Worlds of Design: Searching for Mechanics

As a game designer, when you need a solution to a design problem do you search (the Internet, RPGgeek, enworld?) to find a mechanic that will solve the problem?

Pictures courtesy of Pixabay.​

As a game designer, when you need a solution to a design problem do you search to find a mechanic that will solve the problem or do you try to think one up yourself? I think a lot of designers do a search. I do not and I’ll try to explain why.

Mechanic: A Definition​

In case you’re not familiar with the term, “mechanic” (short for mechanism) is a surprisingly slippery idea, but in my book Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish (Mcfarland 2012) I call them “methods by which the game moves forward. . . For example, rolling two dice and moving your token the sum of the roll around the board is a game mechanic (Monopoly)”

No Mechanics At All​

I'm more or less with Greg Costikyan, who said a game without struggle is a game that’s dead. I should point out that your first resort ought to be to simplify the game in a way that also solves the problem. But this is hard to do. Of course, the simpler the mechanic, the simpler the game, which is always desirable. And the number of simple mechanics in the world is likely smaller than the number of complex mechanics.

I have read that famous board (and video) game designer Reiner Knizia does not want to know a lot about other games because he wants to make his own solutions; I doubt that he does a mechanics search.

I also don’t do a mechanics search. I'm not averse to using a mechanic I hear about, that's no problem, because it's very unlikely that you are going to make up your own mechanics that are original, that nobody's ever done. If the mechanic works, what counts is how good the game is.

Other Sources of Mechanics​

There are mechanics I have learned from other games, but haven’t used (yet). For example I learned from a game called Feudal the idea that you could enforce a limited number of negotiation opportunities. Each player has three tokens, expending a token in order to have a negotiation opportunity. This enables some secret negotiation without turning the game into a long negotiation session (as in Diplomacy). I asked myself, why I hadn’t thought of this?

Another mechanism is the Advantage/Disadvantage I learned of from Dungeons & Dragons (fifth edition), though I suspect it already existed. You roll two dice instead of one to determine something, usually two d20s for some kind of check, and if the GM says you have Advantage the best of those two rolls counts. If you have Disadvantage the worst of those two rolls counts.

Also coming from fifth edition (as far as I know) is the personal tuning of major magic items, which limits the usage of magic items considerably. You tune the magic item to yourself (which takes significant time) before you can use it, and can only tune a small number at any given time. No one else can tune it while it’s tuned to you, if I recall correctly. In this case, once you have the basic idea of tuning you can set the parameters as you like.

I haven't used any of these mechanics, but I admire all three.

Borrowing Mechanics​

Keep in mind, you cannot copyright ideas in games, so as far as I have ever heard, you can use in your game a mechanic devised by someone else.

There's nothing wrong with a mechanics search, it’s just a third resort (after simplification and then figuring out a mechanic to use on your own). There is even a recent book that details bunches of modern board game mechanics (Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms 2nd Edition by Geoffrey Engelstein, Isaac Shalev). I don’t know of a book of mechanics specifically for RPGs.

But What About Being Innovative?​

Innovation is highly overrated. Most “innovations” in games have been used before, you just don’t know about it. Nor do most players care about innovation, they just want to play the game, and to be surprised by what happens. Innovation is merely a limited way to surprise people.

Your Turn: What is your method for solving a design problem, with or without new mechanics?

 

[Von Ether]

Innovation is highly overrated. Most “innovations” in games have been used before, you just don’t know about it. Nor do most players care about innovation, they just want to play the game, and to be surprised by what happens. Innovation is merely a limited way to surprise people.

Reading this brought up two things in my mind.
1. I see it often quoted that if you think you came up with an innovative mechanic, Greg Stafford did first 30 years ago.

2. I lost track of how many times I've seen this interaction on the web:
OP: "I don't like X in 5e, I need a house rule! ASAP!"
Poster #2: "There's a rule for that in the DMG."
OP: "Whaaaa?"

 

[kunadam]

Wasnt somethig like attuning used in Earthdawn? It was actually a long process to unlock the full potential of a magic item.

I do search for mechanisms. I'm still searching for a magic system with spells and mama point to replace the Vancian system of D&D

 

[Laurefindel]

I tend to see innovation as a way to move things forward to make them better, or at least better for the themes/concept/style you're looking for. Putting old elements in a new context (like borrowing rules or mechanics) is a form of innovation, and looking at what others have done in the past gives you good basis to innovate. As the saying goes, "Stealing from one source is plagiarism. Stealing from many is research!"

Science advances by comparing and reviewing results with other authors, and each advancement is based on the work of a predecessor. I tend to do the same with RPG game mechanics; I start by educating myself on what I intend to convey and look at what other authors have done; either adopting their work or building from them. I don't think innovation (of RPG mechanics) really exists in a vacuum.

 

[MichaelSomething]

But people here hate it when I do that!

Want to balance spells? Material components?

Game too easy? Have PCs roll stats 3d6 in order!

And don't forget long adventuring days to enforce resource management!

 

[RareBreed]

Usually when I think of mechanics, I think of dice, but I also consider other systems, like for example "action economies" or "resource pools" (where you have to distribute a fixed pool of points across 2 or more kinds of resources).

I've had some inspiration from other games but I usually try to think of mechanics on my own. When I think of dice mechanics, I either try to mathematically derive the probability distributions of a dice mechanic, or I empirically create simulations with large-ish samples in software to figure out the distributions. This is kind of a bugbear of mine, and for example, while I wanted to like Modiphius's 4th Edition of Twilight 2000, I found issues with the probability distributions of their dice mechanic.

I also don't need to do research because I've got years worth of games I have bought on drivethrurpg or bundle of holding, not to mention decades worth of playing or reading all kinds of games. I also did a fair bit of historical miniature war games in my youth (including "modern" circa 1980s) micro armor, and that also influenced me. I guess like Gygax, I had a wargaming background and wanted to know more about the individual represented by those metal figurines.

While technically, I played AD&D before I did historical miniatures, it was only a brief stint, and I can say that I was a wargamer before being a roleplayer. In fact, the next game I really played a lot of before roleplaying was Car Wars and Ogre/GEV. So I look more for mechanics with a simulationist/wargaming bent.

 

[GMMichael]

Also coming from fifth edition (as far as I know) is the personal tuning of major magic items, which limits the usage of magic items considerably. You tune the magic item to yourself (which takes significant time) before you can use it, and can only tune a small number at any given time. No one else can tune it while it’s tuned to you, if I recall correctly. In this case, once you have the basic idea of tuning you can set the parameters as you like.

XP for calling out the correct usage of mechanism! (Not that Lewpuls needs XP...)

Adv/Disadv was genius for D&D, as a streamlining of 3.5. I can't say I'm a fan of Attunement though. It seems very clunky, or ad hoc. If the question is "how do we put the reins on magic item usage," I'd prefer a more elegant answer than "let's make a new rule that says some magic items arbitrarily (?) require a process that lets a character use only one of them at a time, and at a slow rate of change . . . "

 

[kenada]

A number of different games have influenced the design of my homebrew system (and I keep a list, so I can acknowledge that influence), but there are also problems I have to solve that don’t map neatly to other mechanics or constraints or design intentions that preclude them. There’s a synthesis that results in something new and different overall (or else why am I bothering?).

I wouldn’t be surprised if that is common. It seems difficult mot to be exposed to different ideas in our areas of interest. I’m not even sure that’s necessarily a good thing. (I would also distinguish being influenced by something from just MacGyvering things together without applying your own understandings and ideas.)