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?

Character versus character

Combat

Going to start with the RPG granddaddy, combat. Combat rules were first developed from wargames and few games break that lineage in any appreciable way. One thing that’s important to remember is that wargames did not stop developing after RPGs forked off in a different direction; both indie wargaming and of course digital wargaming have created significant innovation that from time to time makes its way back to RPGs. Even when you look at games trying to push RPG combat beyond what was originally set forth in the 70s and 80s, they’re often doing so by pulling ideas back in from other spaces in wargaming and video games. As much as Lancer is somewhat based on D&D 4e it is still innovative, Spencer Campbell’s LUMEN system is also trying something new here, as is (though in a somewhat different way) Fabula Ultima. However, both roleplayers and wargamers alike do center on ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, which explains why D&D is still the bestselling RPG and how Games Workshop still makes as much money as it does. Combat is one area that is so refined where a lack of combat mechanics is really only an improvement if you’re trying to make a game that isn’t about combat, and that is an underrepresented category.

Opposed contests

Generalized mechanics for opposed contests can highlight both that RPGs can do so many things outside of combat and also that they don’t. Although I’m sure you could name an indie game that’s sold 25 copies in either of these cases, the fact that there’s no compelling and popular game built around racing or sports is kind of wild to me. The rules would not be hard; I’ve read some very interesting contest rules in a number of different games. Hell, one mechanical strength of QuestWorlds is how deep the designers go into extended and chained conflicts, the exact sort of rules that could actually be compelling if ground to something that players cared about. For now, though, broad rules for opposed contests are everywhere, and have generally benefited from the refinement seen in all mechanics that involve rolling a dice to see if you meet or exceed a target number (more on this below).

Social conflict

Whereas I lament the lack of specified rules for things like racing, there are plenty of specified social conflict rules and the vast majority of them suck. I give Burning Wheel a lot of credit for framing the ‘Duel of Wits’ conflict system specifically to performative conflict, the type you’d see in a parliamentary or courtroom environment. Other games like Genesys which essentially port their combat system over to social interactions provide little guidance into how those systems can map to a social conflict, which means they run into two distinct problems. On one hand, this method of framing a social interaction is profoundly unrealistic. On the other, no one seems to lean into non-realism enough to make it actually fun instead of weird and an uncomfortable reminder that the world assumes you have no social skills by virtue of your hobby choices. One light in the darkness? Red Markets, whose negotiation mechanics are both interesting and fun but also bounded to a few specific in-game scenarios where they make sense (luckily in a zombie apocalypse you can narrow down and presuppose your social interactions). Red Markets also has the Dependents system, where maintaining relationships with your loved ones is important for keeping you grounded. It’s simplistic, but adds some depth and frankly discomfort to the game’s resource management.

I do think social systems are a place where designers are trying and where we see more and more interesting stuff every year. Several PbtA games (Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows, Masks) play with relationships in cool ways, but I also think there’s an opportunity to build a social mechanic up as the core mechanic of a game. Let’s make a tarot deck with four suits of differing teen bullshit and major arcana for the biggest, most scandalous rumors that could blow up an entire high school (not literally, that’s my point). A downright crunchy social game could be incredible.

Character versus environment

Skill checks/challenges

‘Roll the die to see if you succeed’ is a fundamental mechanic of roleplaying games, wargames, and Yahtzee, but it does not make a good game into and of itself, no matter how many details you add in (except for Yahtzee). Still, designers have iterated and iterated on this one, and now we have a thousand and one dice mechanics, opportunities to skew rolls through metacurrencies and situational modifiers, and the expansion of character abilities to give combat-like boosts and boons within the construct of a ‘scene’ instead of a fight. I give Apocalypse World a lot of credit for putting a stake in the ground regarding dice rolls, as the mechanical innovations within PbtA games (excepting Blades in the Dark which converted the basic concept to a dice pool) are primarily around delineating why you roll and what the potential outcomes of that specific ‘why’ are. This sort of delineation can come in the form of ‘Moves’ or it can come from very specified skill mechanics (like in Torchbearer), but it helps move games beyond ‘roll me a (x) check’ in terms of how these rolls actually move the game forward. And while there are games that manage without the humble skill check, this is the sort of mechanic where excluding it automatically places you in a niche subgenre. Even most diceless games have some form of challenge system, with token-based systems like Belonging Outside Belonging being arguably the most popular.

Survival

Another game with granular, specific skill mechanics is Twilight:2000, and thanks to the game’s multiple subsystems the skills are lean, mean, and still detailed. While combat is one subsystem (obviously) the other is survival, and honestly survival is a secondary goal/mechanic which has been integrated into RPGs fairly well. Track food and water, track the climate, and track other challenges, and you’re able to make otherwise mundane goals challenging and engaging. There aren’t many (if any) games that are solely about survival, but when you look at Twilight:2000 and its Free League cousin Forbidden Lands, you see games where forcing the characters to contend with both the elements and combat make for a more grounded, more engaging experience than games that just do one or the other. 

Character versus the unknown

Exploration

Exploration often goes hand in hand with survival, and I’m of two minds on exploration mechanics in games. First, there are some good ones, and the venerable hexcrawl provides a wealth of mechanical support for venturing into the unknown. Second, there are still further innovations being developed, and it’s through these new mechanics that I’m pretty sure exploration could be made more interesting. Grimwild takes the entire exploration loop to an extreme by placing even dungeon mapping partially in the hands of player characters, but given that there’s an element of resource management that comes up in their map-making mechanics, I do think it could work (regardless of how many people want it). Beyond that, there have been some great map-making games in the last few years and, whether it’s player-driven or not, I want to see more of that in games. The idea of a GM writing out a concrete map is so 1974.

Investigation

A couple of episodes of Quinns’ Quest, on Delta Green and Vaesen, have driven home to me that investigation mechanics, despite investigation being hypothetically the cornerstone of multiple popular RPGs, are a void. Regardless of what any commentator says, there’s no fundamental difference between the investigation mechanics in Vaesen, Delta Green, or Call of Cthulhu for that matter, because none of those games actually have investigation mechanics worth speaking of. In all of those cases the writing of modules makes up for the game doing anything at all, and due to that I do see why Quinns was fairly critical of Vaesen while glowing about Delta Green (and to be clear he was glowing about the module Impossible Landscapes).

To look at where games are actually trying to pull this together you look toward games like The Between and Apocalypse Keys where the GM is responsible for tying the mechanical goals achieved by the characters to clues in a way that’s sensible. Some people don’t like this, thinking that it doesn’t make sense to just create the mystery to align to what the characters happen to do, but it is a reasonable way to center a narrative game around investigation.

If you actually want to make a more game-y investigation game that’s not just a d100 murder mystery dinner party, you need to think a little more procedurally around how characters interact with their environment and find clues. The fact that a bad dice roll could shut you out of finding a clue is entirely symptomatic of traditional game mechanics, and Call of Cthulhu falls victim to it just as much as Vaesen (though as noted in both systems, the GM should just not do that). What you need is a more robust array of information, something that would befit an actual investigation more than either a limited number of puzzle pieces the GM fits together for you or a Lovecraftian railroad dependent on a novelist behind the scenes. My inspiration here comes from a recent video game, Shadows of Doubt. Shadows of Doubt sees you solving murders in a procedurally generated city, where all the clues are generated from the actions of the murderer. It’s up to you to connect the dots, but generally the dots are plentiful, including fingerprints, murder weapons, alibis, and even relationships. I don’t know the best way to translate that into an RPG, but I do think it’s possible. To start, what if someone wrote a game specifically about closed-door mysteries, generating circumstances from a constrained palette? Alternatively, a classic British Cozy set in a small village could work nicely too. In the meantime, my only recommendation is to pick up GURPS Mysteries, read some Agatha Christie, and just try to write the mystery on your own. 

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When you break everything down into broad categories, it is somewhat stark how few things RPGs try to do. Admittedly this doesn’t get into ‘character versus self’ with things like advancement and character creation, but those systems often feed directly into all of the other game foci (not to mention each of those could be an article into and of itself). No, most RPG activities boil down to overcoming challenges, keeping yourself alive, discovering new information about your surroundings and surrounding peers, and then killing them.

I do not necessarily think this list is missing things per se, though you could (and some indies do) make a game about the specifics of almost anything and not pay attention to this list at all. What this list illustrates to me, though, is that even the things we state RPGs can do and are doing are not things necessarily supported by rules, by an actual fun game. I think we need to at least ask the question of whether rules and a game built around these elements will be additive. As you can tell by the relative word count, I think it’s especially important in things like investigation where games like Call of Cthulhu provide no actual investigation mechanics, instead relying on pre-written mysteries which in reality have no dependency to any specific game.

With The Forge, narrative gaming and narrative game design got a spotlight, an intense burst of creativity and output that has shaped the hobby ever since. I personally think that the actual ‘game’ element of role-playing games has been left to wither. We have D&D and a whole bunch of games based on D&D, with the desire to simulate the environment of the fiction creating most of the evolution. Screw that. Let’s play card games for social interactions, Battleship for investigations, and make the survival mechanics Mastermind. And even if we don’t actually do those things (the first one may be a good idea, the others maybe not), why aren’t we asking more about how to make these things fun? QuestWorlds had it backwards: you don’t want a game that stays quiet until something needs to be resolved. Why don’t we create more mechanics that demand we engage them, that make players demand we engage them? Let’s get abstract, and stop writing so many damn simulators. I want to see characters come together and make a great story, and I want to do it without saying the words ‘target number’ even once. And for every indie game designer that says they’ve already done this, cool! Fantastic. Sell it. A game, more than anything else, needs players.

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