Once again, more nerdy observation.
In previous posts we talked about narrative, simulationist, and gamist design philosophies. Now we're going to talk about something a bit more nitty-gritty in the way mechanics are actually designed.
Good storytellers will tell you that great stories always involve the character being forced to make sub-optimum decisions. The same goes with great game design. A good game or gaming scenario relies on the idea that players have a limited number of choices to make as they proceed, and that the utility of some choices, usually all of them, is limited.
How games manage these suboptimal choices can generally be categorized in one of two ways: risk management and resource management.
Resource management is, not unsurprisingly, fairly common across all games, but it bears a little bit of discussion for any rank amateurs coming upon this blog. The idea is to provide players a resource or resources, then limit their access to those resources, forcing them to spend those resources carefully to obtain their goals.
Table-top RPGs typically use character-centered resources. These can be "action points," that help a character achieve success (such a Inspiration in 5e, or Willpower in Onyx Path's Storyteller games, for example), direct resources that are spent on taking certain actions (weapon ammo, spell slots), and "time" resources for combat, sometimes referred to as an action economy. More narrative games will focus on more player-centered resources: "drama points" that allow them to control the shape of the story. In narrative games these point economies often ebb one way then another: as players spend their points, the GM accumulates them and vice versa. This is meant to simulate the turns of fortune found in most stories. The heroes score a victory, are dealt several defeats, then come back to achieve victory (generally).
Risk management is also common, but again, deserves some explanation. Every action a player chooses to take carries with it a risk of failure. The player has to judge if the odds of success are worth the effort to seek success. Anytime a player rolls a die or draws a card, they're engaging in risk management. Risk management in games is incredibly popular. Not only because our brains go haywire from random reward cycles, but you have to admit that rolling dice and drawing cards is FUN.
Many narrative games, even if they rely on resource management to drive the story, will still incorporate risk management to help add that uncertainty to the outcome. In the end, nothing beats those improved moments of dizzyingly high success and crushing abysmal failures that you experience at a game table. Further, many of the better narrative games relying on risk management, also focus of "fail forward" and "succeed at cost" mechanics. Apocalypse World and FATE both incorporate this. When player's "lose" a confrontation in FATE, they are rewarded with fate points and an opportunity to dictate the terms of their loss. So instead of dying, they might be captured with an opportunity to escape. Apocalypse World has the players only achieve complete success on the highest rolls. With merely average rolls they only achieve a part of the goal of their move, or are forced so spend a resource to achieve the goal.
These interplays aren't really good or bad; that is a matter of preference. But, system matters. And how the system emulates the kind of game will matter. Superhero games often use dice pools because its fun and powerful feeling to pick up a big old pile of dice and roll it. Apocalypse World, FATE, and d20 are so popular as open systems because they're fairly easy to hack AND have very intuitive measures for calculating risk. Collectible card games, deck building games, and assymetrical card games are fun because they rely on an interplay of risk and resource management.
As I've already said, as a DM I strive for the narrativist ideal, even when I'm hampered by more gamist mechanics. That said, 5e's risk and resource management interplay is one of the more robust in the history of the game. It also is fairly "hackable." And while third-party material is trickling onto the shelves, we're not seeing the storm we saw with the introduction of OGL in 2000. That's probably for the best. The OGL market bubble burst pretty quickly and pretty hard. In fact, that third party trickle, combined with the fact that OGL d20 hacks, like Pathfinder, DCC RPG, and 13th Age, are still being supported by their creators is a good sign that maybe after 40 years, the RPG industry has managed to mature somewhat and realize its limitations.
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