When I reviewed QuestWorlds last week, I came away from the game concluding that everything was centered around one basic mechanic: A character must roll under their ability rating while the GM tries to roll under the ‘Resistance’ rating of the challenge at hand. It is the character versus the challenge, and everything is defined in that way. And sitting with that, it kind of made me realize that a lot of TTRPGs define everything or almost everything in terms of making a check, only broadening the mechanical palette in specific circumstances.

Does this matter? Well, it depends. If you’re the sort of person who sees RPGs in terms of what exists and what people are already playing, then it’s natural to see the baseline mechanics of the TTRPG as something that’s been refined since the original release of D&D and is therefore fit for purpose. If you’re thinking about role-playing game design broadly, though, you may note that this sort of quasi-simulation of using probabilities to determine when a character overcomes certain challenges is a very limited sphere of the design space, barely larger than the sphere created by making quasi-simulations of using probabilities to determine when characters kill each other. You know, wargames.

For now, though, I’m going to stay in this design space taken up by the traditional roleplaying game (coming up with something starkly different will likely be the topic of a future editorial). There are many things which RPGs try to do, some they’ve arguably been trying to do for decades. For all of these tasks, do the mechanics help or hinder? And, because this is certainly the primary discourse around this topic, do mechanics make the task better?