thread: 2005-05-10 : How Do You Design a Mechanic?
On 2005-05-12, Neel wrote:
Wilco, Vincent.
More thoughts about what you said: the flip side of ensuring that the players get meaningful decisions is that when you have something in your game that isn't really about decision-making, you can often cut to the chase and get a better game.
An example of this shows up in combat systems. In most non-tactical games, the only number that can change are the hit points or equivalent. This means that each round the player basically has one binary decision—"Fight some more" or "Run away"—usually with a clearly superior choice. This is not a very interesting decision (and is parodied to hilarious effect in Progress Quest).
So, in my game Leftover Dudes I ended up with a different kind of system for action scenes. It was a Buffy-esque game by genre, so I wanted action scenes in which the PCs showed off how cool they were, but I didn't want to make them tactically deep.
So the way they worked was like this: the opposition shows up in game, and I set a difficulty level for thwarting them. Then, each player described in turn their actions in the usual stunty style of Feng Shui/Wushu/Exalted, and rolled dice and counted successes. Usually, the difficulty was much higher than they could achieve alone. However, they could use teamwork. Teamwork meant that if a player's description built off of and supported another player's description, they could take their successes and give them as bonus dice to the final roll. If the final total exceeded the difficulty, they succeeded, and otherwise, they failed.
So there weren't any really serious decisions to be made in an action sequence. The important thing was that the system extremely strongly rewarded taking other players' verbal contributions and building on them, and this was wildly successful. So, the problem with stunt mechanics is that no one can reliably improvise one impressive bit after another. It's hit or miss. But, it turns out that if you require players to build on each others' ideas, you can chain together five average ideas and get a stellar result in terms of player response.
Emily is probably nodding her head and going "Of course it works; you've got the players validating each others' contributions by actively incorporating them into their own stuff", but this was a major revelation to me. And I figured this out because I saw that there wasn't any decision-making going on in a particular subsystem, and then thinking about the purpose it really served.
