What are your favourite single game mechanics?

Tallifer · Jul 20, 2019

I really love the Friends mechanic from "Adventures in Oz: Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road." Winning and keeping Friends through doing favours opens up more and more opportunities to receive favours from said Friends. The antithesis of murder-hobo-ry.

pemerton · Jul 20, 2019

Action resolution in Burning Wheel (which can be ported to other systems eg Classic Traveller):

* Intent and task action declaration;

* Say 'yes' or roll the dice;

* Success is success on both intent and task; failure is narrated by the GM by reference to intent and/or task as will keep things moving and maintain or increase the pressure;

* Let it ride (ie results stand - no rerolls).

Manbearcat · Jul 20, 2019

* The “Light Clock” in Torchbearer and how all of the other game mechanics are integrated perfectly with it and how, working in concert, they bring home the intended play experience (cognitive space inhabited, mood, theme, pace).

* Same thing goes for Blades in the Dark with its holistic integration of all of its system machinery which engenders bold, devil-may-care scoundrels, each uniquely twisted, as they try to climb an unforgiving, corrupted hierarchy.

Everything is crucial (like Torchbearer), but I think the management of the feedback loops of Heat: Wanted Level, Stress: Trauma, Entanglements, and Downtime are my favorites (yes, more than all the stuff in the Score!).

Yaztromo · Jul 20, 2019

Simple simple: rolling 2d6 for skill checks or fights (adding the result to characteristics and the like).
The simplest dice and a very articulated and "realistic" outcome. Realistic in the sense that, if I try at some task in real life, it is more likely for me having an average result rather than a top result or a bottom result.

Wightbred · Jul 21, 2019

Doc_Klueless said:
13th Age Escalation Die. I use this or a variation of this mechanic in every game I run.

I really love the concept of this, as the intensity of the fight rises to a crescendo and it stops them dragging on. But I’ve never tried it because it seems like adding an extra bonus is fiddly compared to mechanics like advantage.

I have thought that maybe increasing the minimum damage you get on a dice roll from 1 to 2 etc each round might be an option. Any advice on making it work, or other ways to implement it?

Sepulchrave II · Jul 21, 2019

The speculative trade system in Classic Traveller.

More broadly, the interplay of (i) character (ii) world (iii) starship - and how they can be reduced to a simple hexadecimal string - is some kind of weird rocket fuel for the imagination. Ideas just seem to explode out of this matrix. I confess to being rather in awe of Traveller.

aramis erak · Jul 21, 2019

FASERIP table system, specifically the AMSH version.

Palladium Fantasy 1st ed revised's Attack and defense mechanics. Was ruined by personal SDC...

5E's advantage/disadvantage.

Aspects (fate) and MHRP's distinctions (similar enough).

Mouse Guard's formulaic adventure building. makes for fast but fun short-sessions.

L5R 5's Roll and Keep with symbolic dice.

Justifiers' Buy Back - you have an instant reason to participate suitably in the adventure - you want your freedom, slave? Earn it.

Doc_Klueless · Jul 21, 2019

Wightbred said:
I really love the concept of this, as the intensity of the fight rises to a crescendo and it stops them dragging on. But I’ve never tried it because it seems like adding an extra bonus is fiddly compared to mechanics like advantage.

It can see where it might get fiddly, I suppose. I guess I circumvented that by using the following:

In my rarer and rarer Face-to-Face games, I use a photo cube which is basically a 3.5 x 3.5 large cube that I can change out the inner printout on to reflect the different games. It's so big and prominent that the bonus has yet to be forgotten after something like the first session of using it.

In my far more frequent online Fantasy Grounds games, I have an Effect programmed in that I plop on each character in the combat tracker that automatically increases their To Hit rolls by the Designated Amount for 5e. For the AGE system, once I finish getting all the data done, I have a Story entry with Chat Lines in it that I can click on to throw the current Escalation into the Chat Box. Inelegant at the moment, but I'll figure out a better method by time I finish entering the Data.

I have thought that maybe increasing the minimum damage you get on a dice roll from 1 to 2 etc each round might be an option. Any advice on making it work, or other ways to implement it?

Sorry, no, I don't have any other advice. Though I think that adding to damage would work great in shortening combat.

Ginger McMurray · Jul 21, 2019

GrahamWills said:
Disclaimer: Favorite is not quite the same as best.

Preparedness skill in GUMSHOE. Particularly for Night's Black Agents, it allows players to get to the action with only as much pre-planning as is fun for them, and smooths over disagreements about what a character "would obviously have brought with

Very interested in this. How does it work? Maybe I can port it to other games.

Blue · Jul 22, 2019

Wightbred said:
I really love the concept of this, as the intensity of the fight rises to a crescendo and it stops them dragging on. But I’ve never tried it because it seems like adding an extra bonus is fiddly compared to mechanics like advantage.

I have thought that maybe increasing the minimum damage you get on a dice roll from 1 to 2 etc each round might be an option. Any advice on making it work, or other ways to implement it?

There is no advantage in 13th Age (it came out before 5e), so the Escalation Die feels like any other bonus, not fiddly.

You caught on immediately how it prevents combats from turning into a grind. Well, the math is set up so that the PCs have a disadvantage for the first round or so. Think if it added 0 (first round) and then the +1-6 in subsequent rounds (also to save DCs in 5e, in 13th Age those are attack rolls like in D&D 4e), but you actually started with a -1 or -2 to everything.

So the other effect is that people will not always throw their big novas early in the combat, they often wait for later so they hit more. It changes the dynamic and gives more valid strong paths.