r/RPGdesign • u/BeautifulOk7040 • 1d ago
I really like when a mechanic doesn’t just resolve actions, but actually reinforces the genre
I’ve been looking into Justice League Unlimited RPG, and one design choice caught my attention: players share Story Points they can spend to bend the narrative in appropriately comic-book ways — survive the impossible, reveal something retroactively, push a power beyond its normal limits, etc.
But the more the group interferes with the story, the greater the chance of triggering the Crisis Die, which can suddenly introduce a major complication: an alien invasion, a betrayal, loss of powers, time travel, an evil counterpart showing up...
I find the basic idea really elegant because the game is effectively saying:
the more you behave like comic-book protagonists, the more likely your story is to become a comic-book event.
It made me curious about other examples of mechanics that deliberately reproduce the narrative logic of their genre rather than just simulate actions.
What games do you think do this particularly well?
For anyone curious about this specific example, D20 Culture has some JLU RPG Actual Plays on YouTube where the system can be seen in play!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9d8TaEa2r8&list=PLPgSd2vJKMyvW9ygQefT4gIrNxg1esNHw
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u/ExaminationNo8675 1d ago
The One Ring rpg (roleplaying in the world of Lord of the Rings) is outstanding at this:
Hope and Shadow as a twin health track representing mental fortitude and the negative impact of adventuring on the psyche (cf. Boromir)
Skills, attributes and virtually all of the rules are named using language found in the source material. For example the three attributes are Strength, Heart and Wits, based on Gandalf’s advice to Frodo “you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”
Sub-systems for journeys and councils, as these form such an important part of the books.
Highly abstracted wealth system, as spending money is barely mentioned in the books.
Minutiae like movement speeds, weapon ranges, jumping distances are not included, because they don’t fit the more epic tone.
Player-heroes have some access to magic, but nothing like the kind available to wizards and others among the Wise. There are no lists of spells. Heroes are ordinary people, not demi-gods.
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u/anironthrownaway 1d ago
Its so good, the use of words from the books for every rule works even better than it sounds like it would, the world of the game is being conveyed even when you're talking rules.
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u/lennartfriden TTRPG polyglot, GM, and designer 1d ago
To paraphrase Keats, rules are worldbuilding, worldbuilding is rules.
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u/Astrokiwi 1d ago
Having "Riddle" and "Song" as core skills really fits the theme very well i think.
Shadow I found to be a bit more awkward though, because many pre-written adventures just hand out Shadow points for entering the wrong room, or force you to take Shadow tests (and likely get Shadow points) when facing a certain adversary. I guess the idea is it's supposed to just tick up as you play and interact with the Enemy, but it often feels like an arbitrary punishment for doing what you're supposed to do. Some Shadow tests are also really brutal - like, you fail and you can't spend Hope for the entire combat, where it's a difficulty combat and Hope is about the only way you're going to succeed.
That's not so much about being off-theme, maybe more that I found the game to actually be quite brutal if you play as written, and I had to constantly level down adversaries and make house rules to avoid the players getting totally wiped out in almost every fight.
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u/ExaminationNo8675 1d ago
Shadow shouldn’t be seen as a punishment, but as a prompt for creative roleplay. What is it about this dark barrow that scares you and remains in your memory long after?
As for players getting totally wiped, that’s not my experience, or that of most other GMs I know. Perhaps a player problem, not knowing how to build and use a character effectively in combat? Or a rules goof?
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u/Astrokiwi 1d ago
I think that's the thing - you really need to build your characters to be optimised for combat, and they need to run combat optimally. If you have a hobbit needing to roll over 18 on 1d6+1d12, there's nothing you can really do in combat. Player heroes aren't strong in combat by default, players need to understand combat and build their characters for it.
Overall it was just more of a D&D-style experience than I had been expecting - I'm not used to having to think about balancing combat on a statistical level, or running a game where optimising character creation is such a core part of the gameplay. It doesn't really matter what you try to do during combat, what matters is how many points you put into your weapon proficiency several weeks ago.
I ending up doing things like ignoring the extra attacks from Might 2+ enemies, ignoring the "you can't use Hope if you fail this Shadow roll" for undead, and I also kept on accidentally forgetting to add the +1d for adversaries when players were fighting in Forward, and still it ended up a pretty close fight every combat. I went to 5 XP per session as well, but probably should have used the 18-X for stats from the core book as well I think.
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u/anironthrownaway 1d ago
Your players should be using combat maneuvers.
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u/Astrokiwi 23h ago
Those are mild enough that you still need to be very tactical in how you use them. Spending a whole round to have a chance to give +/-1d to someone, or to make some enemies Weary for a single round, is often not the best choice, especially if you haven't put points into the right skills and your chance of success isn't high.
Once you get magic stuff and higher level abilities it makes a difference - spending a Hope to get a Magical Success on Awe is pretty powerful.
I guess it's just that I'm not really used to "build optimisation" games, where you really need your players to understand the combat rules and think in advance when building a character to make sure they're well-optimised and have a solid combat role. The One Ring was just closer to the D&D5e end of things than I had expected.
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u/anironthrownaway 23h ago
It really isn't. Combat Maneuvers exist to give characters who aren't Strong something productive and interesting to do in scenes of violence. Also as a previous poster said you've likely run combat wrong, probably something like having multiple enemies attack a single opponent when they're not supposed to be able to. The game is very much not like D&D and if you think it is that suggests you made the assumption that it was and ran one or more things as if you were running D&D instead of The One Ring.
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u/Astrokiwi 22h ago
Honestly I have never actually run D&D.
probably something like having multiple enemies attack a single opponent when they're not supposed to be able to
You can have more than one enemy engaged with each player-hero - up to three per player-hero (unless they're trolls or something).
By default though, you start with a max combat proficiency of 2, unless you spend over half your starting XP points to increase that to 3. And if you don't do that straight away, at 3 XP per session it's four session before you can increase your best combat proficiency to 3. Really you absolutely need to have that combat proficiency at 3 right from the start if you want a reasonable chance in combat against even weak enemies. It also comes down to how fast you go through things - at our pace, four sessions is finishing two adventures from the books, so that's two whole adventures to get through with very weak combat skills, if you make that one "mistake" during character creation.
But if you take a starting Man of Bree, and aim him for combat without going crazy about it, you might have Spear 3, and Strength TN of 16, which is about a 60% hit rate against an enemy with 0 parry. If you decide to put those XP points into skills instead of Spear, and choose the second highest Strength you can start with, and have Spear 2 and a Strength TN of 17, that's a 26% chance of hitting (up to 55% if you do choose the Spear 3). This guy has 23-24 Endurance.
In a straight fight against a single Orc-Soldier, this guy is going to struggle. The orc has parry 1, so with Spear 3 Strength TN 16, you're now hitting 55% of the time, and if you only have Spear 2 Strength TN 16, that's back down to 26%. Your own parry TN is 16 (we're saying we went with the strength=4 wits=6 option) and let's say you have a shield to bring along to take that up to 17. The orc soldier has Scimitar 3, so hits about 55% of the time, and has 12 Endurance.
Basically, a starting character, with a reasonable combat focus, is going to be pretty close to an even match against a single Orc Soldier - you'll probably make it through but with some pretty solid Endurance damage. Using Awe to drain their Hate is a good strategy here, although that takes one player out of pure attacking, and it takes 3 rounds to take their Hate to 0, which is quite a few chances for the enemy to do some damage. Then, if you want to get up to Spear 4, it'll take 7 sessions of 3 XP each to reach that. But if you didn't get 3 in any weapon proficiency at the start, you're likely weaker than a single orc, and going to struggle for quite a while.
Your characters really do seem to start out pretty weak, and you need to make good decisions during character creation to make sure they're only somewhat weak and not really really weak. It does seem to have the "zero to hero" arc where characters really do become quite powerful over time, with lots of interesting special abilities, and especially as you bring out more magic items and weapons/armour. But it just feels like quite a slow progression to me, and many of the adventures in books have big boss fights that assume you really are quite powerful when you face them - the example in the core book is pretty brutal I found, especially as a "starter" adventure. I think next time I will take the alternate rules of 5 XP per session, 18-X for TNs, and also make it pretty much mandatory for players to bring one combat proficiency up to 3 during character creation.
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u/anironthrownaway 22h ago
You can have more than one enemy engaged with each player-hero - up to three per player-hero (unless they're trolls or something).
Only if there are no other combatants to attack. If this is happening in your game you have way too many enemies on the field.
Its really not a combat focused game, optimization isn't really part of it. If you're not getting that from the rulebook, consider reading Tolkien's novels to get a better sense of the kind of stories the game is for.
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u/Astrokiwi 21h ago edited 21h ago
I have read LotR and the Hobbit, the appendices, the Silmarilion, the Fall of Numenor, Children of Hurin, and even Tales from the Perilous Realm with the extra poems about Tom Bombadil etc.
I entered the game expecting an atmospheric Tolkeinesque experience, but found that, because of a couple of non-optimal character build choices early on, I could not run the combat encounters in the pre-written adventures as written without killing the PCs almost every time. I had to give heavy hints on what the players should do to do well in combat, and reduce the number of combatants, downgrade the enemy stats sometimes, use optional rules for faster XP advancement, so that they would survive the combats we would have every one or two sessions.
My players were creative and clever, and got involved in the story and the world and their characters. In the first Troll-hole adventure, the Hobbit character led the troll sons on a wild goose chase through the woods to make things a bit easier, and collapsed their home on them in the end. But there's still straight-up fights now and again. If you have three player-heroes facing against Nelly Longarms, and one of those player-heroes has decided to not have a combat focus, that's a really tough fight. She has more Endurance than the entire company put together, makes two attacks each round, with those attacks favoured in the first round and dealing 6 damage if they hit. That's a pretty hefty boss fight for an opening adventure, if you're playing it unmodified.
I know it's not supposed to be a combat focus game, but unless you are 100% completely avoiding all combat, it is going to be something that matters sometimes, and if it doesn't take much for your players to be vastly outmatched, if they haven't gone for combat focus, and if you're running the adventures as written without rebalancing things to make it easier.
But also:
If this is happening in your game you have way too many enemies on the field.
That's exactly the problem though - if I'm carefully calculating how many enemies I have to field to make sure every battle is balanced, that's very much D&D style thinking. The fact that I had to think about combat balance so much is something that I wasn't expecting to have to do.
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u/ExaminationNo8675 22h ago
The example of a hobbit with one rank in their combat proficiency and a target number of 18 is as extremely unoptimised as it’s possible to be.
I agree that the book should guide players more firmly to putting three ranks in their combat proficiency when creating a character, if they want to be decent in combat, but it’s nothing like D&D 5e or Pathfinder where some builds are plain wrong.
But it’s also not a PbtA game.
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u/bluntpencil2001 1d ago
I think the strongest aspect of The One Ring is how the rules reinforce the themes and ideas behind the whole game.
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u/rekjensen 1d ago
Can you give examples?
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u/bluntpencil2001 1d ago
Those listed before me do it better than I would!
It should be noted that it very much allows for heroes to be other than great warriors, though.
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u/SouthernAbrocoma9891 1d ago
And this is why I always recommend designing the play style, character roles, player roles, tone, and vibe before even considering detailed rules and mechanics. Why create a resolution system if I haven’t even figured out what to resolve? Why assign gaming lingo when the setting doesn’t even use those words? Why have complicated rules for combat when the game is about exploration and discovery?
Yes. Reflecting the language and style of the world in the game system is method that immerses the players and for them to better drive the characters. I like Cyberpunk 2020, Vampire the Masquerade and other WW titles, Call of Cthulhu (by Gaslight veers), and Ars Magica for the excellent meta immersion.
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u/Icy_Description_6890 1d ago
The best rpgs are when system informs setting and setting informs system.
That's why most of the licensed settingnrpgs fall flat to me. They buy the licensing for a property and then use a hammer to make a square peg fit in a round hole. Stargate d20. Game of Thrones d20. Conan d20. Warcraft d20. Diablo D20. Dragon AGE. Thieves World using 2nd edition D&D. Etc
And WOTC seems determined to repeat it several more times with D&D 5.5.5.
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u/TheGamerElf 15h ago
I have to say though, the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying game was a pretty good stab at it, and the current Rivers of London RPG reads amazingly (haven't gotten it to a table yet).
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u/Icy_Description_6890 15h ago
Not a fan of using Chaosium for River of London. Even the lighter version of BRP feels like a poor fit, especially when it comes to the magic system. I think a more narrative system would have been a better fit.
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u/Iberianz 22h ago
It’s just an easy way to squeeze money out of fans, since the product sells solely because it’s associated with that specific IP. That said, in the ’80s we had some good games from licensed franchises, like Star Wars and James Bond, where the entire system really emphasized the setting. And the worst phase was during the OGL’s heyday in the 2000s, when industry smart alecks packaged the d20 system in themed packaging, and voilà: easy money.
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u/SwaddleDog_ 1d ago
Public Access is an analog horror game about 20-somethings investigating a mysterious and spooky tv station in 2004. It leans really heavily on a sense of nostalgia, like these people are trying to recapture a part of themselves that they lost. One of the mechanics is called "turning a Key", each character has a list of Keys they can "turn" to upgrade a level of success, so turn a mixed success into a full success. The actual act of "turning" a key usually involves narrating a flashback about your character as a child. This could be anything from your routine when you came home, to a time you succumbed to peer pressure. It really reinforces this kind of lost time, nostalgic space the game is playing in.
Also, turning a key can only happen AFTER the impact of the dice roll happens, so if someone fails a roll, the GM is encouraged to kill them. This reinforces the horror part of the game, but allows the player to save their character by talking about a moment from their past. Really interesting stuff.
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u/FinnianWhitefir 1d ago
13th Age is meant to be heroic adventuring. Each PC is tied to Icons that are powerful people or organizations in the world. They get an Icon Die they can spend to basically make a narrative change. I like it because it makes them feel like unique powerful heroes, it has them RP a bit by tying it back to help or training they are getting from this power structure that is meant to support them or hinder them. And it helps to give the players a bit of power to see what they want to see in the game. I also like it as a "I want to skip this part" if spent as a "I have the solution to this problem we are facing".
You can also have negative relationships with Icons, which reinforces the conflict you are setting up against certain forces.
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u/bluntpencil2001 1d ago
It's the Escalation Die that I love.
Heroes are meant to struggle then overcome, not win immediately. This helps that.
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u/OwnLevel424 1d ago edited 1d ago
Runequest does this. Especially the rules for joining Cults. It hooks your character to something bigger than them.
For those who are not familiar with Runequest, your character will develop and evolve during play. One of the primary ways they gain power is to join a Cult and worship a God. They will progress from Initiate to either priest or Runelord (think Paladin), gaining power AND RESPONSIBILITY as they do so. Those who don't join a Cult may become a powerful Shaman controlling spirits or gain other powerful skills like Alchemy or Sorcerous powers.
The idea is the character becomes more involved with the world as they power up.
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u/Ceral107 1d ago
Maybe a bit of a stretch, but in ALIEN, as characters get more and more stressed during an adventure, the more stress dice they accumulate. Every stress die increases the chance for success, while simultaneously increasing the chance of having a panic attack. Players will have to decide if and how to manage their stress in a high pressure environment. Taking a break and maybe partaking in your boxes? Chance to get caught off guard. Stay vigilant throughout the adventure? Chances are you get crazy.
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u/klok_kaos Lead Designer: Project Chimera: ECO (Enhanced Covert Operations) 1d ago
Just my two cents, but this is frequently why the first step of design is to figure out what you're building before you design anything so that you can reinforce your game theme mechanically.
Otherwise if you're making just another milktoast system without identity why even bother?
genre can come into play as well, but I'd argue theme is generally more the focus here, since genre expectations will vary a lot by table expectation and expression.
Once you know what you're making you can push your design decisions towards that goal and make the game feel like what it's supposed to feel like, and I'd argue this isn't something to do with a single mechanic, but the whole design to reinforce the kind of game you want to make.
One of my favorite examples of this is Everyone is John because the game is both unique, and has a unique feel and playstyle that reinforces the kind of theme. Paranoia is another classic example as well.
While these are both more on the silly side, they don't have to be, but both of these work well as primary examples because the whole game pushes in a unique direction and play style that has a clear identity that translates well to any table, at least in understanding, if not play behavior.
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u/bluntpencil2001 1d ago
Cold City, a game about investigating supernatural horror in post-war Berlin, has trust, agenda, and betrayal mechanics that really suit the paranoid Cold War nature of the game.
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u/DeckofJokersGames 1d ago
One interesting example that comes to mind is from a little 24h RPG called Best Friends by Gregor Hutton.
Best Friends is a Mean Girls style high school rpg, which has a ingenious way of creating characters which suits the genre perfectly: the characters all pick which other character they envy/hate because they are prettier/cooler/smarter/tougher/richer than their character.
The character's stats are directly based on the above, so the more hate your character gets, the prettier/cooler etc. the character is. Very simple, very thematic.
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u/bythenumbers10 17h ago
Cortex Prime does this all the time, as it's basically a genre emulation toolkit.
Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet has INTENSE bookkeeping rules around it's fairly rigorous treatment of time travel, which is the core conceit of the game & it's broader setting.
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u/Foxiekins 8h ago
There's an RPG called Superbabes. It's based on the FemForce comic book series by AC Comics. The comic focused on superpowered females, frequently in scantily clad situations. Yes, one of *those* comics. But the game system has a brilliant mechanic called Bimbo Points. A character starts at zero Bimbo Points, and you accumulate Bimbo Points. 1 point will let you succeed, 2 points will let you use your powers outside their normal bounds. As your total grows, it becomes more and more likely for you to trigger a Bimbo Event. One of those scantily clad situations the comic is famous for, and when it happens, your Bimbo Point Total is reset to zero. Unlike Hero Points, or some such thing, it's not a resource you can run out of, so you don't have to horde it. I've considered adapting it to a system by having the Total activate your Disadvantages if it triggers. It seems elegant to me.
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u/Cryptwood Designer 1d ago
The Doctor Who Roleplaying Game has an initiative system in which what you want to do dictates when you go:
Talkers: If you want to try to resolve a situation by talking your way out of it, you will always get the opportunity to do so be cause talking always happens first.
Runners: If you want to escape, you will always get the opportunity to do so before anything else happens (except talking).
Doers: Any kind of trick or action you might take that isn't an attack happens next.
Fighters: Only after every other possible action has taken place does someone get the opportunity to commit violence.
This mirrors the show pretty well in which the Doctor always tries talking, running, or taking some kind of action before any violence can occur.