What Mechanics or Systems Do You NEED?

[Thomas Shey]

Its hard for me to answer this generically, since a lot of it depends on the purpose the game is serving. That said, the more likely I am to find myself in areas the mechanics don't cover, the less happy I am with the system, so at the very least the core elements of the system have to be broad enough to be easily extended. But to make it clear, that's necessary but no sufficient.

 

[Blue]

What do I NEED?: Absolutely nothing. I've played completely storytold games without rules, games with a coin and no rules, and a game with rules that the players intentionally didn't know.

That said, that's a HECK of a load on the gamemaster, and complete trust from the players. I wouldn't want to game like that regularly. So...

What do I need?: A resolution mechanism. Either individual task or more complex. Enough of a character that interacts with the mechanism. Lasers & Feeling "roll under or roll over" is technically enough.

What do I need?: To really enjoy a game, I need:

• A rule system that actively supports the genre, the archetypes within it, and the types of challenges and conflict the genre expects us to overcome. Preferably with both a granular task resolution when "zoomed in" (like D&D combat) to points important for the genre/type of game and a not-a-single-roll challenge resolution system that can handle solo or multiple people, in concert or opposition.
• Enough rules to constitute a shared understanding of the game so that I can understand and plan within the rules instead of just "Mother May I".
• Rules and mechanics that offload from the GM allowing them to tell the story instead of get bogged down in minute resolutions, as well as provide a consistent feel.
• Enough customization to create individualized characters that have mechanical support for their differences, strengths, and flaws.
• Character balance being defined as equal amount of spotlight due to mechanical and/or resolution reasons over the course of a mission/adventure/mystery. (This is outside character arcs and things like that.)

 

[Blue]

I had a conversation the other day on EN world here about ASIs in 5E. An old schooler wanted to randomize it instead. Their suggestion was rolling percentile and then having a stat number like 15.73. Meaning you need .27 to get to 16 in a stat. Every level up you roll, but not percentage this time but 3D8 for some reason. I just couldn't understand why this was better than just getting a bump at certain level? Even if you wanted it random, there has got to be easier ways. The second I see this type of thing im out, I just dont need it.

Just a quick tangent, but I think this was the system used for the Cavalier class back in AD&D (but might have been AD&D 2nd ed).

Back then, an 18 Strength had percentile an extra bonuses on a table already. The Cavalier class added rolling percentile for certain ability scores, regardless if they were 18. And every level they would go up by like 2d10 (or maybe it was 3d8) percent. So if you had a 15/73 (how it was written because that's how Strength was written) and you leveled up (just one class, so no question leveled up in what), you would roll those dice and maybe have a 15/91. If it went to 16/xx, congratulations, you now had a 16 in that ability score. Back there there was no ability advancement from level, just from magic items, so this was a huge deal.

This was back when everything was it's own custom designed subsystem. It was quite the mess. It wasn't even until 3ed that the trumpeted having a unified mechanic of d20+mods >= DC.

 

[Reynard]

Just a quick tangent, but I think this was the system used for the Cavalier class back in AD&D (but might have been AD&D 2nd ed).

Back then, an 18 Strength had percentile an extra bonuses on a table already. The Cavalier class added rolling percentile for certain ability scores, regardless if they were 18. And every level they would go up by like 2d10 (or maybe it was 3d8) percent. So if you had a 15/73 (how it was written because that's how Strength was written) and you leveled up (just one class, so no question leveled up in what), you would roll those dice and maybe have a 15/91. If it went to 16/xx, congratulations, you now had a 16 in that ability score. Back there there was no ability advancement from level, just from magic items, so this was a huge deal.

This was back when everything was it's own custom designed subsystem. It was quite the mess. It wasn't even until 3ed that the trumpeted having a unified mechanic of d20+mods >= DC.

Hackmaster (being a semi-parody version of 2E with taken to the EXTREME) did this with every stat.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Hackmaster (being a semi-parody version of 2E with taken to the EXTREME) did this with every stat.

Yup. Loved the heck out of Hackmaster. Still have all the core material for that version (including the madness-inducing DM's Shield).

 

[Reynard]

Yup. Loved the heck out of Hackmaster. Still have all the core material for that version (including the madness-inducing DM's Shield).

I like it too and would have been all in except for the frankly insulting Hacklopedia strategy.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I like it too and would have been all in except for the frankly insulting Hacklopedia strategy.

The book series? Yeah, that was annoying.

 

[Leatherhead]

A conflict resolution system is the bare minimum needed for a game.

As for what I find enjoyable in games:
A conflict resolution system that enables meaningful counterplay. It can't just be rock-paper-scissors or whoever rolls the bigger number.
Easy to learn mechanics, preferably all tracing back to a single centralized core mechanic.
Causality, synergy with other characters, resource management of any degree.
Characters with distinct mechanical differences, but no exclusive niches.

 

[Pedantic]

An attempt at a comprehensive list of actions. If a player proposes to do something, I expect a mechanic to tell me what happens, without my having to decide what happens.

That should be expanded one step further, so that players should (with some interest in the rules and a general understanding of the tone/genre) be able to understand what is possible and likely to happen as a result of their choices, and what risks they are running.

Ultimately, if a disagreement or discussion breaks out at the table, it should fundamentally be about confusion about the described situation, not about the proposed mechanical resolution.

 

[Celebrim]

This is a great call out. Traveller is one of my favorite RPGs and has little PC progression. The focus is on playing and when the time feels right to end it, the time is right. No worrying about never making it to x, y, or z level again, again.

I partially agree but if you play a game for a long time, say you go to 500 or 600 hours of play with the same characters - and I've been in that neighborhood a couple of time - then even if you don't have a lot of character progression it starts to feel weird if the system is blocking characters from progressing.

Take "Traveller". It's got this brilliant character burner system. The character burner system implies that it takes years to gain small marginal improvements in your skill. Ok, fine. I believe that, though, at the level of comparing what real world people can do to what other real-world people can do, it feels like the range of skill offered by the character burner is smaller than the range of skill we commonly observe. But, again, that's fine, maybe you aren't supposed to play an extraordinarily talented character. But now we start playing and we play through many adventures and the characters do a lot of stuff. Why can't they progress like in the character burner at least? The character burner suggests that by having the sort of experiences that the player characters are having is how they got their skills in the first place - and not just in the narrow ways that Traveller normally allows it. I mean presumably we're doing more stuff and more interesting stuff now than during the character burner stage of that person's life, because otherwise why aren't we playing through those parts of life on the mere principle that you should always start the story where it is most interesting?

What aesthetic is really being served by not having character progression? It almost becomes a defiant attitude - "Oh yeah, this is thing that sets our game apart from those other games. We don't need character progression." that doesn't make a lot of sense to me from either in the imagined world or in terms of the story being created or the meta of playing a game. So yeah, you don't need rapid increases in power for the aesthetic Traveller is going for in its base game, but it does feel like a weird oversight that you can't get a marginal improvement every in-game year or so at least - like a special extra character burner step but with less aging going on.