Tell Me About Your Favorite Mechanics

[SoonRaccoon]

I like Ironsworn's progress tracks. They do a couple specific things with combat that I like.

First, it adds book ends to both the start and end of combat. In D&D, combat starts when you roll initiative, and it ends... at some point? But implicitly, it kind of ends with a TPK of one side. Having a discrete mechanical end to combat makes it easier to have non-lethal combat, because you can use it to say, "You pin your opponent to the dirt with the tip of your sword at their throat. They toss their sword aside and raise their hands." Now you can have an ongoing thread with a rival of some sort.

Another fun thing about it is that it turns combat into a small push your luck game. You fill up the progress track, then roll against it to end combat. The more progress, the higher your chance of winning. The longer you continue combat, the more you fill up the progress track, but you also risk being hurt more.

 

[Bill Zebub]

The core mechanisms of Blades in the Dark (action rolls, resist rolls, and clocks) marry gamist and narrativist play beautifully, while allowing room for negotiated sim too. The book could be organized & written better, but once you have things down it's pretty sweet and as streamlined or drawn-out as you want it to be, on the fly even.

I've been meaning to check it out. I really need to.

Scum and Villainy is a much cleaner explanation of the BitD mechanics.

And that.

 

[Staffan]

TORG Eternity's Destiny cards and the way they interplay with combat encounters.

A Destiny card generally gives the player a momentary bonus of some sort – a reroll, a bonus to any or a subset of actions, turning an opponent's roll into a failure, and so on. There are also some that affect how other cards are played or refill your hand and such. However, once in combat or other encounter situation, you can't play these cards directly from your hand. Instead you need to put them into your "pool", meaning face-up on the table in front of you, one per round. Once in your pool, you can also trade them with other players.

The effect is that you build up a collective party resource over the course of an encounter. This lets you turn a seemingly dire situation into something the PCs can actually win, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. The Escalation Die in 13th Age serves a similar role but without creating its own mini-game. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of taste.

FATE's Aspects and Fate Points are also a really cool mechanic, particularly as expressed in the Dresden Files RPG.

Depending on the campaign's power level, each character has a certain "Base Refresh". If you have no special abilities, this is the minimum number of Fate points you start each session with. Should you have ended the last session with more than that, you get to keep the excess. Every special ability or "stunt" (a special ability letting you use a skill in a different way than usual or better in a specialized situation) costs one or more of this refresh. Fate points are used to boost rolls and to trigger various abilities as well as some amount of "dramatic editing" ("Of course I brought my handcuffs!").

Aspects are true statements about your character, and are linked to Fate points. One of these is your character concept, another is your Trouble, and the rest are just things that are true. Aspects are generally double-edged swords: they can be both good or bad. In a circumstance where an aspect is good, that's easy: spend a Fate point to reroll something or get a bonus. In a circumstance where it could potentially be negative, things get a little more interesting. The GM can "compel" an aspect by saying "Wouldn't it be really interesting if X happened right now?" The player then has the option to either accept the compel and get a Fate point for their trouble, or reject it by paying a Fate point. For example, if you have the aspect "Defender of the innocent" and you're defending someone, you can spend Fate points to help with the fighting. But in another situation, someone might come to you and ask for help, and to turn them down you need to spend a Fate point.

The effect here is that people with lots of supernatural powers will naturally have a lower Refresh, which means they have fewer Fate points. That means they literally have less control of their fate. From a meta-game perspective, they will need to accept more compels and get into more trouble to get the fate points they need to spend for other stuff. Power has a price.

Wealth checks have been around since at least d20 Modern. Does Spire do something different?

First game I saw them in was Advanced Marvel Super Heroes, published in 1986 (the Basic set also had a Resources stat, but that only gave you a particular income in resource points, you rarely rolled it).

 

[Reynard]

First game I saw them in was Advanced Marvel Super Heroes, published in 1986 (the Basic set also had a Resources stat, but that only gave you a particular income in resource points, you rarely rolled it).

I never played Marvel but now that you mention it, I recall DC Heroes from Mayfair also used Wealth as a "stat."

 

[hawkeyefan]

I really like how silver works in Spire: The City Must Fall, treating it sort of as a stat that can be rolled against. It removes the number tracking of precisely how many coins you have and instead just assumes you can make regular small purchases, and then larger purchases have an element of chance to them that might decrease your silver stat. I know I'm not using the words the game itself uses to describe this, hopefully someone can correct me if I'm explaining it the wrong way.

I was going to post about Resistances and Fallout from Spire. A strong favorite of mine.

Wealth checks have been around since at least d20 Modern. Does Spire do something different?

A little. Silver is one of five Resistances that a PC has. The others are Blood, Mind, Reputation, and Shadow. They represent the different things that are at stake when a PC takes an action. They’re the way you “take damage” in the game.

What I find interesting about it is that you take Stress to a Resistance when a roll goes poorly, or if you get a Success with Stress result. The GM rolls the damage and tells you which Resistance to take it to. Then, every time you take Stress, the GM rolls a d10. If the roll is lower than your current total Stress, then the Stress becomes a Fallout.

This is when Stress becomes a specific drawback. Very commonly, you may suffer a Blood Fallout, which can be something like “Bleeding” which has ongoing penalties, or “Broken leg” which means you broke your friggin leg. Or you may take Mind Fallout like “Permanently Weird”, which means you take on a character trait that may be problematic for you.

With Silver, it would mean you’ve taken some kind of financial hit. You’re in hock to the wrong people, or you lose a prize possession.

The amount of Silver Resistance you have (meaning essentially bonus slots that you can take Stress and it doesn’t count toward Fallout rolls) is a general indicator of your wealth and lifestyle.

What I like about this system is it creates a variety of consequences that the PCs face. Things happen to them as they progress through the game… things that last and which you can point back to and say “oh yeah, that’s when my character began to go mad” or “that’s when I lost my armor”. There are actual consequences to the PCs actions that linger and shape the subsequent events.

It’s a great system, and doesn’t get the attention I’d say it deserves.

 

[Reynard]

I was going to post about Resistances and Fallout from Spire. A strong favorite of mine.



A little. Silver is one of five Resistances that a PC has. The others are Blood, Mind, Reputation, and Shadow. They represent the different things that are at stake when a PC takes an action. They’re the way you “take damage” in the game.

What I find interesting about it is that you take Stress to a Resistance when a roll goes poorly, or if you get a Success with Stress result. The GM rolls the damage and tells you which Resistance to take it to. Then, every time you take Stress, the GM rolls a d10. If the roll is lower than your current total Stress, then the Stress becomes a Fallout.

This is when Stress becomes a specific drawback. Very commonly, you may suffer a Blood Fallout, which can be something like “Bleeding” which has ongoing penalties, or “Broken leg” which means you broke your friggin leg. Or you may take Mind Fallout like “Permanently Weird”, which means you take on a character trait that may be problematic for you.

With Silver, it would mean you’ve taken some kind of financial hit. You’re in hock to the wrong people, or you lose a prize possession.

The amount of Silver Resistance you have (meaning essentially bonus slots that you can take Stress and it doesn’t count toward Fallout rolls) is a general indicator of your wealth and lifestyle.

What I like about this system is it creates a variety of consequences that the PCs face. Things happen to them as they progress through the game… things that last and which you can point back to and say “oh yeah, that’s when my character began to go mad” or “that’s when I lost my armor”. There are actual consequences to the PCs actions that linger and shape the subsequent events.

It’s a great system, and doesn’t get the attention I’d say it deserves.

Very cool!

 

[Pedantic]

It's not terribly sexy, but I really like Take 10/Take 20. Having an absolute value you can point to that provides a reference for how skilled you are, given time and space to practice and err is very convenient, and take 10 is a solid mechanic for action outside of a clock.

I'd like to see a D20 skill system that defaults to using those values and translating them into actions players can take, moving rolling onto back burner as something only done when you're pushing your luck.

 

[Ondath]

It's incredibly simple, but I quite like Bell curve resolution tables. Both old school D&D (reaction rolls) and modern narrativist (PbtA default roll) games do this, and while I like the spread of a straight d20, the bell curve is really useful when I want consistent results. I brought reaction rolls to my 5e game and I like how it changed the way I run social encounters. I'm also using a more PbtA style roll when the players want to add something to the story: So I know that the result will be middling on average (meaning players can't derail the entire campaign on a lucky roll), but an incredibly rare roll gets rewarded.

 

[Reynard]

It's incredibly simple, but I quite like Bell curve resolution tables. Both old school D&D (reaction rolls) and modern narrativist (PbtA default roll) games do this, and while I like the spread of a straight d20, the bell curve is really useful when I want consistent results. I brought reaction rolls to my 5e game and I like how it changed the way I run social encounters. I'm also using a more PbtA style roll when the players want to add something to the story: So I know that the result will be middling on average (meaning players can't derail the entire campaign on a lucky roll), but an incredibly rare roll gets rewarded.

I really like 3d6 encounter tables for this reason.

 

[Staffan]

A little. Silver is one of five Resistances that a PC has. The others are Blood, Mind, Reputation, and Shadow. They represent the different things that are at stake when a PC takes an action. They’re the way you “take damage” in the game.

What I find interesting about it is that you take Stress to a Resistance when a roll goes poorly, or if you get a Success with Stress result. The GM rolls the damage and tells you which Resistance to take it to. Then, every time you take Stress, the GM rolls a d10. If the roll is lower than your current total Stress, then the Stress becomes a Fallout.

This is when Stress becomes a specific drawback. Very commonly, you may suffer a Blood Fallout, which can be something like “Bleeding” which has ongoing penalties, or “Broken leg” which means you broke your friggin leg. Or you may take Mind Fallout like “Permanently Weird”, which means you take on a character trait that may be problematic for you.

With Silver, it would mean you’ve taken some kind of financial hit. You’re in hock to the wrong people, or you lose a prize possession.

Hmm. Interesting. So Silver in the Spire is more of a reactive stat that governs how/when bad things happen to your financial status, rather than a proactive stat you use to get things done and/or acquire things? That's certainly different from how most other games I've seen where "money" is a stat do it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Hmm. Interesting. So Silver in the Spire is more of a reactive stat that governs how/when bad things happen to your financial status, rather than a proactive stat you use to get things done and/or acquire things? That's certainly different from how most other games I've seen where "money" is a stat do it.

Yes, it’s primarily a consequence… kind of saves and hit points rolled into one.

But it also has a secondary use as a kind of passive indicator of wealth and lifestyle and so on.

 

[aramis erak]

I like the multiple separate pools priority system for Characters from old World of Darkness... VTM, WWTA, MTA, WTO, and CTD, plus my favorite oWoD game, Street Fighter...

I like the roll and keep narrative dice mechanics from Legend of the Five Rings 5th edition

I like the narrative traits in 2d20 system games, and their parallel in Cortex Plus/Cortex Prime.

I like the general skills/specialized subskills mechanic in Serenity RPG (Cortex Classic) and in Alternity. In both, up to a certain level, you buy the general skills; past that, you raise each subskill separately.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I like Hero System's speed mechanic, with characters being able to hold actions and abort to defensive actions. Combined with combat bonuses that can be moved from attack to defence this allows for some very cinematic combat.

The old Legend of the Five Rings duelling (from 3rd ed, gone from more recent additions.) Gave a lovely feel of rising tension leading to swift action.

Fate points and the bidding system whereby GM and player can try to outbid one another to activate or resist character traits. Such a nice system, so easy to attach to any game system.

 

[damiller]

For me its Champions Now:

1. I like the way "rounds" are handled in combat. Its segmented, and your speed determines how often in a round you will go.
2. I like that powers cost. You can't just throw your most powerful power all the time.

 

[payn]

Traveller character generation. I really like the life path system. I also like skill heavy systems.

3E/PF1 weapon crit ranges and damage multipliers. Makes weapons interesting and different.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I like the Speed Chart from HERO.
I like a 3d6 roll under for skills; I appreciate that it pretty much helps defined just how good you are. If you have a 17- you have to roll under on 3d6, you know you are very good at that skill.
I like the crit system in 3E/PF1 - the range and different damage.
The escalation die from from 13th Age.
The die pool countdown mechanics from WOIN.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

The escalation die from from 13th Age.
The die pool countdown mechanics from WOIN.

I don't know these two. Any chance of a brief explanation?

 

[Reynard]

I like the Speed Chart from HERO.

I love hero, and in theory I love the speed chart. Until there's a speedster in the party.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I don't know these two. Any chance of a brief explanation?

Escalation die - you have a d6 that turns up by one every round, and that adds to hit rolls. However in 13th age the monsters have different powers that work if the escalation die is odd or even. It's a narrative rule that does the "losing at the start of the fight, figuring out how to fight the opponent and winning" feel of action movies.

The countdown dice pool. Lets say you have the PCs in a situation where something dire is about to happen, but you don't want to decided a specific time, so you put a pool of D6s into the pool. At the end of reach round you roll them, and remove any that have a specific number (I think six is the default). So each round there is a chance of 0-lots of dice being removed. When all the dice are removed the event happens. It helps build tension, and isn't some arbitrary amount of time. The players can see the pool get smaller and smaller and adjust their actions accordingly.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I love hero, and in theory I love the speed chart. Until there's a speedster in the party.

I can see that. But for 25 years the only people in my groups that wanted to play a speedster was me.