NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GuardianLurker" data-source="post: 9414196" data-attributes="member: 786">It's been said a couple of times already - most people (even RPG designers) don't have the money or time to cast their net wide for elements. In doesn't help matters that there are a LOT of games. Even if 80% of them are just Fantasy Heartbreakers,  the remaining 20% are still nigh overwhelming in quantity.There's also the problem that a lot of unique mechanics can be drowned out by other more obvious changes. There are also a lot of mechanics buried in time. For instance, FFG's SW series (Edge of Empire, Age of Rebellion, etc.), which gave rise to the generic/unlicensed Genesys, has the VERY obvious "funky dice" mechanic - which is really cool. But also hard to port. OTOH, it's initiative tracking system is really neat, and can be easily ported. Essentially, every player rolls for initiative, generating a certain number of "slots" that become a party resource. Then the party chooses which party member uses which slot. And no player can use two slots in a round. Really cool. But drowned out by the other mechanics.As an example of "buried in time"; a number of the early supers games (Champions, DC Heroes [MEGS edition], etc.) had a very similar initiative mechanic to the modern d20 systems - a single roll, ascending is better. But then they added a slight twist; declare actions ascending, resolve actions descending. So the high initiative combatants not only went first, but had the most information. And really easy to lift and use.And those are both easy to find mechanics, for a heavily used subsystem/scenario (i.e. Combat). Others mechanics, other systems, are harder to find, or harder to reuse. For Instance, I've heard that Forbidden Lands has a "road-building" subsystem. I don't have a copy of the ruleset (Is it on DriveThru?; I haven't looked) and I have no idea how much use it would be, but it actually directly related to something my players want to focus on. And that was just a throwaway comment by someone here. How many have I missed? But even if I don't reuse/adapt the actual mechanics, I might be able to use the concept. Example: Pendragon has a concept that they call "Winter Phase" - it's a really neat empire-building/downtime subgame. I don't use the mechanics. But nearly every game I've run since (30 years since I first encountered it) uses "Winter Seasons" - periods of downtime lasting a minimum of a few in-world game-months that the players can use however they like.</blockquote>

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