Tag: mechanics

Shape of a Mechanic

March 21, 2011

I wanted to talk about a concept I’ve recently hit upon that I’m calling a mechanic’s “shape”. To do that I have to introduce a few prerequisite concepts, but first, a caveat. I don’t believe in a grand unified theory of game design. Instead, I take a view that’s closer described as “there are many facets to truth.” So, when I say that I need to define what I mean by mechanic in the first place, I’m not claiming to have a perfect, complete, or final definition of the term. I can only bring up the parts that are currently on my mind here.

To me, a game mechanic is a rule, strategy, behavior, or convention that governs some sort of activity or sub-activity in a game. It has a domain that it applies to—where it fits in the entire system of mechanics. A simple mechanic might be “when you hit someone with a weapon, you roll that weapon’s damage dice and inflict that many hit points of damage.” The mechanic tells you what its domain is or the activity that it applies to—in this case, hitting someone with a weapon. It also tells you what to do when that thing happens—roll damage and reduce hit points.

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Game Design

mechanics, theory
Leveraged!

February 28, 2011

We just played through Leverage and it has me thinking a lot about a lot of different pieces. On balance, we had a ton of fun with it, even with only a passing familiarity with the rules. I’m sure our second play through will be smoother.

As a license-based game, the system captures the feel of the original show amazingly well. You don’t play the original team; instead there’s a very compelling system of generating a few details of your character and having the rest revealed through your first job. I’ve not really thought deeply about the many ways to construct character creation rules, so this was fun to play with. Many of the bits left undefined are textual descriptors, which can be challenging to define without having played the character (as we’ve found with In a Dragon-Guarded Land). Defining them slightly later helps provide inspiration.

Nominally, the rules suggest that these details should be provided via flashback scenes, which is very much in the show’s style. However, we struggled to break out of our pre-conceptions about play needing to be done linearly. A lot of this game’s challenge lies in figuring out what to focus on and what to gloss over and fill in later with a flashback. The thing that’s most interesting about flashbacks in this game is that those scenes can be used for retroactive narrative positioning with no other mechanical effect. In theory, that’s a tool that could be used in any game.

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Game Design

character creation, Leverage, mechanics, process during play
Marked and Unmarked Mechanics

February 23, 2011

Back to grinding the “mechanics are important” axe! I want to talk about a concept that comes from sociology—marked traits—and how it applies to role-playing games.

Certain RPGs hold a privileged status when compared to smaller production games. D&D, and to some extent the World of Darkness, are two such games. These systems are considered “normal” from a mechanical view. Their traits are unmarked while other games are noted for the ways in which they differ from this status quo.

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Game Design

cards, dice, indie, marked, mechanics, OGL, unmarked
A Circulatory System

February 21, 2011

A heart, courtesy of thevintagecollective on Flickr.

Here’s an idea that I’ve been hashing out with my friends Alex and Amir, neither of whom have enough internet presence to link to, sadly.

Looking at games like Mouse Guard and Dread, we started thinking about limited resources, particularly resources-for-action, and refresh mechanics. Let me unpack that a bit. Both games very nicely constrain action: in Mouse Guard, there are two phases to play, and in one, the Players’ Turn, you can only act n times, where n increases by taking more badness during the GM‘s turn. In Dread, every action brings the group closer to a horrible death by making the Jenga tower more precarious, but every horrible death resets the tower, partially.

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Game Design

Dread, Fiasco, mechanics, Mouse Guard, theory
Character Death

February 13, 2011

When a character dies, it can be a real buzzkill in a lot of games. Some games make this not so—in Fiasco, you can continue to exert influence over the story, in the name of a dead character, just as easily as a live one. In Dogs in the Vineyard, you don’t die unless you’ve had a dramatic death scene, and figured that the conflict was worth staking your life on. But in many other games? Death can happen all too easily, once anything comes to blows.

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Game Design

death, fun, mechanics, Spirit of the Century, theory
Power and Balance

February 5, 2011

Reading through Leverage, there’s something very interesting to be learned from the section on creating a job. In Leverage, both the show and the game, the crew’s marks are pretty much always rich and powerful, guarded by as much physical, financial, and legal protection as they want. Yet they are all still vulnerable.

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Game Design

balance, being awesome, fun, Leverage, mechanics, Shadowrun, theory
Ars est Celare Artem

February 4, 2011

Kabuki Stagecrew

That’s Latin for “the art is in concealing the art”. I’ve long held it dear as a motto, through work as a stagehand to work as a systems administrator. In both such jobs, the pinnacle of achievement is to do your job such that people not only don’t know you’re doing it, but forget that it’s even a job that needs to be done.

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Game Design

mechanics, theater, theory
Mechanics with Side-Effects

February 3, 2011

I want to talk for a bit about something I sometimes see in RPGs (and, less often, in other games): mechanics that resolve one thing while producing a side-effect for something else. For example, critical hits in D&D, divine interventions in In Nomine, and the complications/opportunities system in the Leverage RPG. For the purposes of this article, a side-effect mechanic is primarily about one thing (whether you succeed at something, generally) but that produces a side-effect that is taken into consideration elsewhere in the game.

That's the way I roll

First, though, I’m not a huge fan of side-effect mechanics. I find they usually add more complexity than benefit. They can be jarring if the side-effect is something fairly removed from the original thing being resolved. Side effects have to be balanced such that they work with the core mechanic, neither ruining its original feel nor making the secondary effect insignificant. In short, the whole concept is troubled from a design perspective. Still, there are times when it’s completely appropriate. Where and when is the key question.

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Game Design

criticals, D&D, In Nomine, Leverage, mechanics, theme
Math, Crunch, and Dice

January 30, 2011

As designers and players, we’re into narrative-focused, story-oriented games. Such games typically eschew complex mechanics in favor of one or two thin premises and a boat-load of charm. So what then, do we have to say about the “crunch”—the technical rules—in our games? Surprisingly, we spend a fair amount of time debating how to mechanize everything from war to afternoon tea.

Game mechanics are not optional in a role-playing game. If done correctly, they can re-emphasize the narrative, in the same way that a picture frame can help a viewer focus on a painting or courses in a meal help a diner enjoy an elaborate meal. If done wrong, they become a distraction to telling a story. In some examples, they may subvert the role-playing altogether as players concentrate more on leveling up than saving kingdoms or winning love.

Here’s the thing I find essential: Mechanics in RPGs are as much a form of world-building as the setting of a game; perhaps moreso. As Austin pointed out about Exalted, when the mechanics of your game don’t support the fiction of your story, the entire affair approaches farce. That, incidentally, is one of the reasons that indie games so frequently have novel mechanics and concentrate on stories of a particular type. By stripping down the system to just the pieces that are essential to establishing the feel of the game, a designer can push players towards styles of play that those mechanics are good for.

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Game Design

mass-combat, mechanics, theory, world-building