Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Indaarys" data-source="post: 9197069" data-attributes="member: 7040941">It is a textbook on game design, the one that (AFAIK) pioneered the idea of game patterns, and the book breaks down not only how to identify them but also how to construct them, and why and how they work as a design syntax that can be applied to every game ever made and ever will be made. The thing about your question is that it exists in (to invoke MDA) the aesthetics of a given game, and so it isn't strictly material to the mechanics, meaning the mechanics don't care what they're called and if unfun is genuinely arising from a mechanic, its because of the mechanic's design, not what aesthetics have been granted to it. However, solving an aesthetic problem is something to consider, and I could offer up my own idea on that matter: synchronicity. How a given game action should feel, be named, and be percieved by the player as all being identical by that player. Ie, jumping; its called a jump, it looks like a jump and accomplishes what a jump should intuitively enable a person to do. You can stretch it for fantasy without breaking synchronicity (see Super Mario), but if you have it and it doesn't even match up to real life (see Skyrim, where verticality generally isn't a possible playspace) then you have an issue. You'd have to examine the machination (see Game Mechanics: AGD) to resolve an issue of game feel, but the other two aren't that complicated. You have full control of how the system names a given action, and you can playtest game feel to get the player perception right. If in a TTRPG a given mechanic is not lining up with whatever aesthetic purpose it has, its going to be due to this. This principle I came up with is actually why I ended up using a violation of common design wisdom as a solution; if you want to ensure synchronicity is maintained in a progression game (to use terminology from Game Mechanics: AGD), then eventually basic actions need to stop being able to be failed. Ergo, modifiers that will eventually exceed the value of the die roll, where my core 1d20+Mod game has base mods that go up to +30, before any boosts or buffs, and where the highest single base mod is +150. Combined with baked in degrees of success, the overall system models capability progression in a way that avoids the pie-in-face pitfalls that tend to happen with other games.</blockquote>

Verification