What Do You Think Of As "Modern TTRPG Mechanics"?

Fenris-77 said:

Here's an interesting article from Clayton Notestine at Explorer's Design about mechanics, dominant mechanics, and designing by omission.

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Fenris-77 said:

I might agree with you in detail, but in broader strokes he's on to something. As regards HP for example. I'm not sure, as you are not, that the focus on HP in combat represents a desire path as such, at least not a path based on clear choices. I do think that HP tend to occlude most other options in combat though, especially for newer players. Sometimes that changes. For example, when one looks carefully at the 5E wizard spells the overwhelming usefulness of control spells over damage spells is pretty clear. The catch is you need a pretty deep reading (or a good blog post) to really see the underlying math and ramifications. Better examples might the 2014 Battlemaster, or Bardic Inspiration.

What HP does have going for it is precisely what he mentions in the article - the effects are instant and very measurable. There are no delayed effects or fuzzy possibilities as there are if you decide to trip or disarm instead of doing direct damage. 5E really lacks any specific telos in combat other than the kill and doing damage speaks directly to that aim. In a different game, one that has morale rules and one that isn't predicated on fighting to the death, those other options might look more attractive to the same player, at least in part because they more directly index a path to a win condition.

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Thomas Shey said:

Though even in games not focused on fight-to-the-death, you have to have things set up so that's not only functional but attractive. Otherwise it can just create secondary issues that will produce perverse incentives (i.e. "We've now captured these guys out in the middle of the wilderness and there's no one to turn them over to and we have other things we need to do." Which can produce some appallingly anti-heroic incentives).

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Pedantic said:

So this reads to me as describing designer intended player heuristics in play. Players, when encountering a game will strive to find a repeatable strategy, technique or decision making basis to choose which actions will best propel them to the goal. Where I think the article falls short is that it assumes players stop at beginner level heuristics. In contract bridge, players might start with making bids they can absolutely meet and/or striving to win tricks in off-suits or with the lowest possible card they can win with. Those work well when everyone is at beginning skill level, and eventually yield to better heuristics when players start using bidding languages.

When you're specifically designing heuristics for players to discover, you want to make sure they hit at different levels of skill, so your game offers space for players to learn about it. Players prefer powerful heuristics that have strong and low variance impacts on the game state because they're trying to succeed. As a designer, part of the task is to keep your heuristics satisfying to use (players should feel like they gained and made better decisions by employing them) without actually making them so powerful that they truncate the decision space.

The assumption in this article (and I think a lot of discourse about RPGs) is that it always seems to assume players will never get better at the game. Take the whole trap discussion: players will use whatever mechanic is least likely to injure them when engaging with traps. If the Rogue can dismiss them with a die roll consistently, they'll go that way, if the GM rewards conversation (and especially if there's a routine procedure they can develop to have that conversation) they'll approach that way.

The damage-first, Fireball everything Wizard is a beginner heuristic that gives way eventually to control spells, which gives way eventually to pre-combat battlefield setting spells. Outside game discussion can speed this up, though it actually varies, you can't always skip someone past earlier stages of learning about gameplay effectively. I don't know that's necessary a problem, outside of the ultimate power of the heuristic being too overwhelming.

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Lanefan said:

Whether or not the players ever "get better at the game", the constant remains: both in and out of character, players will quite reasonably tend to choose and-or gravitate toward the path of least resistance.

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Pedantic said:

You're describing the approachability or obviousness of a heuristic. Players will find those first or faster, but if they aren't satisfying or powerful, they'll still upgrade given more exposure. Similarly to above, it's often good to have heuristics of different levels of obviousness in your design, again to give the players the feeling of learning/growth.

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Fenris-77 said:

It's possible that you are overestimating the amount of deep thinking the average player does about game mechanics. I don't disagree with you mind, but I wonder how many 'average players' are really reflective of the game rules and deeper heuristics at all, except by accident. That's not a criticism, people play RPGs primarily to have fun, not to earn degrees in Postmodern Ludological Theory (I'm making fun of myself there, not anyone else).

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Pedantic said:

See, that's sort of exactly what I'm taking shots at. I used contract bridge, a very old and very popular game as an example, and this kind of heuristic development is the basis of interaction with board games and video games. You make up a theory about how to play Slay the Spire or which resource you should start with in Agricola, and over repeated plays discard and form new ones. Analyzing a game's proposed heuristics might be advanced designer stuff, but it's very basic player stuff.

I don't think RPGs are special, except in so much as we choose to treat them as special in the design. People who play games play all those other games too, and do all these same things. I think it's pretty obvious that RPG players learn about the rules (even if in a lot of games, that means learning about what procedures their GM likes them to deploy) and play through similar patterns.

That the "average" player doesn't, I think, is as much a reflection of RPGs generally not actually having designed far enough for them to learn much. Board states are too similar, action choices are too constrained or FOO, games are too fragile and get redesigned when players try strategies too far outside the norms, and we've built a culture that rhetorically tries to suppress players from pushing past initial heuristics, with the optimizers and the munchkins and the rules-lawyers and all of it.

It's the games, not the players that are the problem. They either lack depth so that beginner heuristics remain correct or aren't stable enough for players to do it and fall apart when players deviate from an expected baseline gameplan.

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Pedantic said:

It's the games, not the players that are the problem. They either lack depth so that beginner heuristics remain correct or aren't stable enough for players to do it and fall apart when players deviate from an expected baseline gameplan.

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Fenris-77 said:

It's possible that you are overestimating the amount of deep thinking the average player does about game mechanics. I don't disagree with you mind, but I wonder how many 'average players' are really reflective of the game rules and deeper heuristics at all, except by accident. That's not a criticism, people play RPGs primarily to have fun, not to earn degrees in Postmodern Ludological Theory (I'm making fun of myself there, not anyone else).

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