Innovative Mechanics

[DaR]

Or Yes Virgina, System Really Does Matter

In the past few months, there's been a preponderance of truly interesting new games here on the Forge and elsewhere.  A number of them have had mechanics which I thought were inspired or bordering on utter brilliance. Among them:

[*] Jake's Riddle of Steel's use of Spiritual Attributes as a mechanical way to drive both character and player involvment and the ditching of the traditional 'I go, you go' initiative methods in favor of just choosing offense or defense and working accordingly.
[*] Clinton's Paladin, using a system where the main character currency (Light and Dark Animus points) and character traits can be used to initiate rerolls of non-successful dice, plus a rather interesting system for collective group resolution.
[*] Scott's Draconic and Vincent's Otherkind, which seperate out aspects of resolution success and narration into multiple simultaneous rolls and then let the player decide how to best use his various successes and failures to determine what he feels is important in a given scene.
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Things in the less immediate past which caught my attention:

[*] James West's The Pool's use of a dead simple 'roll any sixes?' to determine narrative control, without an inherent proscription of success or failure.
[*] Clinton's Donjon Krawl, which turns the number successes on a resolution roll into a form of currency which can be used in a variety of ways, like narrative control (stating facts), bonuses to future actions, or as a more traditional measure of the effectiveness of the action.
[*] Ron's Sorcerer, which employs FitM and a single roll to determine both success and the order of actions in combat.
[*] Tunnels & Trolls, where the "party" functions as a unit, combining their rolls and sharing out the success or defeats of a combat round, rather than functioning as a collection of seperate individuals.
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In all these cases, the mechanics were either rather innovative (at least, in my experience) or they served to reinforce some central tenent of the game, such as its Premise or the desired tone and focus of the game.

So with these examples in mind, what other specific mechanics have you seen that you thought were either truly innovative or just fit the game's premise absolutely perfectly?   It could be anything from just a dice rolling method which happened to reinforce the desired style of play to a particular subset of rules which turned an ordinary game into something spectacular, but whatever mechanic it was, it caught your attention and made you go "ooh, when I write my masterpiece, I wanna  use something just like that!".

-DaR

[Ollog Herder]

Yes, friends.  I think that Earthdawn's magic system is one of the coolest ever.  For those of you who don't know it, I'll explain.
 See, the astral plane is the source of magic.  But it has become tainted by Horrors.  So wizards can no longer safely draw in energy to shape spells.  To gather spells now, they must use Matrices and Threads.  A Matrix holds the form of the spell, while threads feed energy into the Matrix.  To compare it to D&D, spellcasters put spells into Matrices as a way of preparing them for use, and then Threads are woven at the time of casting.  The system involves dice rolling for successes.  A spell of this nature may be cast any number of times per day, since the "balance" is acheived through randomization.  
 While still fairly typical of "D&D clones" in that spells are very abstract and are not a part of the magician, the system blends so well with the setting and is so dependent on setting details that it deserves my regard.
 Mage: The Ascension has a bit of a cumbersome mechanic for spellcasting, since there is little elegant about accumulating a dice pool for one's magic.  However, the fact that the 9 spheres can, collectively, accomplish anything is a very strong facet to the system.
In addition, there is the rule of "Toast": the individual spheres reward creative thinking so much that it's possible to acheive the same general result (if different details and methods) with any of the 9 magical spheres.
 My final plug is for one of the first RPGs that I ever played, Everway.  The flexibility of the card-based resolution system is what I love the most: whether you want to have blow-by-blow combat or sum it all up with some GM narration, you can have it your way.

[Andrew Martin]

So with these examples in mind, what other specific mechanics have you seen that you thought were either truly innovative or just fit the game's premise absolutely perfectly?

There's my Ratio system, which uses a single D10, and allows players to have character descriptors with infinite level of precision, for example:

Strength: 94.39546%
Blaster: 67.89123456%

For generic simulationist modern through SF games, I'm never going to another system! :) Because any other system doesn't allow enough precision. And it blends so smoothly with on/off descriptors as well:

0.0000000000000 (and so on...)% = off
Any thing in between is rolled for.
100.0000000000000 (and so on...)% = on

It also corresponds exactly to real world and future skill and attribute values!

[Paganini]

It's difficult to speak about innovation, because so many people come up with the same ideas at the same time. Was Vincent more or less innovative that Scott? Who knows? I thought the Sovereign Stone system was innovative... their die mechanic was really cool, simple, and almost exactly identical to what I'd designed for a cinematic action game. I'd never seen anything like it before, but I'm betting someone has done it somewhere. (And, incidentall, their magic system is really cool too.)

Zak's Shadows is probably the most innovative game I've seen since coming to the Forge, with it's idea that character effectiveness isn't neccessary for a Director stance powered Narrativist game.

(Zak! Get off your butt and give a Shadows game that I can actually *buy!* :)

[DaR]

It's difficult to speak about innovation, because so many people come up with the same ideas at the same time. Was Vincent more or less innovative that Scott? Who knows? I thought the Sovereign Stone system was innovative... their die mechanic was really cool, simple, and almost exactly identical to what I'd designed for a cinematic action game. I'd never seen anything like it before, but I'm betting someone has done it somewhere. (And, incidentall, their magic system is really cool too.)

Well, the intent wasn't so much to focus on innovative in the sense of being "the first", but in the sense of "different from the normal way".  I'm not asking for the first instance of dice pools or the first instance of using d1000 with double-reverse-whammy-roll option or whatever.  What I'm hoping for is sort of a laundry list of "the really cool mechanics we've seen".

We, as a community (the Forge specifically and game designers in general), have had parts of this conversation before, often phrased in the form of "what sort of cool die rolling techniques do people use?".  I'm looking to expand on that question, though, because while I admit I find new dice rolling techniques interesting myself, it's the application of those techniques to a game (thus creating System) that is really interesting.

For example, The Riddle of Steel uses a fairly standard dice pool system, involving rolling dice based on your traits, trying to exceed a target number of some sort, and then counting the number of dice that do exceed the target number as successes.  Pretty vanilla and people have been using it since practically the dawn of gaming.   But what makes it interesting in Riddle of Steel is the addition of the Spiritual Attributes.  Extra dice so you have a better chance of more successes, but their use is tied to doing things that the player has declared are personally (and spiritually) important to the character.  As several recent threads have pointed out, this a wonderfully effective way for a GM to look and say "aha!  if I use these as story elements, my players will be hooked as well as the characters".   It also ties strongly into TROS idea that characters should be passionate people who excel because they're driven to by their beliefs.

On the other hand, Clinton's Paladin uses a dice system I'd never see anything quite like before.  At first blush it's a fairly standard dice pool system.  Roll a number of d6 equal to your trait, and anything that's a 5 or 6 is a success, with the number of successes indicating the effectiveness of the action.  Where it gets interesting is the addition of the ability to use Animus points to initiate rerolls.  By choosing an appropriate trait from your Light and Dark traits, and spending an appropriate Light or Dark Animus point, you can reroll any dice that are below the rating of the trait you've chosen.  As long as you have Animus to spend and appropriate traits with a ranking higher than one of your unsuccessful dice, you can keep rerolling those dice in order to get more successes.  This very strongly ties the dice mechanic to the central Premise of the game, which revolves around the Paladin's struggle to balance between the Light and the Dark and to several genre conventions where paladins (or Jedi or whatever) battle back and forth, pouring emotion into the battle until one side can't give any more and the fight is then ended in very short order.

Ollog's example of Everyway's card system was another good one.  It was innovative simply for its use of tarot-style cards as randomizers, but those cards were even more important in the game.  The various cards had direct ties to the cosmology and mythology of the world yet simultaneously enhanced the flavor by making the players interpret how they thought the meanings of the card affected the conflict at hand.

That said, yes, Sovreign Stone's d20 magic system was very interesting and quite innovative compared to most of the other d20 magical systems out there.   I'd almost certainly use it for any future d20 high-fantasy game I played.   But I've never seen the original system.  How does it work?

-DaR

(Edit: I know the difference between its and it's.  No really.  Honest injun.)

[Paganini]

That said, yes, Sovreign Stone's d20 magic system was very interesting and quite innovative compared to most of the other d20 magical systems out there.   I'd almost certainly use it for any future d20 high-fantasy game I played.   But I've never seen the original system.  How does it work?

The original SS system was based on rating character traits with die types. So you might have a Strength of d8 or a Running skill of d6. Traits were divided into Attributes and Skills. To perform an action, a skill was selected, and the dice for both that attribute and it's parent skill were rolled - so an interesting twist in the fairly basic Attribute + Skill idea. You could get an extra die or two by "exerting," taking stun damage representing fatigue (physical or mental). The goal was to beat a GM chosen target number.

Magic used this basic system with a twist: The target number was determined by the spell rather than the GM. The more macho the spell, the bigger the target number. To cast a spell the player would roll as normal... but the rolls were cumulative. You could just keep rolling until you beat the target number. The catch was that every roll after the first gave you a point of stun damage... so casting a spell beyond your ken would eventually result in you going unconcious. Rolling botches would also give you stun points, and too many botches could cause you to lose control of the spell.

[Jake Norwood]

This is old, and kinda "duh" when you look at me and TROS, but I remember the first time I saw non-abstract damage in a combat system. It was either ICE's MERP or WFRP, I don't recall which, but I thought "damn! I actually took his hand off" or something. It was hard dealing with regular old hit points after that.

I also think that Pendragon's use of Traits, balanced between 20, did a wonderful job of motivating players to believe in something and do something other than just wander around killing stuff. It was a lightbulb for me.

Dzikie Pola, a Polish game that revolved around 17th century dueling noblmen and raiding your neighbors was the first system I ever saw that smoothly used strategy in combat, including a few maneuvers. It took a lot of vagueness away from combat, which I loved.

InSpectres has this really nifty chaotic confessional thing, which is by and far the best element of the game, and had me thinking for weeks on how to play with something like that later on in my own designs.

Finally, I read sorcerer almost a year after completing TROS, but as Ron and I have often joked, you would swear that we had been reading each others notes in areas of combat, destiny, and a few other tidbits.

Just my 2c.

Jake

[damion]

Well, I actually always liked EarthDawns mechanics.

Magic systems seemed to be a prime area for innovation, if only because DnD's was so bad.

I'd also throw Walt's symetry system in here, as it looked pretty cool.

Concurrent discussions with Mike to the contrary, universal currency systems are pretty cool, and allow the generation of
vastly different charachters that can work together.

[gentrification]

I like Dying Earth's mechanics quite a bit. Putting more points into an ability doesn't reflect greater competence so much as a reserve of patience and the willingness to persist in the face of capricious happenstance.