You Got Narrative in My Game Mechanics! (Part 1)

Before we get started, allow me to apologize for the long lapse in articles posted here. Work’s been busy, the world is hard and atypical right now, etc., etc. You’ve heard it all before but it’s no less true this time. Anyway, thanks for your patience.

People sometimes think that a game designer’s job is to make game mechanics. Some roleplaying game designers think that’s what their job is. The problem with that is that it leads to mechanizing everything. You get a dense set of rules that ends up being more a wargame or a board game. RPGs need some room to stretch and be flexible. Room for narrative.

 For our purposes today, we’ll say that “narrative” encompasses the non-mechanized aspects of the game, where the players have the freedom to try something that’s not written on their character sheet. When you read the rules of a game, and there’s no rule or die roll involved to go around town and get information on the setting, that’s narrative (at least, that’s how we’re defining it for this article). So then, it’s more accurate to say that an RPG designer’s job is to create a system which involves both mechanics and narrative, because deciding when to not create a rule is as important as creating one.

But how does a designer know when or when not to create a rule or to leave it to the narrative?

There is no set answer. It depends on the game and the game experience you’re trying to create. There’s a lot to unpack here.

I think early on, every designer has to decide how rules-heavy their game will be. That might seem obvious, and yet I’ve seen a lot of games where the designer clearly believed that they were designing a rules-light game and somewhere along the way they got lost. They might still even refer to their game as rules-light, but they’re not seeing their own creation clearly. (I can’t think of a single instance where I’ve seen the reverse—where someone set out to create an intricate rules set and accidentally created a rules-light game. But I suppose it could happen.)

Now, let me stress, we might be talking about games that are rules-light, rules-heavy, tactical, story-based, or what have you, but I’m not making a judgement on any of them. Create the game you want and you’ll almost certainly find people who want to play that very game. This article—like all the articles in this series—is about making sure you end up with the sort of game you set out to design.

What it really comes down to is determining what you want the experience at the table to be like. Tactical action with careful rules referencing? Epic storytelling? Utterly random experiences that surprise even the GM? Players pouring over an intricate series of options that allow them to mechanically create precisely the character they want, or wide open rules with broad allowances that allow them to create precisely the character they want?

But more than that, think about the use of dice at the table (we’ve talked a lot about this already). How often do you expect the players to roll dice? How about the GM? Once you’ve got this question answered, you can start to determine what activities in the game warrant die rolls and which ones don’t.

Some people think that if a character takes an action, they need to roll dice. If you’re rolling dice, there’s a mechanic involved. That seems like an easy rule of thumb, but let’s think about that more closely.

A character makes an attack against a foe. A character leaps onto a moving train. A character wants to recall the history of the land to help identify some old inscription. Those seem like actions most players want to roll for. (But some games handle them differently.)

But there are other sorts of actions. A character rushes across the room. A character hoists a heavy backpack, puts it on, and then walks all day toward the next town. A character builds a campfire and cooks their dinner. Those don’t seem like actions most players want to roll for. (But don’t be hasty—some games require them.)

And then there are the cases even less clear-cut.

A character talks to the mayor to get his friends released from jail—a perfectly valid action in an RPG—but one that involves not only a dialog between PC and NPC, but (more importantly) one between the player and the GM. Do dice need to be rolled? What if the PC’s words do not match up with the player’s die roll?

Take another situation: a character is searching the old man’s study looking for a hidden document. They could say, “I search the room,” but they don’t. Instead, they say, “I pull out the drawers in the desk and check carefully for false bottoms.” The GM looks at their notes and sees that there is indeed a false bottom in one of the drawers and that’s where the sought-after document lies. Is there a die roll required on the part of the player, or is the GM’s response purely a narrative one?

Now, I’m aware that many think this is a GM issue, but it really shouldn’t be. And the reason is these are problems that a GM cannot best address ad hoc. All aspects of the game are (probably) interdependent, and changing one probably impacts others.  

Furthermore, in both examples, if I, the player, used all my resources to build a character with great speaking skills or great searching abilities, but I never engage with those mechanics, don’t I feel like I erred when I created my character? Why did the game’s character creation options allow me to do that? Conversely, if this is the kind of game where we roll for every character action but there are no mechanics for talking or searching, doesn’t it suggest that I, as a PC, shouldn’t attempt those two actions? 

In other words, the way gameplay is designed (or implemented) needs to match up with the way characters are designed. Character creation plants the seeds for player expectations, and if the game doesn’t then meet those expectations, there’s something clearly wrong. If GMs of your game are lamenting the fact that your players solve every problem with violence, maybe take a look at the character creation options in the game you’ve provided. If everything is about choosing weapons, abilities to help you fight and heal, and every spell is fireball and magic missile, should anyone really be surprised that players come into every situation with their characters’ swords drawn?

So rules need to back up play expectations, both for the players and for the designer.

This means that the designer needs to look at what the most important activities in the game will be, and ensure they have the most mechanical weight. Consider designing those rules first. If you have a combat-focused game, design the combat systems first. Make sure they work just the way you want them to, even if they are more involved than any other aspect of the game. That’s what I mean by mechanical weight.

When we were designing 3rd Edition D&D, we sort of jokingly referred to the concept of “complexity points.” We knew that the game shouldn’t be any more complex than necessary, and we had a pretty good idea of what “too complex” looked like overall for D&D. So, this meant that we had a (pretend) limited resource of these (utterly abstract) so-called complexity points we could spend on the whole game. So we’d say, “Is this issue worth spending some complexity points on?” We never actually put number values to these topics, but it was a worthwhile concept to remind us that if we made one aspect more complex, we couldn’t do that for another. Something had to be important to spend points on.

And so that’s what I’m getting at here. Spend your complexity points on what’s important to the game. If it’s a game with a lot of starship maneuvers, go ahead and develop some fun and interesting rules for them. If it’s a game with spaceships, but PCs don’t ever pilot them, don’t bother with such rules. Ensure the activities that will take place most often at the table are the most robust and satisfying. (Obviously, you can go too far with this idea. Every time you make the most used systems the most complex systems, you run the risk of making the game feel more complex than it probably is overall. If combats take an hour to resolve and you expect to have 3-4 combats in a session, well, you’ve got a game that is almost nothing but combat, and it will seem pretty complex.)

However, there is another way: instead of mechanizing an important activity with a lot of complexity, a game can take the time to thoroughly explain to the GM how to adjudicate that important activity narratively. In other words, if you want a game where characters avoid combat and try to find non-violent solutions, you can make the combat rules simple (and probably very deadly) and then craft a thorough discussion for the GM on how to cope with the players’ improvisational, non-combat solutions. As they like to say in certain circles, it’s rulings not rules.

So focus rules design on aspects of the game that need them and narrative design on the rest. Simple, right? Well, if that’s not a rhetorical set up for an, “it’s actually more involved than that,” I don’t know what is. But we’ll get to those matters next time, in Part 2.