…there’s like 3-4 conversations going on right now about mechanics in RPGs and, broadly, it’s about how games model or don’t model things but mostly folks talking past each other. So here I’m just going to talk about how mechanics model characters interacting with the game, and not like broader stuff like pacing, narration rights or reward incentives.

“Physical strength is no substitute for perception.”

In D&D, let’s say you have Strength 16, and it means you can carry 160 lbs. It’s a descriptive score, it directly models something in the fiction. You can look at various strength scores and make reasonable inferences about different creatures and what they can and can’t do. Most RPGs treat stats, scores, and traits in this kind of fashion.

Let’s compare this to Sorcerer – in Sorcerer you have a Stamina score, which is pretty much the “do all things physical score” so it’s a reasonable equivalence to Strength for D&D. The scale is much lower, like usually folks sit in the 3-6 range.

Here’s the thing; Sorcerer isn’t measuring your character’s ability to lift or carry things; it’s measuring your character’s ability to win in conflict USING that ability. Think of the cartoon where you have the super strong character who is so clumsy or applies their strength poorly, knocking things down upon themselves, getting stuck in things, and so on; their strength is not in question, it just doesn’t help them win conflicts.

You could also think of the trope of the scatterbrained professor or wizard who is full of a VAST array of facts and information and yet cannot seem to think of a good idea when things are going bad in the moment. Descriptively they should have a high mind stat, interactively it actually functions with a low stat.

Now this is a level of abstraction and it makes sense this isn’t as intuitive, but it’s also because the focus of the game and what the mechanics are modelling, is different. Sorcerer is modelling stats on characters interactive outcomes, not in-fiction facts.

“Stop moving. You’re a rock.” “There are no rules. I’m gonna get you!”

Measuring the interactive strength tends to show up more in games aimed at modeling narrative arcs, and that’s because meaningful actions in stories aren’t weighted the same way things are in a sense of physics. If you have a character in a story who is cold and mean 90% of the story and then we see when/where they decide to show utter compassion and care, it has meaning, even if it gets little screentime. So the score can be high but not apparent by what you usually see.

This also applies especially to many of these games when it comes to using stats around relationships. It’s not these are the only relationships that matter, and “Oops you didn’t put down ‘Loves Mom 5’ guess you don’t love your Mom you suck!” – it’s that by putting a score to it you’re telling the rest of the group that these are the relationships we’re going to focus on for this game (campaign, arc, whatever).

So in this case, the stats aren’t even a measure of something in-fiction, they’re more like the equivalent to stage notes or directions to the cast & crew putting on a play.

“I’m sorry Mr. Wick. There are rules.”

Why put a mechanic to anything? Well, you put it there because you want something to reliably happen (or strongly be in the possibility to happen). Does your game have rules for people suffering violence and dying? Bet that’s going to happen in your game a lot more than if the game had no rules for it at all. Does those rules around violence involve John Woo ballet flips past bullets or is it FPS run and gun past fire or is it WW2 war is hell there’s no dodging it’s just stay under cover, or what? The stats, the modelling of what you want in your game, changes all of those possibilities, and can either make some types of play or stories more likely or impossible.

Now, this isn’t to say the rules have to be a direct rail for what is going to happen; it’s actually best to think of how sports has rules – there are boundaries, there’s rules of how you can play, but all of that exists specifically to create choices and pacing and dynamics WITHIN the rules that’s the interesting part of the game. Vincent Baker called this idea “The Fruitful Void” – the part you really want the game to be about isn’t in the rules, but it’s the space the rules create that groups reliably fall into. It’s the attractor in the possibility space. It’s designed emergent play, but importantly; reliable emergent play.

Anyway, it’s worth playing games that do all of these things, to at least know what the deal is and whether it’s something that you want in the games you play or not, or when/where it fits the type of play you want for a particular group or a campaign.

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