Favorite Game Mechanics?

[bosky]

Personally the old and hard to find spaceship dogfighting game has two of my favorite mechanics.

First for hitting each weapon has a combination of dice that are rolled against a Defensive Value. For example a basic Pulse Laser hits at 2D8+Gunnery (where Gunnery is D4, D6, D8, etc.) However the coolness of the mechanic comes in because the Damage is just Low, Medium, High. So if you rolled a Pulse Laser with a ho-hum pilot (2D8+D6) and got a 4, 7, and 8 the damage would be 4. I really like not having the second roll, and how it still has great variety between weapons. They obviously account for multiple Lows (like if you roll 4, 4, 7 you'd just add the two 4s together) so there is sort of a critical hit mechanism going on there.

So that's all neato, but my favorite mechanic is still their damage track. I've played games of Battletech and the like where you slowly fill in dots to represent armor damage, and that's all well and good, but the damage track is Silent Death is awesome because it actually degrades the performance of the ship. Basically it's a grid (say 10 rows long and 4 rows high) with different items in some of the grid points, like -1 Drive, -1 Defensive Value, Weapon Lost, etc. Then when you take damage (like 4 damage) you would mark off 4 boxes and apply any effects that were marked off. So as you take damage your speed is reduced, your armor is stripped away, you start losing weapons, etc. until your ship is either dead in the water or actually destroyed.
I don't know how well I described it but the elegant degrading and simple hit/damage mechanisms are amongst my favorite mechanics.

In general though I'm not a fan of D6 based mechanics...I'm kind of bored of the dice and the limited granularity it provides. D12 is my current favorite, but that might be from too much Advanced Heroquest as a kid.

And in case we were going to get into least favorites I'd have to put in my vote for Warhammer 40,000. My friends are enamored with the game and I hate playing it compared to the many, many stellar alternatives. But the fact that you have to do 7-BS=what I need to roll to hit, then roll a ton of D6s, then roll to wound (checking a chart to compare Strength and Toughness) and then roll saving throws just for shooting is hilarious awful.

[Chris Johnstone]

This is a fabulous thread.

I'm generally pretty terrible at putting together core mechanics: I think a certain faculty with mathematics is needed that I simply don't have.

However, looking through threads like this is marvelous. The Silent Death low/medium/high mechanic is wonderfully simple and the Otherkind system is just frankly amazing. I went and looked it up, to get a feel for it. As I read it, the Otherkind system works something like this:

Choose an action
Decide on two things that could go wrong
Roll 3d6
Allocate the dice to the action and/or things that might go wrong as pleases you

Goal:
5 or 6: decidedly successful
3 or 4: partly successful
1 or 2: failed

Things that could go wrong:
4-6: You narrate the bad thing (typically, it doesn't happen)
1-3: GM narrates the bad thing

So, to use a really simple example, I'm in a dungeon and I attack a goblin. My goal is to kill the goblin and we decide two things could go wrong. 1) the goblin calls for help and 2) the goblin hurts me instead.

I rol dice and get a 5, 4 and 2. I really don't want more goblins turning up, so I allocate the 4 to 'goblin calls for help', but I want the goblin dead, so I allocate a 5 to my goal. This means I'm stuck with getting injured, because all I have left is a 2.

I realise this is an older system now (been around a few years, though I'd never heard of it), but, I mean, wow. That's an amazing little gem of an idea. I *think* I'd like the option of characters taking 'simple actions' (with a modest reward but no penalties) and 'complex actions' as described above, and then restrict NPCs to 'simple actions' so that things run smoothly.

That seems like it would stop the mechanic turning into a tangled web as the GM tries to manage a mass of NPCs in any given situation (I imagine a royal court ball full of intrigue would spiral out of control quite rapidly...?) I could be wrong though.

Really interesting thread. This is making me mull over gaming again after having had quite a lot of downtime.

Chris

[kylesgames]

I'm a math guy, personally, and I like adding numbers/successes up, but a system I'm going to use down the road is somewhat similar to what Chris posted about-

Players have a pool of points, and a die. They also have three or four personal factors (Long term goal, short term goal, minor loss, major loss), and their goal is to reach goals without suffering losses (which diminish the pool of points, meaning a faster loss rate, meaning eventual death), with goal completion offering bonuses and the option of narrating a good ending for the character.

Each player narrates four or so points worth of loss or gain "slide" for other players (theoretically distributing it equally helps make the game easier, and I'm assuming four players) on their turn, and on their turn players apply their die to one category and points from their pool to the others, narrating their actions (there are bonuses to being in character- a thief may swipe an important item, or infiltrate a stronghold unseen, and for doing this he would have a bonus to the points he applied, narration being favored). The die is a wildcard- you can't add points to it, so you'd better hope you succeed. Pools refresh each turn, but at half the rate of loss, though they are refilled when "scenario goals" are completed- cooperation allows scenario goals to be completed, but it can only be fueled by points from players, and each scenario goal requires increasing amounts of points- if the players go for it blindly without completing goals, they'll hit a point where they've accrued too much loss. Scenario goals always slide back every round, so players can't just neglect it when it's half filled (progress will never be lost).

[Rob Lang]

Silent Death, good call. That was a great space mechanic.

A mechanic I played recently (not a RPG one) was really interesting. In a card game called Dixit - you each have a hand of cards with imaginative pictures on each card. A player starts, picks a card from their hand and describes it with a short phrase or single word. They lay the card face down. Everyone else then picks a card with an image they feel represents the phrase and lay that face down too. The cards are shuffled and turned face up. Everyone has to guess which card they think was put down by the starting player. It's a clever mechanic, thought I'd share it!

[kylesgames]

[Chris Johnstone]

Dixit is a great game. A lot of fun. Whenever I try to describe it to people I sort of resort to: "It's the kind of boardgame Amélie would play".

The only problem I've found with it is that one player had to be banned from describing his card as 'mostly blue and sort of creepy'. As it turns out that describes about 80% of the deck.

Chris

[misterecho]

I like crunch on occasion too. Merp and Warhammer 3e RPG being notable ones.