator goals, and that it suffers from identical problems to non-antagonist collectives of players in round do... specifically that it's easy to fall into the trap of collective decision making where so much time is spent discussing the thing and trying to get a consensus that people either get tired or the most cautious approach wins out due to a fear of upsetting someone. We should absolutely be considerate of other people's feelings, but the number of times I've seen security paralyzed with indecision... well, it's a lot.
If I were doing a from the ground up redesign here's what I would do... and I'm going to put these into tiers based on the complexity and impact of the changes.
First Tier
Either assign a randomly selected player as the leader of the conspiracy... or, preferably, allow the conspirators to elect a leader.
Remove most of the conspirator goals and focus on a core list of maybe a dozen possible objectives, that are very clearly interesting and offer a level of flexibility to the conspirators. They should be goals that can be used to drive a narrative across an entire round and don't end up leaving the rest of the crew out of the fun by just happening in some maintenance tunnel or in the darkest corners of botany.
Second Tier
Rework the objectives in a similar way to above, but for the sake of variety include some procedural generation content when it comes to objectives. Write the base objectives up in such a way that it allows for the insertion of relevant in-game items and concepts procedurally as part of the goal without breaking things.
Third Tier
Evolving goals with completion checking and some sort of endgame state for the conspirators. That's a massive lift, but it would admittedly be interesting if your "get 20 people to attend the clown's party in the bar" goal checked for 20 people in the bar with the clown wearing a birthday hat and led directly to hilarious consequences like an outbreak of clowning around.
My main issues are that there is a lack of motivation to follow conspirator goals, and that it suffers from identical problems to non-antagonist collectives of players in round do... specifically that it's easy to fall into the trap of collective decision making where so much time is spent discussing the thing and trying to get a consensus that people either get tired or the most cautious approach wins out due to a fear of upsetting someone. We should absolutely be considerate of other people's feelings, but the number of times I've seen security paralyzed with indecision... well, it's a lot.
If I were doing a from the ground up redesign here's what I would do... and I'm going to put these into tiers based on the complexity and impact of the changes.
First Tier
Either assign a randomly selected player as the leader of the conspiracy... or, preferably, allow the conspirators to elect a leader.
Remove most of the conspirator goals and focus on a core list of maybe a dozen possible objectives, that are very clearly interesting and offer a level of flexibility to the conspirators. They should be goals that can be used to drive a narrative across an entire round and don't end up leaving the rest of the crew out of the fun by just happening in some maintenance tunnel or in the darkest corners of botany.
Second Tier
Rework the objectives in a similar way to above, but for the sake of variety include some procedural generation content when it comes to objectives. Write the base objectives up in such a way that it allows for the insertion of relevant in-game items and concepts procedurally as part of the goal without breaking things.
Third Tier
Evolving goals with completion checking and some sort of endgame state for the conspirators. That's a massive lift, but it would admittedly be interesting if your "get 20 people to attend the clown's party in the bar" goal checked for 20 people in the bar with the clown wearing a birthday hat and led directly to hilarious consequences like an outbreak of clowning around.