Your favourite gaming mechanic?

[Quickleaf]

Is there a mechanic from a tabletop RPG you really love?

I'm fond of 5E's advantage/disadvantage. It is so much more intuitive than a ton of fiddly modifiers.

There's a lot of little mechanics I like in Beyond the Wall, particularly:

• Cantrips are at-will, but require a spellcasting check. On a failure, you choose whether you expend that cantrip for the day OR you suffer some mishap at the GM's discretion.
• Playbooks help to craft backgrouns quickly as well as build your character. Very elegant and flavorful mid-way point between D&D-style character creation and Lifepath-style.
• Scenario packs include random tables which change the way the adventure plays out for each group. Brilliant.
• Guidelines for collaborative setting creation starting from the village and expanding outward as play expands.

 

[Arilyn]

My favourites are:
Escalation die in 13th Age, as well as backgrounds and one unique thing
The magic system in Ars Magica
Aspects in Fate. They simulate narrative so well, and are very elegant
The cards used in the old TORG game

 

[RangerWickett]

Low Fantasy Gaming:

1. Major Exploits, including Rescues
2. Party Retreat rule
3. Improvised Chase table
4. Short/Long rest mechanics (not the same as 5e)

What are the first three from?

 

[RangerWickett]

I loved the magic system of Talislanta, so much that I tweaked it for use in D&D via Elements of Magic. Building spells is fun.

What to hear a crazy mechanic? A friend and I were brainstorming weird things to do with dice, and he came up with a mechanic for an oracle-type character. In addition to your normal dice you use, you have a special set of shiny dice - your oracular dice. Each die - d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 - starts with a 1. But at the start of each turn of combat, you have a vision. You roll a d20 and can 'bank' that die, switching any one of your oracular dice to be whatever number it rolled. Thereafter, whenever you would need to roll a die of that type, you can choose to use the banked value and then reset that die to 1.

For instance, at the start of your turn you roll a d20 and get a 4. That's pretty crap, but you choose to bank your d4 as that 4. So if you end up stabbing someone with a dagger, you can spend the banked 4 to deal max damage.

If instead you rolled a 11, you can either set it as your d20, or as your d12 (or you can ignore it). So you can guarantee a d20 roll will be average, or you can do near-max damage with a greataxe.

I want to give this a try some time. It might be fiddly, but I imagine it would yield some strange gameplay choices.

 

[Psikerlord#]

What are the first three from?

All three (as well as the short/long rest variants) are from Low Fantasy Gaming rpg: https://lowfantasygaming.com/freepdf/

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Knockback in Hero System. Every Supers game needs simple rules for punching bad guys through walls.

 

[Manbearcat]

Any play agenda, GMing principle, GMing technique, or dice/resolution mechanic that ensures something interesting (that leads to compelling decision-points) is always happening.