thread: 2005-05-10 : How Do You Design a Mechanic?
On 2005-05-10, Vincent wrote:
Examples:
"Dawn," from last year's Game Chef. I was working on a game for that competition, didn't finish it, it was called BADASS the roleplaying game, subtitled "every man is an island." It paired dawn with dusk to represent how far along your character was.
Anyhow it had rules like these:
Choose a dawn/dusk number from 2 to 9, with 2 being toward dawn and 9 being toward dusk. Divvy a number of dice equal to your dawn/dusk among your skills. Give your "natural resiliance" a number of dice equal to 10 minus your dawn/dusk. If your character's an elf, you have to choose a dawn/dusk over 6, as you've lived thousands of years of murder and hate you undying Elric-looking bastard. If one of your human contact NPCs meets a bad fate, add 1 to your dawn/dusk.
So those rules happen to model reality, to some extent, with the badass character getting more world-weary and also investing in some human contact once in a while. But the real point of them, as you can see, is to structure my choices and actions as a player. And in the last rule, about "human contact NPCs," you can see how your choices and actions as a player may hook into mine - you can bet there'd be some rules about who gets to say what about the fates of which NPCs.
Or let's pull a good word from your answer to Andy, Tobias: "marriage." Let's apply it to Emily's cool future Brazil. And this time let's avoid modeling reality altogether:
You can declare that your PC's fate and another PC's fate are "married." The PCs don't have to have any particular relationship or even know one another at all. Once per scene, you can pull a die from the other player's pool and include it in your roll. If your roll's a win, return the die to the other player's pool; if it's a loss, throw the die away!
There's a rule that structures the interaction of the players without any real reference to the game world at all.
And for a third example, how about "marriage" in Em's Brazil again, but a) modeling reality and b) to the detriment of the inter-player interaction:
PCs who're married get +3 to their conflict resource total when their spouse is in danger. No rules about who can and can't be your spouse; that's left to the setting. Let's even go exotic, in keeping, and say that in the setting marriage is a flexible institution, with people marrying and un-marrying one another in all kinds of whimsical combinations.
What happens? Within minutes of meeting, all the PCs marry each other! It's a reasonable-seeming reality-modeling rule, but thoughtless: it has a bad (at least iffy and unintended) influence on the players' decisions.
