Monday, August 20, 2018

#RPGaDAY2018 - DAY 20: Which Game Mechanic Inspires your play the most?


Day twenty of #RPGaDAY2018 sees the start of "WHICH"-week, where all of the prompts start "which"... Today's question was kindly submitted by Ricardo in Brazil - you can find him on twitter as @f5kn, and it's a biggie - "Which game mechanic inspires your play the most?"

Thank you Ricardo! Great question!!

TSR's Indiana Jones RPG with its slide rule to work out how well you'd succeeded or failed. 

For years, especially coming from the old school era of gaming, everything you did with a dice roll was simply "You Succeed" or "You Failed". I think it was either the Indiana Jones RPG by TSR (yes, that legendary game!) or the James Bond RPG that first exposed me to the concept of succeeding/succeeding well/succeeding really well, meaning that your roll produced levels of success.

Since then, I've really appreciated games that added some colour to the results - it means that your game isn't just hit or miss, win or lose, fail or succeed.

For Doctor Who I adopted a cool idea which was to add the "AND" and "BUT" rules, so you could succeed ("and" something extra good happens, or "but" something doesn't go as well as you'd hoped), or failed ("but" something advantageous happens, or "and" it gets even worse than you'd feared).

Star Wars (the FFG one we're currently playing) has a similar thing with its "advantages" and "threats", "triumphs" and "despairs" on those wacky coloured dice.

For WILD, I'm hoping to take it a stage further with simple resolution using a card draw from a Tarot deck, but there's the additional level of description that can be drawn out of the divinatory meaning of the card, or just inspiration from the illustration. At least that's what I'm hoping...


Until tomorrow... stay multi-classy!

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