Task resolution serves as the crux of most RPG designs. How do the PCs do things and how do you know if they succeed or fail? In answering that question, we think about whether the game mechanics attempt to simulate reality or emulate a certain sort of fiction. I almost always put in these articles some sort of statement about how there’s no right or wrong answers, but I’m going to deviate from that somewhat here. I’m going to put it in as plain language as I can:
A fine piece, though I would also approach this question:
“When does the conversation stop and the mechanics begin?
The answer is what the designer wants the people around the table to care about.”
In a slightly different way; particularly as it concerns randomizers-as-mechanic. Instead of randomizers in general, I’ll just use dice, but this applies to any randomizer.
I see the dice as something that comes into play not just when the designer wants the table to care, but also in two metasituations:
- when the table does not know an outcome of a situation
- when the table cannot know the outcome of a situation
The two are a little different, but in this situation that’s not particularly crucial. The point is that the dice transform one situation into another in an unpredictable way.
In this role, they are / can be a mechanic that escapes any potential designer control and gives creativity to the table (and the dice as oracle).
Though, of course, one could also argue that this is a case of designer-intent, where the intent is to provide the table a means to escape edge cases and designer intent.
I tend to refer to my game as "realistic" (...and also put the quotation marks around it) because I think that Believable as more to do with consistency than any logic of the world. When I say "realistic" I don't mean that the system is fully simulating physics or anything like that. I want to set the ground level of understanding: the fictional world is like the real world you experience every day.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on such a difficult field! Let me say that I have just written my (first) RPG and tried to tackle this problem in order to avoid to fail as you described. My main (and nearly only) game mechanic is not realistic, but it is fun and believable... I am not sure about the 'easy to understand' as the outcomes are not clear (and extremely subjective), but for sure it is easy to use for the player. In order to get confirmation of what I observed in my playtest, I published my game in a 'playtest edition' and I hope in the next future to get the same outcomes. Needless to say, if you would like to have a glance at it, pls let me know. Thanks again for your enlightening post! Best
A fine piece, though I would also approach this question:
“When does the conversation stop and the mechanics begin?
The answer is what the designer wants the people around the table to care about.”
In a slightly different way; particularly as it concerns randomizers-as-mechanic. Instead of randomizers in general, I’ll just use dice, but this applies to any randomizer.
I see the dice as something that comes into play not just when the designer wants the table to care, but also in two metasituations:
- when the table does not know an outcome of a situation
- when the table cannot know the outcome of a situation
The two are a little different, but in this situation that’s not particularly crucial. The point is that the dice transform one situation into another in an unpredictable way.
In this role, they are / can be a mechanic that escapes any potential designer control and gives creativity to the table (and the dice as oracle).
Though, of course, one could also argue that this is a case of designer-intent, where the intent is to provide the table a means to escape edge cases and designer intent.
I tend to refer to my game as "realistic" (...and also put the quotation marks around it) because I think that Believable as more to do with consistency than any logic of the world. When I say "realistic" I don't mean that the system is fully simulating physics or anything like that. I want to set the ground level of understanding: the fictional world is like the real world you experience every day.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on such a difficult field! Let me say that I have just written my (first) RPG and tried to tackle this problem in order to avoid to fail as you described. My main (and nearly only) game mechanic is not realistic, but it is fun and believable... I am not sure about the 'easy to understand' as the outcomes are not clear (and extremely subjective), but for sure it is easy to use for the player. In order to get confirmation of what I observed in my playtest, I published my game in a 'playtest edition' and I hope in the next future to get the same outcomes. Needless to say, if you would like to have a glance at it, pls let me know. Thanks again for your enlightening post! Best