Meta-Mechanics Worth Stealing

A number of games introduce a cool mechanic (or meta-mechanic) that can be used in other games without too much work.

For instance, Ars Magica introduced the notion of troupe play, where each player has multiple characters of different power levels and plays one of them each session.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer took the idea of drama points and added a twist: weaker, "supporting cast" characters get more drama points than powerful characters like the Slayer.

Pendragon introduced stats for personality traits, in opposed trait pairs: These stats can be used descriptively, to reflect how a character has acted, or prescriptive, to determine how a character should act. Characters with high (or low) enough scores in the right traits can gain bonuses for being, for instance, a good Christian knight.

Also, between adventures, Pendragon characters go through a winter phase, during which they age, advance their personal lives (court a lady, marry, sire heirs), maintain their lands, etc.

Champions introduced the idea of separating special effects from game mechanics. It doesn't matter what kind of energy blast your superhero uses -- fire, mutant eye beams, magical bolts -- under the hood, the game relies on the same basic mechanics.

Feng Shui espouses the notion that the game should encourage, rather than discourage, "cool" actions, so stunts suffer no penalties for difficulty.

Feng Shui also suggests plotting your game to include three action sequences in "awesome" locales and to think up a short list of cool things that could happen at each location -- bits of the scenery that might explode, good spots for people to fall down from, stuff that can be picked up and thrown, etc.

Sorcerer recommends that every character start with a kicker, something that just happened (before the start of play) to kick the character into action.

In The Shadow of Yesterday, characters have keys -- motivations, problems, connections, duties, and loyalties -- and are rewarded (with experience points) for acting on them. Further, a character can earn a particularly large one-time reward with a buyoff -- acting opposite the key and giving it up forever.

In D&D, a player can Take 10 on a d20 roll, automatically succeeding at easy enough tasks without risking a die roll. Also, a player can Take 20 on a d20 roll for an action with no negative consequences, rather than rolling the die repeated until a natural 20 occurs.

In Stormbringer, each character begins play with a single trinket of personal significance.

Unknown Armies introduces multiple madness meters -- Violence, Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self -- for different kinds of mental trauma. Failing a stress check forces a character to fight, fly, or freeze while accumulating a failed point on that meter; 5 failed points means temporary insanity. Succeeding at a stress check forces a character to accumulate a hardened point; 10 hardened points mean the character has become a cold-blooded sociopath.

In 7th Sea, disadvantages grant bonuses only when triggered, not at character creation.

Can you recommend any similar "meta-mechanics worth stealing" for your own game? Have you used any of these in your own game?

The d6 System Wild Die

Bye
Thanee

True20 has the Take 5 mechanic Similar to the take 10 rule, but it can be used even during stressful situations. You're just that good.

The character creation system from Spirit of the Century; each player creates a character by coming up with some basic genre-appropriate traits (similar to Shadow of Yesterday's keys) and then fleshes out his character by coming up with the title and premise of a pulp novel the PC starred in - as well as guest-starring in other PCs' books or series prior to the start of the game.

Patience, from Super Console, is a *brilliant* metagame mechanic. Basically, each player starts with a pool of Patience and may expend it to achieve a variety of effects (such as searching every nook and cranny of cleaned-out dungeon, fighting a no-threat mook battle, or solving a puzzle) that would otherwise take time with little gameplay component; in SC itself, it actually allows you to level up, but that's because it's a 75-level system rather than 20-level like d20. Not only does it speed up gameplay, it tells you exactly what the players are/aren't interested in!

Also, I don't really think you can call Champions' effects-based mechanics a 'meta-mechanic' in the same sense as these others. It's a design philosophy that has to be implemented from the ground up, not something you can bolt onto an existing system.

Another that would be hard to bolt on after the fact, though less so than the principles of the HERO system, is the way conflict is escalated in Dogs in the Vineyard: the player chooses how much risk he wants to put his character in/how important a given conflict is to him, but gets greater effects if he 'bids' higher consequences.

EDIT: Removed redundant bits, added more.

Background - almost everything you listed and any imaginable number of other mechanics fit right into a background. They can be as simple as the "cool starting weapon with history and mystery" to a split personality character where some stats are different depending on the personality currently in control.

Of course you have the dreams, foreshadowing, past events, and so on which you play with expendable characters to flesh out the story in Vampire The Masquerade.

The swashbuckling cards courtesy of Scratch Factory (and us, apparently) adds immensly to any game. (Used them in CoC last night. "Drop your weapon..." saved my character from being eaten by a byakhee. Just so you know. )

Feng Shui espouses the notion that the game should encourage, rather than discourage, "cool" actions, so stunts suffer no penalties for difficulty.

Feng Shui also suggests plotting your game to include three action sequences in "awesome" locales and to think up a short list of cool things that could happen at each location -- bits of the scenery that might explode, good spots for people to fall down from, stuff that can be picked up and thrown, etc.

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I've used those two in D&D with some success.

Also, Feng Shui gives some good advice on how to handle mooks - enemies that can't dream on scratching the PCs, and who are expecting to die (or maybe it wasn't the book, but a web page with advice on how to run feng shui games)

mmadsen said:

In The Shadow of Yesterday, characters have keys -- motivations, problems, connections, duties, and loyalties -- and are rewarded (with experience points) for acting on them. Further, a character can earn a particularly large one-time reward with a buyoff -- acting opposite the key and giving it up forever.

Click to expand...

That sounds really interesting. Can you give some more detailes on how it works?

Torg's Drama Deck. Players are given cards that they can play to get bonuses on different types of action, or play them to introduce subplots into the game. DMs use the cards to moderate the flow of combat and resolve large-scale dramatic skill resolution.