The Minigame Problem (and how I simplified without sacrificing depth)

How important do you think it is that a game avoids the Minigame Problem?

This is a problem I would think is best exemplified by the common critique of current DND that combat feels like a separate game from the rest of the play experience. Ergo, a minigame.

Whether or not this is a strictly a bad thing though is I think up for debate. On the one hand, the transition can be jarring depending on how abrupt the mechanic shift is, it can lead to, or at least exacerbate, problems where one part of the game is arguably overdeveloped compared to the rest of it. DND again is the premier example, where Combat effectively makes up 90-95% of the game rules.

But then on the other hand, it can also said that a lot of attempts to avoid this issue often cause the opposite problem, where a part of the game (or worse still, the entire game) ends up underdeveloped. Not to start a debate over it but I'd argue most of the PBTA descended games tend to fall into that category, with most of them being very, very shallow once you look past the narrative veneer of ostensibly unobstructed improv.

Personally, I recently started working on introducing a solution to this problem relative to my own game. At first it was more just an intellectual exercise, as I never really put any stock in the Minigame problem to begin with, but as I kept working it it ended up revealing ways to basically compress a lot of the complexity out of the game but without having to explicate anything.

This involved my hunch that I could take the base procedure of my Combat system and introducing it into my Exploration system, which itself spawned out of trying to figure how Id handle Combat when you're not meant to transition into the full rules. My system relies on scaling Stakes being clearly communicated, and combat is meant to be insanely fast if the stakes aren't suitably high. (Eg you only go into the full tactics game I built if theres an actual danger you could lose)

Combat in a nutshell is based around the Combat Roll, 1d20 rolled twice, at the beginning of the Round. This gives players two input random results to then use how they see fit throughout the round.

The idea then is to take that same procedure and set Exploration to work the same way. So rather than the classical take a turn, roll a die, you'd instead open a round of Exploration by rolling 1d20. And then when it comes to take your turn, you choose how you'll use it (via Travel tasks, which are tied to one of the 32 Skills in the game).

This alone, conceptually, helps bridge the gap between the two systems considerably. But naturally this got the creative juices flowing, and I started thinking about how I could add a little more. This lead to me taking the Momentum system from combat, which is basically just exploding dice, but you can do more than just rerolls, and also transposing that into Exploration.

But that then gave rise to the issue of how I'd actually give players the dice to roll for this, as doing exploding dice with d20s would just suck. Eventually I came up with the idea of introducing "Skill Dice".

So to explain that, I should give the context that my game uses a Skill Advancement system mechanically akin to Dragonbane and informed by Bethesda style action RPGs. Players have 32 Skills to pursue that can be advanced from +0 to +30.

In addition to this, they also have 9 Talents, which are basically Attributes or Ability Scores, that are each derived from 4 specific, associated Skills. Eg, Strength is derived from your Mining, Smithing, Striking, and Wrestling skills.

Your Strength Modifier acts not only as its own modifier for any Strength related checks you'd make, but also as the Modifier for each of its respective Skills (ergo you can't max Strength without also maxing out the relevant Skills). And, if one hasn't done the math, this means that the max modifier at a base level is +30. This does break conventional wisdom, but it has a lot of benefits, including making the game simpler over time (less rolling) to run, and allows for the Stakes of a given check to be more clearly telegraphed. If you have to roll its because you have a chance of failure, and that stays steady when the target numbers are single digit just as much as it would when they start pushing 50+.

The Skill Die would be a new addition to this, as an escalating die that increases in size as your individual Skill grows, from a d4 up to a d12. If your Talent Mod matches or exceeds your Skill level, then you also get to arbitrarily pick which die of the ones you've unlocked for the Skill you get to use. (This is to ensure people have access to the gradient that forms with exploding dice, as smaller dice will be more likely to generate Momentum)

How it would work then, re Exploration, is that the party would all roll their 1d20, and call out their numbers. The highest would go first, and then, just as in Combat, whats basically the Initiative gets passed to someone that that first player chooses, and so on until everyone goes.

When its your turn, you'd state what it is you're going to do. In the overworld this would be some sort of Travel Task (scouting, gathering, etc), and in Delves or Rambling you'd be describing your direct actions, like picking a lock or rummaging through debris, whatever.

The Skill Die would come in if you want to, or need to, go for an extra bonus to your result to do whatever it is you set out to do for your Turn. This not only gives me a clean hook to allow Momentum to be generated, but also helps make Skill Advancement itself seem less like minutia.

But this solution actually ended up having a big impact on the overall design, as it revealed a lot of other neat things I could do to lessen the perceived complexity of the game.

For example as part of Exploration itself, I had an admittedly convoluted system called the Lore Bonus, which was copied more or less wholesale from a similar system in Arora Age of Desolation. With Momentum, now I can change the Lore Bonus away from what it was, which was basically Momentum anyway but more convolited, and turn it into a simpler mechanic, whereby learning about the Regions, Cities, and Dungeons you explore accumulates into a party-wide bonus that reduces your Momentum range. Eg, a Lore Bonus of +1 means you get Momentum off your, for example, 1d4 Skill die if you roll a 3 or a 4.

As I don't necessarily want the LB to have a limit, that then begged the question of how do I prevent people abusing unlimited Momentum? Easy, I do go for a limit (+3), but still pretty lax, and I retain the original degradation that was apart of that system originally. But THEN, I also use the new Skill Dice as another hook to trigger my Living World mechanics, in thise Complications from the Time Pool mechanics that run that system.

Ergo even if you just keep hitting maxes, you're going to invite complications into your adventure, which may not always have to do with the specific thing you were doing. I just gamified the classic advice to just roll your dice behind the GM screen randomly to keep your players on their toes.,

But then all of this lead to further refinements, by carrying these changes back into Combat itself. Now I can explicate Damage and Defense dice, which no matter how simple I conveyed them always seemed like a lot. Now its just the same Skill Dice you'd be already familiar with once you learn how to do a basic check.

This in turn now means I can greatly simplify both my Item Mechanics, and the Crafting Mechanics along with them, and now Ill have even more room to push the high customization Im going for with them.

So now, because the design is going to emphasize Momentum as basically a core mechanic, this means I can greatly compress the Momentum section in my Combat rules, and no longer depict it as an advanced mechanic, which if only superficially should result in a much less daunting system to learn.

And on top of this, I have sufficiently blurred the lines between Exploration and Combat as systems, which means that Settlements and Domains, and Warfare, the two higher-in-scope systems that build off of those two initial systems, are going to be easier to unify as a cohesive system, making the Party's transition into the Alliance, if they choose to go that route, much easier to onboard for.

And! Ive found yet more ways to hook my Living World mechanics into the game, helping to greatly increase the player facing aspects of that system.

While it may not be apparent, from my perspective the game has compressed to be simpler despite the fact that Im really only rearranging a handful of elements and adding a new one, and more indepth as its interconnectivity has increased dramatically, up to and including addressing the Minigame problem.

I think if one was being uncharitable they could still say the game has it, because it doesn't just use one mechanic for everything in the exact same way everytime, but I don't see that as an issue. After all, I want these systems to feel like what they depict, so some separation is a-ok, and in the meantime I'm using the same core mechanic anyway, just expressed slightly differently between the two core pillars. (Eventually 3 once I carry forward the same ideas into Social aspects)
 

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aramis erak

Legend
I've never seen the inclusion of minigames as an issue provided there's a consistent rolling mechanic used.

Then again, a number of games I've loved over the years had portions that were extracted and sold as separate games, or were RPGs added on to boardgames.

I've also seldom felt a need to avoid using specific minigames in theme... such as Deadlands Reloaded casting mechanics, dropping into using the Snapshot boardgame to resolve Classic Traveller boarding actions, using Mayday for ship movement in Classic traveller, using AHL in place of Bk 1 combat in classic Traveller, nor of using abstraction games (Mechwarrior RPG with Battleforce instead of with Battletech) when I don't want to deal with the detail of the main linked game.
 

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