Mechanics that reflect Setting

[Valamir]

I split this off from this thread because I thought it was particularly interesting topic in its own right, and only tangental to the purpose of that thread.

If not, you extrapolating this into a whole range of "source material" that the "setting was modelled on" is actually a perfect example of the sort of bringing-in-stuff-from-the-outside, that I was talking about. I don't see any source material mentioned in the games text that would lead me to assume those archetypes exist...

I think there's a very interesting difference in how we read games.

Here's how I read games:

1. First, I skim the whole thing, to get a rough feel for the game as a whole.

2. Then, I carefully reread any designer's notes, lists of source inspirations, and chapters on how to play. I do this in order to get a feel for where the author was coming from and where he or she wants the players to go during play.

3. Then, I reread the flavor text and setting information. This is basically always written without being double-checked against the mechanics, and as such it's useful for revealing what the author wants out of play, as opposed to what the game mechanics actually deliver.

My goal, with step 2 and 3, is to learn what sorts of things that I and the other players can bring into the game from outside that will cohere with what's already there. IMO, saying "don't bring stuff in from outside" is asking for the impossible. The players always will (and indeed, must) do this; what the designer can do is give advice about good and bad places to look.

4. I read the mechanics, looking for possible inconsistencies with the impression that steps 2 and 3 gave me for what play should look like. I write potential problem areas down, and then run the game. (Note that "problems" are defined relative to what I have learned from steps 2 and 3 about the goals of play, and to what the particular group of players I have will like.)

5. In play, sometimes I learn that potential mechanics problems aren't problems in practice, and always I learn about things I didn't see that are problems in practice. At this point, the mechanics get tweaked, and step 5 gets repeated until we converge to a system that's reasonably satisfying for everyone in the group.

In Mongrel, I see a much weaker motivation for the mechanical differences between sexes than you do, because I don't put the mechanics in the driver's seat. As a reader, the side-comment about Dune is more important to me than the character creation system, because it tells me something about the systems of signifiers that Ron was drawing upon while writing the game.

This is a fascinating process, Neel.  I see in it a quite appropriate reaction to the general prominence of "system doesn't matter" (or "doesn't matter much") that is common in alot of design.

It looks to me that what you're doing is recognizing that alot of games don't put much effort into making their mechanics support their setting, and so you start by analysing the setting to determine how the game should play.

Then you go and compare that to how the mechanics to see how well the mechanics support this, prepared to change it as necessary where it doesn't.

I would say this process demonstrates that you believe that system does matter but have become used to having to rewire the game yourself to get it support the setting.  Would that be a fair characterization?

In the specific case of Mongrel, however, Ron is very much a system does matter guy, so I am confident that none of the mechanics in Mongrel (making allowances for this not being a final version) are written without careful thought as to what the setting implications are.

[neelk]

This is a fascinating process, Neel.  I see in it a quite appropriate reaction to the general prominence of "system doesn't matter" (or "doesn't matter much") that is common in alot of design. It looks to me that what you're doing is recognizing that alot of games don't put much effort into making their mechanics support their setting, and so you start by analysing the setting to determine how the game should play. Then you go and compare that to how the mechanics to see how well the mechanics support this, prepared to change it as necessary where it doesn't.

I would say this process demonstrates that you believe that system does matter but have become used to having to rewire the game yourself to get it support the setting.  Would that be a fair characterization?

Yes, with the caveat that I'm most interested in focusing play on the decisions of the players, and I'm as willing to adjust the setting as the mechanics to achieve this.

For example, in In Nomine, the characters have, by default, a reasonably quick and reliable way of summoning the Demon Prince or Archangel they serve. Both the setting material and the game mechanics reflect this. However, I didn't like this, because it made it too tempting to summon an unbeatable trump during crisis moments. Since I wanted the game to be about the players' agency, I modified the summoning rules so that it took several hours to summon a superior, and told the players that the arrival of an archangel or demon prince on random places on Earth caused disturbances that could be detected from the celestial plane. So now the normal MO for characters was to only summon archangels and demon princes in specially sanctified/desecrated places (called Tethers) which concealed their arrival, and usually only for backup like information or equipment. Now, the player characters were at the sharp end in crisis situations, and the players couldn't shunt off agency to a third (NPC) party. If I wanted to keep archangels and demon princes easy to summon, I'd likely change the game so that the players run each other's superiors (possibly using Nobilis mechanics). Now agency would remain in the players' hands even when the ordinary PCs called in the artillery.

The other part which drives me is that I think the communal, improvisational part of play is one of the most important parts in making happy players. I think that things become "real" in an rpg when the stuff that the players create is recognized and manipulated by the other players; I see the other players at their happiest when what they make up is recognized by the others. It's a two-level pleasure, in that your status as an integral member of the play group is acknowledged, and in that the game world feels richer and more dynamic because there are more interactions going on in it. So I worry a lot about getting "stuff" bouncing from player to player.

The most successful instance I have ever seen of this happened when I was a player in a Feng Shui game. This game started after the end of a year long campaign, during which all the players had watched a Hong Kong action movie or two basically once a week. Everyone had everything -- the setting, the characters, the plot moves -- down cold, and so when we started to play there was this incredible sense of fluidity, as the players laid down plot twists and melodrama and all of it ricocheted off of everything everyone else was doing. It was lovely!

So knowing the source material of the game is vital to me. I need to know where the designers were drawing their inspiration from, so that I can watch/read it too, and get a feel for what sorts of improvisational moves will "fit", and which ones don't. Structuralist critics claim that signifiers in a text have meaning only in relation to the other signs in it, and if I want to riff off the stuff in a game I need to know what the systems of signs used to make the game are, so that I can add stuff in a way that matches the rythyms of the other players' expectations. This is all vague and hard to put into words, but it's some of the most important stuff I know.

[Christopher Kubasik]

I'd add that a game can be it's own source material, if it is presented clearly in the text.

I know color fiction and those "background" chapters take a lot of shit from some people... But truth be told, for some players and groups, they do a great job of getting on the same page for their style of play.  For example, Sorcerer & Sword points potential players to a semester's worth of reading to get the game "right."  If I make up my own setting that's actually unique and different, I've somehow got to cram at least enough color to inspire everybody to such a degree that they have a starting shared imaginary space to work from.  After that, they'll riff together and make up their own logic and details off each other's ideas.

Christopher

[John Kim]

   In the specific case of Mongrel, however, Ron is very much a system does matter guy, so I am confident that none of the mechanics in Mongrel (making allowances for this not being a final version) are written without careful thought as to what the setting implications are.  

Well, as you say, the setting for Mongrel is very sketchy at this point.  So it's hard to compare it fairly with other games.  I can give it the benefit of the doubt and say that the setting, when shown, will match perfectly with the mechanics as well as being interesting and good for play.  But I don't think that's being fair to the other systems.  

In the earlier thread, you wrote:

  The game is hardly in a stage of completeness at this point.  I believe Ron does have plans to release the game at some point so I'm sure there will be more to come.  If you'd just shelled out $10 bucks for the PDF I'd be right there with you, but color and flavor stuff is the easiest damn thing in the world to write, especially when you've got a system that pretty much demands certain assumptions in order to be consistant with the mechanics.

I'm not sure what the reluctance is to reverse engineer the setting from the system.  If we believe that system does matter then clearly if we start with a setting we have to craft mechanics that consistantly support that setting.  Why shouldn't the reverse be true? If you construct the mechanics first you then have to craft the setting that is consistantly supported by those mechanics.  

Your key statement here is that color and flavor stuff is "the easiest damn thing in the world to write".  I find that empirically, this isn't true for me.  I frequently use house rules or a house system, but there have been several campaigns which I played essentially by the published rules.  In contrast, I have almost never played in a campaign which followed a published original-to-RPG setting.  The one exception was a Harn campaign I played in.  Now, I'm sure that there are people who do play in published worlds as written, but personally I find it even harder to stomach than playing in published systems.  

When I read published RPG material, I am frequently appalled by the bad organization, incoherent rules, and other aspects of the game.  But if there is one thing which stands out as truly putrid, it is the color and flavor text.  I don't think they are purposefully doing this.  Rather, I think that flavor and color stuff is extremely difficult to write.  

An approach which many games use is to take color and flavor from established fiction (i.e. Tolkien, Howard, Lovecraft) and then attempt to make mechanics which suit that color and flavor.  Systems also capitalize on using real-world material as well.  It's certainly something that I've done.  While it may be technically possible to come up with good color and flavor after-the-fact to suit a set of mechanics, I have to admit I'm skeptical.  What real games have taken this approach?

[Valamir]

You are, of course, correct, John.  My comment was rather too flip.  But I do believe it is quite easy to conceive of, although it then does require actual writing talent to record it in a form for others to read.  More actual writing talent (in terms of skillful use of structure and word flow) than writing mechanics requires.

While it may be technically possible to come up with good color and flavor after-the-fact to suit a set of mechanics, I have to admit I'm skeptical. What real games have taken this approach?

Couldn't say, not being privy to the design process for most games.  Probably not too many RPGs.  System Does Matter is not, after all, a universally recognized approach.  It is much more common for designers to pay little to no attention at making sure their system matches their setting; or what effort they do spend is more likely to be on making the system more transparent, rather than more tied in.

It is extremely common in board game design, however.  

I think its an extraordinarily useful approach, however.

[Lxndr]

Fastlane started off as "wow, mechanics using a roulette wheel!" and then, from that basic System/mechanics point, found color and flavor to match.  That, in turn, helped inform later system/mechanic changes, but it's still the basic mechanic that came first.

Even there, though, the chosen color/etc. wound up informing later iterations of the design, even if the basic core remained unchanged.  So it's not as if the mechanics rose fully-formed out of the muck, and just stood there unmoving as I hung Color/flavor on them.

The only other instance in the roleplaying game world that I can think of off-hand is Urbis, a d20 setting where the designer's explicit goals include, to the best of my knowledge, "if the D&D mechanics, including classes and alignments and the specific spells and whatnot, were the actual physics of a game world, how would that game world look?"

In the end, though, I'm with Ralph.  System can inform/create Setting just as easily as the other way around.

[Emily Care]

In the specific case of Mongrel, however, Ron is very much a system does matter guy, so I am confident that none of the mechanics in Mongrel (making allowances for this not being a final version) are written without careful thought as to what the setting implications are.

The proof is in the pudding. As Neel pointed out, how mechanics function in play is often different from how it may look on paper. Any interest in a sample to see how Mongrel might fare? Maybe just make a few characters and do some example situations using the resolution system.

And Neel:

The other part which drives me is that I think the communal, improvisational part of play is one of the most important parts in making happy players. I think that things become "real" in an rpg when the stuff that the players create is recognized and manipulated by the other players; I see the other players at their happiest when what they make up is recognized by the others. It's a two-level pleasure, in that your status as an integral member of the play group is acknowledged, and in that the game world feels richer and more dynamic because there are more interactions going on in it. So I worry a lot about getting "stuff" bouncing from player to player.

Amen.

--Em

[Shreyas Sampat]

To offer another datapoint, Crucible and Refreshing Rain were mechanics-first designs for me, with almost nothing in the way of "design for Colour".

[Mike Holmes]

Way back Paul Elliot looked deeply into the idea of not only making setting the basis of design, but further into the idea of a game that mechanicall really only focused on exploration of the setting. Meaning that characters are only revealed as part of the setting that they embody.

The game was going to be called The Kap, and I really wish it had been finished:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=1296
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=1410

Mike

[Callan S.]

Beyond reflecting the setting, aren't mechanics part of the setting themselves?

Atleast in the names we give to mechanics, eg; unit A removes 10 points from unit B. This is then named PC hits orc for ten hit points, and suddenly just as much as orcs are a part of that setting, that mechanical transaction is part of the setting as well.

I mean, what is the difference between "The king hates all magic users" and "To hit someone with a warhammer roll 5+?". The meat of setting involves rules of how the world works. Even if its just "The people of Happyville love tulips", theres the meat of a rule there to work with (go sell tulips there?)

The only real difference is that those setting rules are fuzzy...what does it translate to? In happyville, do you get a bonus to sell tulips at a higher price? If so, what is the bonus?

So really setting in an RPG could be described as proto rules, stuff that hasn't been converted in to hard rules yet and it's up to the DIY desires of the GM and group to do so.

And the reverse is true too. Hard rules are individual effects that are yet to be converted into setting. Eg, if the king hates all magic users because he's afraid of his soldiers all being enchanted, but all soldiers have +20 to save (say that means they'll pass 99% of the time), the hard rule has yet to be converted to setting.

The latter is an example where people may prefer to change the hard rules to fit the setting. Anyway those are my thoughts, hope they are applicable. Any thoughts on their validity, anyone?

[neelk]

Beyond reflecting the setting, aren't mechanics part of the setting themselves?

No, not at at all. The rules are things that the players use to manage the game. The setting is a fiction the players create. These are different, and you don't have to reify the rules into a hard part of the setting. Saying that the mechanics must be part of the setting is like saying that the mechanics are the "physics" of the game world. This isn't true.

There are often genre conventions that hold about the sorts of things that happen in the game, but which are not strongly reified within the setting. For example, in a superhero game, there's a convention that randomly "patrolling" superheros will find crime. This is a game rule, which the players might choose to embody as a random encounter table, or a hand of cards they can play from, or as a narration they can do to illustrate how their character investigate, or some such. But, if you reified this into the setting and computed the level of crime at which this kind of behavior becomes statistically plausible, you'd find that the level of crime would have to be so high that the urban life we find familiar is impossible -- NYC in-game would be like Mogadishu, not our Big Apple. So, it's accepted that the player characters will find crime when they patrol as a part of the mechanics, but it's not a serious fact within the game's setting.

For another example, think of octaNe -- there, the rules are almost entirely concerned with who will narrate, and say very little about the setting. Who narrates doesn't mandate antything about the setting; it's a player management tool.

[pete_darby]

But surely, at least to the extent that a system models a set of interactions in an imagined world, they must to some extent define that world.

Even in octaNe: the mechanic of assiging narrative rights ensures that the worlds of octaNe are those in which the logic of story overrides the logic of physics to some extent. Even if you hold that the mechanics of the simulation don't define the world, merely describe it, they set the terms of interaction with the imaginary world.

[Callan S.]

Hi Neelk,

"Whoa," you might say, "my GM Herbie can run anything. The game can suck, but he can toss out what he doesn't like and then it rocks." OK, fine. Herbie is talented. However, imagine how good he'd be if he didn't have to spend all that time culling the mechanics. (Recall here I'm talking about system, not source or story content material.) I'm suggesting a system is better insofar as, among other things, it doesn't waste Herbie's time.

From the system does matter article, of course. In relation to Mogadishu issue (scuse the pun), what your doing is almost the same as Herb. He's throwing out a logical extension/implication of the rule.

Now, it's dead easy to throw it out and requires minimal effort and time. But that's not the same as it having no effect at all on setting (if left alone).

Nor is the culling of a rules implications much different from nixing the rule itself (its still nixed even if replaced by a very similar replacement). Kill the effect of a rule and what is the purpose of the rule existing in the first place?

Clearly in your example it does have a purpose and its relatively easy to cull the extra unwannted setting effects from it. But there are other problem rules like this and they aren't all that easy to cull, particularly like in my example where all the kings men wouldn't fall under a spell to any significant degree. I think deciphers lord of the rings game has something similar, in that PC halflings can't be killed by a max damage troll strike (or so I've heard). Or the 'naked dwarf' syndrome in warhammer fantasy. It's possible to cull the implications, but not easy because of system importance.

[Ben Lehman]

I think it all depends on what sort of rules they are.  Authority rules (aka Natural Law rules) are the physics of the setting, and Credibility rules (aka Metaphyiscal rules) aren't.

reference thread:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10856

[Callan S.]

Do credibility rules affect how the setting is percieved by players (not PC's)? Then it's setting in as much as it determines what color sunglasses the players use, so to speak, when they see the setting. Perception distortion of a setting (even if its small), is effectively part of a setting for players, if not for PC's.

PS: Please excuse my edit that happened after you posted. I always edit! :)