thread: 2009-09-14 : Subsystems
On 2009-09-18, Josh W wrote:
But perhaps people being able to use fighting abilities while talking is actually a design goal. Unifying the mechanical basis is one of the ways of getting sub-systems to interact, and it gives them long borders, because rather than attaching at specific points; "activate fight, swirly graphics", they plug into each other in a variety of situations. An example might be someone trying to break up a fight, with social mechanics interacting with combat ones. The "automatic" escalation of Dog's provides another example.
This suggests to me that the idea of a unified mechanic should actually be a way of considering at a deep level the differences in different kinds of interaction, and using one dice system (or whatever) to express those differences.
This can cause headaches, like when I tried to combine my "lifting heavy weights" subgame with my combat subgame, which mashed up the dice in a horrible way and forced me to shift the numbers for everything, but when it works it means that it's really hard for people to play the interactions of subsystems wrong, or at least makes it obvious that they are doing it, and so locks the game together.
