thread: 2009-09-14 : Subsystems
On 2009-09-23, Zebediah wrote:
Vincent: ah—I see the point I was trying to make was too obvious, and everybody had it already. My bad ::grin::
I came to RP first through 1-shot larps—specifically, though the Assassin's Guild, which is known for insanely customized mechanics: if you don't know the herbalism, or computer hacking, mechanics, you don't get to use them. And if there isn't a mechanic for it, it falls into one or two catagories:
Impress the GM: if you can convince a GM you should be able to do something, they'll come back the next day and give you a sketch of how to do it.
Kludgite: things made of kludgite are "impervious to player cleverness." Yes, you can write programs to interact with nodes, but the in-game bank's computer system is made of kludgite. You can't use your computer skills to manipulate finances, no matter what clever plan you concoct.
This occasionally leads to that old chestnut about disbelief: it is not merely suspended, but hung from the neck until dead. But some level is vital for game balance in a gamist system, to distinguish a "fair" win from an "unfair" one.
Which I think was a lot of words mostly to explain where I was coming from.
Toward Mathieu:
My my larp experience, I'd define a subsystem thusly:
A subsystem is a set of procedures and information used to resolve some portion of a game, with very limited reference to the other subsystems of the game.
Important to the notion of a subsystem is that you don't need to know the other subsystems in order to resolve this one—that information is prelude or postlude, or very rarely, runs in parallel with a simple "bonuses from one system can be passed to another." If two subsystems run off the same resources and pass each other bonuses while they run in parallel most of the time, you're probably looking at one complex subsystem.
There is usually some level of unification, in that there's some description of the relevant details of a situation that subsystems change, and that then that subsystem or another one can be used to affect the new situation.
The "very limited" is the part that's most ambiguous. In a larp, or the equivalent, there may not be any connection between the systems other than the fact that the same player is using them, and if his character has been killed with the combat system, he's not allowed to use the research system anymore. In Feng Shui (or D&D, or....), the same stat-block gets interpreted in different ways in different venues by the different subsystems.
In Burning Wheel, there's actually a very complex morass of which skills are useful in which mechanics, combined with various "pick three options from this list" choice mechanics, which assemble into most of the submechanics of the game. But those sets of choices, and what is tracked, does a very good job of giving the feel of combat, debate, etc.
Which is, going back to the top of the page, an important aspect of having subsystems—they're there to give you the flavor of doing something that you're not actually going to do (because it's illegal, immoral, dangerous, impossible in general, impossible for the player, or depends on interacting with details that we aren't going to bother to establish)
