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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9715759" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't know if lore is the "primary driver of mood and tone". I think mechanics can often drive mood and tone as well.Like, if the lore is saying that the world is grimdark and bloody, like say Warhammer Fantasy, but the actual rules make make combat and recovery from combat a total breeze, you've got a mismatch that is going to change the tone and going to influence the behaviour of the players and thus the PCs. You can keep telling people combat is fatal and scary, but if it just isn't, well... eventually the players work that out. And eventually is probably like session 2.Whereas if you've got a game that's saying it's very heroic and about defeating evil in combat, but is actually brutal and bloody in combat, and hard-to-survive, you have a mismatch in the opposite direction (indeed, AD&D had this problem a lot of the time, especially with certain adventures/campaigns/settings), which causes the players to have the PCs not behave like fantasy heroes, but more like fantasy thugs and ambushers.I've been watching a lot of Buffy and Angel recently, and I remember in the 1990s, I couldn't think of an RPG that actually matched how stuff played out in them, even just looking at combat say. But now I'd say these would definitely be PtbA games or similar, with very narrative combat, where Buffy et al are always strong enough to defeat the opponents, but never so strong they completely casually trash them every time (even later on, it's unusual if Buffy et al just casually vape a bunch of vamps, and a normal random vamp will fairly often give Buffy a good fight or knock her down a few times or the like). So if you had a D&D-style system where the PCs powered up so much that it trivialized say "straight out of the grave" vamps or "basic" demons, that would give a very different vibe to those shows, or equally if you had one where it was long and hard to recover from fights, that just wouldn't work, not even for the non-main characters (the actual Buffy/Angel RPGs weren't all that good at handling their own genre as a result, I would suggest).Yeah exactly. Tone and genre are the main thing mechanics typically need to support.Sometimes lore and mechanics interact, but it tends to be in more specialized and setting-specific games, and not always even then.</blockquote>

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