What are some interesting fundamental (or not) mechanics in TTRPG other than DnD?

[Jonjonjon4]

Hello folks.

Today I want to ask you all, what are some fundamental or non-fundamental mechanics in TTRPG that are not DnD?

To make it clear, fundamental mechanics would be like, Attributes or Skill system in DnD.

I am really curious what the non-mainstream game have to offer.

[KorvinStarmast]

Hello folks.

Today I want to ask you all, what are some fundamental or non-fundamental mechanics in TTRPG that are not DnD?

To make it clear, fundamental mechanics would be like, Attributes or Skill system in DnD.

I am really curious what the non-mainstream game have to offer.
1. Use 2d6 for resolution: Blades in the Dark (and FWIW, I think that all PBA and related games do that)
2. Stress/Trauma: Blades in the Dark.
3. There are GMless games.
4. There are diceless games.
5. Fate Points: FATE
6. Compel: FATE
7. Dream Points: Golden Sky Stories

But seriously: the TTRPG landscape is pretty big, with over 4,000 games published. Your question is overly broad.

[Kurald Galain]

You lose sanity frequently, particularly when seeing monstrous enemies and when casting spells; you effectively cannot regain sanity; and at zero you're permanently out of play (Call of Chthulhu).

Your character can break the laws of physics by failing an intelligence check, essentially by being too stupid to realize that what they're doing is impossible (Toon).

You gain experience points by making the other players or GM laugh (also Toon).

You gain "perversity points" by making the other players (or the GM) laugh, and you can spend these points to mess up what other players are trying to do (Paranoia).

Displaying out-of-character knowledge of what the rules are is considered treasonous and will get your character killed (also Paranoia). Have a nice daycycle, citizen!

[Easy e]

Every RPG has its own unique "Hook" that makes it interesting and unique.

Hooks come in a variety of different styles. They might be:

- The Concept
- Thematic
- Mechanical
- Genre
- Artistic

It is impossible to talk about it in a broad sense, as each game is trying to create a unique hook for itself and earn a place in the market.

[Just to Browse]

Some really fun structural mechanics I've loved:

Progress Clocks: (Blades in the Dark) Progress clocks (https://bladesinthedark.com/progress-clocks) are easy ways of abstracting progress towards an eventual goal. They're basically just a way of counting to 4, 6, or 8, but the guidelines for when to create them, when to use them, and what it means to tick a clock forward are all incredibly useful. If you're familiar with the 4e skill challenge rules, this is a similar concept but distilled into as simple of a concept as possible. I use progress clocks in games that don't include the rules, because they're just such a clean and simple tool.

Position and Effect: (also Blades in the Dark): The rules for position (https://bladesinthedark.com/action-roll) and effect (https://bladesinthedark.com/effect) are used to frame every roll you make in Blades. When a PC wants to do something, the GM takes a structured approach to determining the consequences for failure and the outcome if they succeed:

The PC chooses the action rating (the equivalent of a stat or skill) for their roll.
The GM uses that rating to determine the player's Position (controlled, risky, or desperate)
Then, they choose the expected Effect of the action (limited, standard, or great). There's some extra rules structure in here that I'm skimming over, but it's supposed to take into account the effectiveness of your opponent, whether your tools are good, how many people you're trying to shoot, etc.
Then, the GM communicates this. After they have all of the information, the player gets to make adjustments to their own roll. They can get help from an ally if the roll seems dangerous, take some in-game mental damage, and even adjust the Position and Effect on a 1-for-1 basis.
The rulebook's weakness kind of shows here, because despite the fact that these mechanics are deeply entwined in the default resolution mechanic, the rules for them are scattered across a couple pages / links.

Predefined Questions: (Apocalypse World and other Apocalypse engine games). There aren't online rules that I know of unfortunately, so I can't include a link here. The idea here is that when a player makes certain kinds of moves, the result of their roll determines how many questions they can ask about a situation. For example, in Apocalypse World, you can Read A Sitch, which enables you to ask from a predefined list of questions, which includes:
where’s my best escape route?
which enemy is the biggest threat?
what’s my enemy’s true position?
The explicit list of questions allows the designers to enforce genre conventions, avoids analysis paralysis, and gives the players agency in a scene, because the rules obligate the GM to answer these questions truthfully.

[Easy e]

I think Meta-currency in games is a pretty big outlier from D&D norms more.

[Jonjonjon4]

I think Meta-currency in games is a pretty big outlier from D&D norms more.

What does that means?

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Swords Without Master: you roll to see the tone of your action, rather than caring substantially about success or failure. This is because the game is first and foremost about weaving a colorful, moody pulp fantasy story. It's surprising how much of a twist it feels like to roll the tone you weren't expecting.

Primetime Adventures: characters have a Spotlight rating for each episode, which determines how many cards they draw during a scene. At the start of a season, you work out spotlight curves for each character to make sure that you don't have too many spotlight characters in a given episode. This means that some characters quickly resolve a season arc and fade into a more supporting role, others have a slowly building personal arc, and others carry a solid arc through the middle of the season. There's a lot of variety from that one simple stat!

Dread: it's known for being the Jenga game, but the character creation is very cool: the GM sends out questionnaires to players, and the answers determine what the players are able to do without making pulls from the tower. However, they're also very good for foreshadowing the session, and for helping players get invested even before it starts.

World Wide Wrestling: the GM figure preps a series of matches every session, and also decides who's going to win each one. However, players have a move they can roll to attempt to swerve a booked result they don't like; it's a fun way to give the game structure while also giving players agency and making it feel like actual pro wrestling.

Good Society: players can spend a token (the main game currency) in order to have a player in the scene give a monologue to the table about what they're feeling right now; this monologue isn't happening in the scene, but it's more like getting to look into the character's feelings at that time. It's a cool way of helping players easily show interest in other players' characters.

Tenra Bansho Zero: characters do not die when they hit 0 HP, but are instead left for dead. However, players have a single Dead Box which they can check when they take a hit: they take no damage from the attack, and from that point forward, they get a huge boost of dice. However, if you get dropped to 0 HP and have the Dead Box checked, your character actually does die! It makes that decision really impactful, because you're getting a big reward but you're also putting your life on the line.

[Easy e]

What does that means?

I mean:

If the OP is looking for mechanics in RPGs that are not part of the D&D Mechanics package, then the concept and mechanics for Meta-currency would be interesting to the OP. They should look into the concept of meta-currency in RPGs.


Is that clearer?

[Jonjonjon4]

I mean:

If the OP is looking for mechanics in RPGs that are not part of the D&D Mechanics package, then the concept and mechanics for Meta-currency would be interesting to the OP. They should look into the concept of meta-currency in RPGs.


Is that clearer?

Gotcha! Now it is clear

[Anymage]

I mean:

If the OP is looking for mechanics in RPGs that are not part of the D&D Mechanics package, then the concept and mechanics for Meta-currency would be interesting to the OP. They should look into the concept of meta-currency in RPGs.


Is that clearer?

You're responding to the OP asking what metacurrencies are.

To the OP: D&D is largely based on the idea that your character's impact on the world is the direct result of the actions they take, plus the dice landing where they roll. Metacurrencies generally allow the players to impact the flow of the game, either through skewing dice rolls when they really want something to work out (the most basic case), or sometimes adding some element to the scene/story that hasn't been mentioned but also hasn't been ruled out (e.g: a PC with the soldier background declaring that the captain of the guard used to be their buddy back in the army). Oftentimes, if you're expected to gain more over the course of play instead of starting out each session with your full allotment, you gain them by acting in character even when it's a detriment, accepting a complication for your character, and sometimes for fully meta actions like making the table laugh or ceding the spotlight to make another character look cool. Basically things that give you more narrative control, and possibly encourage you to be more engaged in your character and/or more supportive as a player.

[False God]

Huge fan of Willpower mechanics(WoD), absolutely fundamental to allowing characters to go behind their means at cost.

I'm a big fan of Sanity mechanics(CoC/WoD), but older ones can dip into "you start having real-world mental problems" which can get a little sketchy when the game presents a gamified version of a real-world health issue.

I like the L5R Taint mechanics, you can game them a bit during character creation, but visible physical corruption by evil really helps bring the setting to life. There's a particular theming to them thats very asian, which is helpful. It's easy for more gamey systems to turn these into nothing but mechanical benefits when you ignore the social and roleplay ramifications of being a horrifying mutant.

I also like the L5R core stat system. The presentation of your "ability scores" as elemental affinities really pushes the system away from the standard "strong, dextrous, smart" deterministic ability score presentation as most of the elemental scores can be used to cover any of these more traditional stats, even if they lean towards some more than others. You can still get a group of very diverse characters this way who are all "strong" for example. And not like "mentally strong, socially strong, etc..." but like, all physically strong, their approaches to strength are just different.

I like Light/Dark mechanics and they're integral to anything Star Wars. But they require a level of camp to play up properly and they're often poorly represented as "you're lightside which gives you bonuses and you're awesome" and "you're darkside which gives you penalties and your're insane".

[NichG]

I'm personally a fan of 'mastermind' type abilities that let you spend a use/point/etc to retroactively 'have prepared something' off-screen - 'actually I anticipated this and stocked a sword made of the one material that we just learned breaches your immunity', 'actually I hid a landmine where you just stepped, surprise!', etc.

7th Sea (1e) has a sort of difficulty-bidding system that became something different but also neat in 2e. In 1e, you could increase the difficulty of a roll in increments of 5 (called 'raises') to scale the effects (or get extra effects above and beyond the basic action), but if you fail you fail entirely.

In 7th Sea (2e) instead, you only roll once per scene and you count how many 'sets of 10' you can make by combining dice, and those are your currency to buy off consequences or achieve goals within the scene. So for example there's a person you're saving from a burning building, but going inside means getting injured, and there's also a briefcase of important documents in there; furthermore, a mad fire-immune Castillian sorcerer happens to also be in there and he might pull some stuff. You can spend one raise to just save the person, you can also spend raises to e.g. not be injured by the fire in the building, save the documents, take a potshot at the sorcerer on your way through, maybe a raise to dodge when the sorcerer grabs control of the flames and directly tries to strike you with them, etc. The clunky bit is that you have to kind of choose 'how am I approaching the scene' before you really get into it since you only get to roll once; you can change tack later on, but you don't get to reroll or add new raises (and in fact, it costs you extra raises to do actions that don't fit with your initial plan), so its a bit rigid at the scene level but its a bit too abstract for the 'actions' or 'rounds' levels that other games use.

Speaking of 7th Sea, 1e had an interesting initiative system where each character has 1-5 actions per round (based on a stat - Panache - which was, honestly speaking, the god stat). But putting that aside, even if you fixed everyone to the 3-4 range, the interesting thing is that for each action you roll a separate initiative die, and that gives you the flow of a given round tick-by-tick, with counter-actions and things like that requiring dice to have been 'held'. So if you move quickly in a round, you can attack before other people can store dice for counters. And if you hold dice to use for counters, but get to the end of the round without having used them, you can still take those actions doing other things. Main problem is if everyone holds their dice and says 'no, you go first', 'no you go first', etc, so you do have the augment the rules to break those stalemates... For example saying that the order of preference of held dice at the end of the round is their original initiative order.

Don't Rest Your Head has a dice mechanic where you roll multiple pools (which you have some ability to choose the size of) and add their results to determine success/failure, but you also look at which pool had the most successes in order to determine the nature and side-effects of that success or failure. So for example characters have a sort of stress track that feeds a supernatural power - they can draw up to the number of dots they have on that stress track to form a pool to add using that power, but if that pool wins then they also move further on that stress track (there are other things that can result in you moving on this track). So going further on that track makes you more powerful, but also more vulnerable to being pushed off the edge. I wouldn't particularly run that system/setting as is, but I'd definitely steal the idea of pools competing for control of the feel of a scene and use it in other contexts.

Stuff from CRPGs with tabletop adaptations:

Arcanum had a neat stat mechanic that effectively determines the number of parallel persistent buff spells you can have on yourself at a time.

Pillars of Eternity has a stat which subtracts from the duration of ongoing negative status effects, which is a really neat idea but hard to make work in a game with chunky rounds (would work pretty well for a game with continuous initiative though). I also like how in Pillars 2 the quality of your lodgings and the specific foods you eat can give you certain floating buffs for 24 hours, meaning that maintaining a ritzy lifestyle actually has some mechanical consequence and payoff. For tabletop I'd like to generalize that to an idea of wealth *only* buying temporary power, and other resources being the only way to really buy permanent power, especially perhaps in a more sci-fi setting. So rather than 'I buy a spaceship with really good weapons', its 'I am paying to maintain a spaceship with really good weapons, and the higher spec the spaceship, the higher the maintenance and crewing costs'. That means that there'd be a kind of calculation where you might actually want to use lower-spec stuff for jobs or situations that can be solved by the lower-spec stuff, but you could still bring out the expensive big guns for a finale.

On the other side of that, wealth systems where rather than tracking wealth directly you have a wealth score which says 'anything cheaper than this, you can assume you have access to if you want it; anything more expensive, you can't afford' are interesting too.

[Anonymouswizard]

In Unknown Armies 3e your core abilities are determined by your mental state. The more hardened you get the less capable you are at acting as a functional member of society', and the more naturally being a secretive, violent crazy person comes to you. It really fits with the idea of the PCs being people who turned to the occult because they were desperate to make something happen.

For percentile systems flip-flops, where you take your die roll and transpose the digits. It's a neat little way to add some more control over die roll results without being completely random or too powerful, with matched results rendering it useless. Hope you didn't spend a point of Moxie on that check before rolling an 88!

[Pauly]

Character creation mini-games.
Rather than the player determining the stats/skills/backstory these elements are created through a life path mini-game. Traveller is the original, but has been used in many other games.

[Psyren]

The AGE system, used with Dragon Age among others, is a 3d6 system with a critical hit mechanic I really enjoy. Called Stunts, these crits are not automatically hits, but they trigger if you clear the target number and get at least one double (i.e. at least two of the three dice on your roll show the same value). As a result, the chances of this happening are much, much higher than getting a 20 on a 1d20, so you end up with a lot more of those exciting moments. In addition, stunts let you do a lot more than simply adding extra damage to your attack, and because every spell cast requires a roll, all of them can stunt as well.

[Telok]

Several games have wealth attributes instead if tracking individual money & coins. These vary from "anything of x price or less you just get" to "roll to see if your credit card is maxxed out this adventure" to hybrid systems with both rolls and money.

There are games with stunting systems. In D&D if you want to pull off a stunt like jumping off a balcony, swinging on a rope, and landing a kick on someone, then you're looking at several rolls and maybe some penalties. So people mostly just walk over and mash the 'sword attack' button. But several supers games let you do anything from spend a currency to add or bend your powers to simply saying you can do appropriate power-adjacent stuff. A few other games will give you bonuses or let you make minor scenery changes for simply giving a good exciting description of what you're doing.

[Anonymouswizard]

One I just remembered, difficulty in The Fantasy Trip is determined by the number of dice you roll, from 2d6 on an easy roll, 3d6 on a normal roll, and 4d6 or more for hard tasks, on a roll under system with average stats at 10-11. This interestingly means that easy tasks are basically automatic unless you have an unusually low stat (most likely with ST, injury and fatigue come out of it) and hard tasks quickly scale into the 'find another solution' level.probably best to just stick to 2D to 4D, with 5D for really out there stuff (like suplexing a small giant).

Also yeah, going to throw out another voice in support of lifepath character creation, it's just generally better as you end up with a character with ties to the world, or at least a story. There's no Bob XVII the random fighter, now you've got Bob XVII the one armed monkey wrangler who wanted to be a fighter but prove allergic to gambesons (stupid tables), and also served two terms as a inquisitive he doesn't like to talk about due to the 'singing manticore incident'. I sometimes get the desire to write up a lifepath system for D&D5e, it would probably go upbringing -> apprenticeship -> career 1 -> life event -> career 2 -> life event 2, with the apprenticeships and careers each giving a level in your choice of a few classes.

Oh, and one from Burning Wheel that might seem strange to some, charging for negative traits. While this is partially due to how BW advancement works,it has the neat benefit of knowing just how important to the player that inability to dance was, as they've potentially had to pass up multiple beneficial traits to get it. It's a very different feeling to players looking for the highest point disads they'll never have to deal with (I once that another player ask why I took a worse version of a disad despite the system giving me no extra points for it. Really the reason was 'because I wanted to').

[Reversefigure4]

Swashbucklers of the seven skies has an interesting mechanic called style dice (which add d6 to your roll). Players get them from the GM when they do awesome swashbuckling or in genre things. So far, so standard metacurrency.

But the bucket of style dice for the table is finite. Once they're gone, they're gone. However, if players think something another PC is doing is awesome, they can put some of their own style dice in the bucket... At which point the GM matches those dice from an external source and the finite number increases. The more you share, the more everyone gets. In practice, with the right players, it leads to people constantly setting up awesome stuff for other PCs to do. Great for spotlight sharing.

[Quertus]

I'll second Metacurrencies / Fate Points / Hero Points / Rerolls (maybe WoD Willpower belongs in here, too?) and Dynamic Outcomes / 7th Sea raises (some 3e D&D modules implemented a version of this with variable-DC Gather Information outcomes).

And, although it's D&D, doubtless you can find it in some non-D&D systems, so I'm a big fan of Wizards get 0 spells by default (all spells come from random treasure and spell research - 2e and earlier) and Unboundd Accuracy ("Einstein automatically hits the DC the 5-year-old can never hope to make" - 3e). I especially like Unbounded Accuracy paired with Dynamic Outcomes.

In theory, I love Dynamic Magic / Build-Your-Own-Effects, like WoD Mage, 3e Epic Spells, 2e True Dwoemers, Ars Magica spells, etc. In practice, I tend to get mother-may-I'd "I don't see it working that way" even to rotes taken straight out of the book. so... in practice, I end up hating my GMs even more than usual when we're using Dynamic Magic, but I think it could be fun under a decent GM. To a lesser extent, I enjoy player-driven Item Creation and Spell Research, although the outcome of these endeavors is static once created.

I enjoy systems complex enough that I can be "not playing the same game as everyone else". For example, in 2e D&D, rather than attempt to defeat the monsters, one could attempt to trigger / optimize Morale Checks; in 3e D&D, a Diplomancer could attempt to recruit the monsters instead of kill them (and an Evil Cleric could recruit Undead in any edition). I usually refer to this as some variant of "playing / focusing on High School Romance Drama in a Tactical Basketball Simulator".

I love things some of my groups refer to as Tables of Doom: the 2e D&D Wild Magic d100 Wild Surge chart, the Warhammer Fantasy (2e?) d1000 Mutation Table, etc. The Warhammer Fantasy Rewards of Chaos are also fun.

I like systems to follow the following simple rule of elegance: If the roll looks like d20+modifier vs target DC, rolls can be plentiful and low-impact; if the roll looks like "short range is 4, I walked is 5, your defense makes 7, two trees makes 9, targeting computer makes 8, pulse makes 6..." or a large dice pool to sum or count successes or is otherwise complex and time-consuming, then the rolls should be impactful and infrequent.

Fun should be incentivized, not deincentivized. Killing things is fun. Being smart is fun. Being smart and killing things should be incentivized. Being smart in killing things should not be deincentivized. (translation: the system should give you bonuses, not, say, reduce your XP for killing things, beings smart, or being smart while killing things.). See also "4e skill challenges" for what not to do.

I'm something of a fan of the WoD XP system: 1 point Automatic, 1 point Learning Curve, 1 point Acting, 1 point Roleplaying, 1 Point Heroism... 1 point Taking an Unusual Action that Worked, 1 point Noticing an Important Fact or Clue, 1 point Showing Unusual Wisdom, Restraint, or Vision, 1 point Major Accomplishment, 1 point Comic Relief. I guess we could call that... proper XP incentives and session recap?

That said, in general, I'm a fan of RPGs that give Group XP, and reward the group for things like "did something smart", "made the GM/group laugh". I like it when there's a reminder and a tangible benefit from players who did a good job, when they get that momentary bonus spotlight time at the session wrap-up for their good works. So, an end-of-session Recap Spotlight with Crunch.

The homebrew Paradox had a simple premise for several of its systems, including its casting system: a very lite "how much are you willing to pay?" mechanic theme. Most characters had "Magic"; my iconic 1e Paradox character had "Telepathy". Because my character was more limited in the effects they could produce, they had a higher success rate with their powers. In 1e, bigger effects had a larger mana cost. In 2e, there were no explicit "mana costs", but bigger effects had bigger target numbers, and "mana" could be spent to improve any roll. My iconic 2e Paradox character spent most of the session floundering (in effect, taking the "build up mana" action, which works much like the "create an advantage" action from fate, except that the mana can be spent on any roll), to have a big effect at the finale.

I like systems where there's books filled with cool things you can buy (3e D&D, Shadowrun, doubtless many others) with "concrete wealth". Even more than that, I like systems filled with books and books of cool things you can't buy, but get as random treasure (2e D&D, Warhammer Fantasy to a lesser extent, maybe others).

I'm... in an odd place wrt book-diving mechanics. Once I have the system mastery to utilize them effortlessly, I love them; until then, not so much. So, one could argue, I want a system worth my time to gain sufficient mastery to be able to use such mechanics, more than that I enjoy such mechanics for their own sake.

And, of course, the Mechanics should Match the Fiction. If the fiction says one thing, but the mechanics say something else, the system has failed.

That's what I've got off the top of my head for mechanics I've enjoyed.

[Jay R]

Pendragon: You have a score for every Virtue, and the complementary score for every Vice. So if you have a score of 14 in Merciful, then you have a score of 20-14 = 6 in Cruel. Your actions can give you checks on both sides, which can then change them. [If either one goes up, the other goes down, so they always add to 20.] So eventually, these are based on your actions in the game.

Flashing Blades: There are five different dueling styles, and they each have their own advantages. Spanish style is better for slashes, Italian Style is better for thrusts, French Style is better for parries, etc. How you learned to fight will affect your fighting choices throughout the game.

Flashing Blades: The classes are actually social classes, and include Noble, Gentleman, Soldier, and Rogue. These determine how much is costs to learn skills. A Rogue needs one point to buy Stealth, but 3 points to buy Heraldry. For a noble, it’s the reverse.

Chivalry & Sorcery: How many experience points for an encounter depends on your actions and your class. A knight only gets half points for killing an enemy; he gets full points for vanquishing them without death. A Thief gets more points for backstabbing than for fighting openly.

[KorvinStarmast]

Several games have wealth attributes instead if tracking individual money & coins. These vary from "anything of x price or less you just get" to "roll to see if your credit card is maxxed out this adventure" to hybrid systems with both rolls and money.

There are games with stunting systems. In D&D if you want to pull off a stunt like jumping off a balcony, swinging on a rope, and landing a kick on someone, then you're looking at several rolls and maybe some penalties. So people mostly just walk over and mash the 'sword attack' button. But several supers games let you do anything from spend a currency to add or bend your powers to simply saying you can do appropriate power-adjacent stuff. A few other games will give you bonuses or let you make minor scenery changes for simply giving a good exciting description of what you're doing.
Tunnels and Trolls:
exploding dice on a triple score. (Triple 1, 2, 3, etc) offers an additive re roll.
Saving Rolls offer experience points
Saving Rolls also have an exploding feature.

[Beelzebub1111]

You lose sanity frequently, particularly when seeing monstrous enemies and when casting spells; you effectively cannot regain sanity; and at zero you're permanently out of play (Call of Chthulhu).

That's an exaggeration. you can regain sanity with rest and psychiatric help, and you get sanity rewards at the end of each adventure for saving people, defeating monsters, and stopping threats.

Also, you stop getting freaked out by monsters the more you see them. for example, you can only use a max of 6 sanity from seeing deep ones in a single adventure. Your immunity goes down by 1 for each adventure, so the next adventure you go on if you see a deep one you only lose a max of 1. You also roll by encounter not by monster so 8 deep ones is just as disturbing as 1.

Also, once your mythos knowledge is greater than your current sanity you lose half sanity from all sources forever even if you recover past your mythos knowledge again.

all these combined make it surprisingly hard to go completely loony.

[Anonymouswizard]

Another one from Traveller: death in character creation. To be fair to the game as the Lifepath minigame has gotten more and more complicated the lethality has been significantly reduced (Mongoose Traveller uses mishaps which only potentially snowball to death), but it's kind of so iconic to the game that it's ever going away (like Jump Drives or the limited viability of shields). It's evolved into the entire risk and reward structure of the careers, where the better the skills and benefits available the greater the chance of a mishap that'll slap you with a penalty and throw you out of the career.

Of course if you want you can still play 'iron man' rules and send potential PCs through the meat grinder. Maybe you'll get a Scout Ship out of it.

[Pauly]

‘Tech Tree’ magic systems.
GURPS has it, and I’ve come across in some other systems.
Basically if you want ‘learn ‘fireball’ you first need to have acquired “burning hands’ and then ‘aganazzar’s scorcher’
This creates magicians who are either OK at many things, good at a few things or very good at one or two things.
It removes the infinite utility bookworm.
Another variant of this system I’ve read but can’t remember exactly where it comes from is that for each type of magic (elemental iirc - water, fire, ground, air, life, death) as you leveled up you could then add range, damage, area of effect to the elements of your choice. Then for spells that combined elements you needed (X) advances in element (A] and (B) [eg to summon a fire elemental you needed 5 total advances in life magic and another 5 in fire magic].

Stupidly Dangerous Combat
Cyberpunk 2020. A term coined by someone I gamed with a long time ago. In Cyberpunk it doesn’t matter how advanced your character is or how well equipped they are - if you do something stupid you will die. For all of it’s infamy for being lethal I never found Cyberpunk to be a particularly lethal game, as long as you were cautious and used appropriate tactics. In D&D once you get past level 5 or 6 you have so many HP that you can survive no matter how much you channel your bastard child of Gomer Pyle and Leeeeroy Jenkins.

[stoutstien]

Another one from Traveller: death in character creation. To be fair to the game as the Lifepath minigame has gotten more and more complicated the lethality has been significantly reduced (Mongoose Traveller uses mishaps which only potentially snowball to death), but it's kind of so iconic to the game that it's ever going away (like Jump Drives or the limited viability of shields). It's evolved into the entire risk and reward structure of the careers, where the better the skills and benefits available the greater the chance of a mishap that'll slap you with a penalty and throw you out of the career.

Of course if you want you can still play 'iron man' rules and send potential PCs through the meat grinder. Maybe you'll get a Scout Ship out of it.

I know this is a tad tongue in cheek but traveler's PC creation is still one of my favorites. It not only helps players and GMs flush out individual characters but it also links all the players with a woven past. It doesn't have the vending machine history that a lot of more modern systems have.

[Catullus64]

The Career System from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, for a couple reasons. First of all, it's semi-random. You get a single re-roll if you don't like the career you rolled up. It makes for fun, idiosyncratic stories where a mercenary, a beggar, a hedge wizard, and an apprentice shoemaker all team up to go on adventures, and there's enough emphasis on non-combat skills that all of those people actually feel useful. You have a lot of room to grow and progress your character, but things remain grounded enough that your character never turn into superheroes.

I'm a fan of any attack resolution system where a greater margin of success on the roll to hit can be translated directly into greater damage with the attack. (Dark Heresy does this with special melee talents and automatic weapons).

Systems where you actively roll to defend yourself against every attack are also great for keeping players engaged when it's not their turn, especially if beating the attacker by a margin can also grant special benefits.

[False God]

"Body Charts", notably from Deadlands. It combines well with low fixed HP systems to give a little more breathing room to taking damage, and enhances gritter systems by specifying damaged body parts, rather than more ephemeral generic "Hit Points". It can also provide players with opportunities to say, sacrifice an arm to defend against a blow instead of losing their head. IMO it also pairs better with wound-systems since getting bashed in the leg with a club means you get a broken leg, rather than rolling randomly to get a random broken bone somewhere seeming to pop out of your big bag of HP.
-Deadlands can also use a generic HP system, but it's still a fixed number and it makes the system WAY less fun IMO. I consider it fundamental to any Deadlands game I run.

[Tanarii]

My favorite two are:
Weapons hits eventually cause ruinous criticals
Magic use eventually causes headsplosion

Warhammer and Forbidden Lands both feature these.

My least favorite is: Dice Pools
Unfortunately Forbidden Lands also features those. Otherwise it'd be an amazing game.


Narrative mechanics / meta currency is a special case for me. I generally prefer games where the players play a character, not the world. Otoh the few times I've had a chance to play one it's been a nice change of pace. It's like normally eating strawberry ice cream and trying some chocolate once in a while. It's clearly inferior and people that like it are weird, but all in all it's honestly just different and worth it once in a while. It's not like biting into a steaming pile of dog poo*. Or worse, licorice.

And now I need to go get some ice cream. :smallamused:

*That'd be finding out my GM is trying to "tell a story".

[TaiLiu]

The Exalted systems have a stunt system where you gain bonuses for describing your character's actions in a cool way. My understanding is that it encourages a cinematic feel. The idea is sound, and you can take it and adopt it for any genre.


7. Dream Points: Golden Sky Stories.
Yes, points systems are pretty neat. If you got rid of D&D's core mechanics, I guess what would be left are the various point systems that it relies on.


1. Use 2d6 for resolution: Blades in the Dark (and FWIW, I think that all PBA and related games do that)

Predefined Questions: (Apocalypse World and other Apocalypse engine games). There aren't online rules that I know of unfortunately, so I can't include a link here. The idea here is that when a player makes certain kinds of moves, the result of their roll determines how many questions they can ask about a situation. For example, in Apocalypse World, you can Read A Sitch, which enables you to ask from a predefined list of questions, which includes:
where’s my best escape route?
which enemy is the biggest threat?
what’s my enemy’s true position?
The explicit list of questions allows the designers to enforce genre conventions, avoids analysis paralysis, and gives the players agency in a scene, because the rules obligate the GM to answer these questions truthfully.
Yeah, PBTA games are a great place to look for game-building inspiration. I would love to have the PBTA system attached to D&D's skills.


And, of course, the Mechanics should Match the Fiction. If the fiction says one thing, but the mechanics say something else, the system has failed.
Yeah, for sure.

[vvvvictor]

Some games have more robust rules for social conflict. In many DND games I've played social conflict has been free form "just talk it out", or maybe handled by a single roll where the results are eyeballed. I don't much like the former because it makes my character's 18 charisma kind of useless if I as a player can't approach that level. And I don't like the single roll much like I imagine many folks wouldn't want sword fights resolved with a single roll.

Fate, for example, uses the same conflict resolution system for swords and words. The skills and stunts (feats) are different, but the underlying system is the same. You try to create and leverage advantages to force the other person to give in.

[Razade]

1. Use 2d6 for resolution: Blades in the Dark (and FWIW, I think that all PBA and related games do that)


There are PbtA games with no dice rolls at all and some PbtA/FitD games that use 3d6 for resolution.


Some really fun structural mechanics I've loved:

Progress Clocks: (Blades in the Dark) Progress clocks (https://bladesinthedark.com/progress-clocks) are easy ways of abstracting progress towards an eventual goal. They're basically just a way of counting to 4, 6, or 8, but the guidelines for when to create them, when to use them, and what it means to tick a clock forward are all incredibly useful. If you're familiar with the 4e skill challenge rules, this is a similar concept but distilled into as simple of a concept as possible. I use progress clocks in games that don't include the rules, because they're just such a clean and simple tool.

While they're used a great deal in Blades in the Dark, this is something that is fairly universal in PbtA games going back to AW.

[Ionathus]

I'll echo the PbtA 2d6 + MOD resolution system: it was my first foray outside of a d20 system and it resonated with me a lot. Equal chances for a 1, a 10, and a 20 in the d20 system always feels a little too random -- making it 2d6 instead makes the rolls just consistent enough that you get to feel like your strengths really are strengths and your weaknesses really are weaknesses, while still allowing for chance to tip the scales one way or the other.

Another PbtA (or maybe just Monster of the Week specifically?) game mechanic I really like: Luck. You get a number of points (7?) when you create your character, which you can use at any time to reduce an instance of damage to 0 or get an automatic success on any move. Extremely helpful for clutch moments when you really want or need the gambit to pay off. The only catch: they never return, and if you use them all up, your character is "doomed" -- basically guaranteed to eventually die horribly or suffer a fate worse than death. So using them always feels momentous, adding to the drama of literally burning the universe's dwindling goodwill for you in order to kill the monster at a critical moment.

It allows players to have big cool moments when they did all their homework and roleplay and told an awesome story but the dice didn't agree -- sometimes you really just want to brute force it. But the fact that it's a non-renewable resource means that it never feels too contrived or "easy mode." You know what you're giving up, and it's almost somber.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Luck is specific to Monster of the Week, yeah. That said, there's a lot of PbtA games out there that can work very differently, so I recommend you check them out!

Speaking of: Murderous Ghosts is a two player PbtA where one player is exploring a haunted place, and the other player plays as the ghosts trying to scare them to death. Among various things, it uses a Blackjack inspired resolution system to create escalating tension... You really don't want to bust.

[Tanarii]

I though BitD used a form of dice pool, not the AW 2d6+stat method

[Just to Browse]

Yeah, BitD (and everything using the FitD engine) uses dice pools. You roll a number of d6 equal based on your attribute or action rating, then take the highest to determine the result. If you roll two 6's, you get a critical success. You shouldn't be adding dice together or adding numbers to your rolled result.

[KorvinStarmast]

There are PbtA games with no dice rolls at all and some PbtA/FitD games that use 3d6 for resolution. Crap, I mixed up my DW/Fellowship game (2d6 resolution) with blades in the dark (X d6 depending on bonus dice) mechanic. A dice pool, I think.

Thanks to Tanarii and Just to Browse for catching my mix up there.

[Khedrac]

Something I saw in Top Secret SI in the late 1980s but I believe wasn't original even then:

Percentile system with doubles that succeed = criticals (i.e. 11, 22, 33, 44 etc. so no trying to work out what 5% of 63 is or similar).
Also clearly stated that in opposed roles the higher roll that succeeded was the better result.

[Vahnavoi]

Character creation by drawing coupons from a hat and gluing them on a character sheet.

Character creation via a personality test (f.ex. a multiple choice questionnaire).

Players giving each other points (experience, fate points, alignment points, etc.) for playing their character expectionally well (or badly).

Players voting as a resolution method.

Players betting in an auction as a resolution method.

Rock-paper-scissors (and all expanded versions) as a resolution method.

Cracking open fortune cookies and using the divinations as a resolution method.

Using a deck of cards (standard, Tarot, custom) as resolution method.

Using a deck of cards for procedural generation (terrain, events or any other form of divining what happens in the game).

Casting of bones or other divinatory object that aren't dice as form of resolution. (See f.ex. Book of Antitheses, Lamentations of the Flame Princess.)

Using numerology (real or invented) to divine connections, purpose and abilities of characters. (See f.ex. Book of Antitheses, Lamentations of the Flame Princess).

Drawing pictures as a resolution method.

Drawing pictures as procedural generation.

Appropriating game boards from other types of tabletop games to implement complex procedural generation of terrain. (F.ex. using playing board of Labyrinth to model an everchanging dungeon.)

Looking what other convention goers are wearing as a resolution method.

In general, looking at nearby objects as resolution method or procedural generarion. (F.ex. looking out of the window to see what the weather is to decide weather in a game.)

Using an hourglass to time player turns and other ways of using real time to forward game events.

Players solving crossword puzzles and other forms of encryption and decryption as resolution methods.

Players singing or reciting texts to accomplish something in a game (f.ex. character dialogue, vocalizing a spell to do magic.)

Players reading or translating foreign texts as a resolution method.

Players manipulating small objects to form sequences to accomplish something in a game (f.ex. arranging Scrabble letters or runic stones to form words for casting a spell.)

Secret information passed via notes, letters, text messages or other private channels.

In text-based games, using color and other text formatting options to convey extra information.

Players creating character for each other, not to themselves.

Game master pre-arranging game scenario by designing and distributing player characters.

Use of miniatures and WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get")

Use of Lego blocks as miniatures, terrain, puzzle pieces etc.

Specific mapping techniques or formats to create complex spaces. (See f.ex. Vornheim and Veins of the Earth for Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Kirottu Kirja for Praedor).

Using a calendar to track time and special events.

[Beelzebub1111]

When you fight monsters in Kult Divinity Lost they have specific reactions when they are damaged that you can check off. For example a statblock of some creature might look like this:

Harm & Harm Moves
Wounds: ☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ ☠
◊ Ignores the harm.
◊ Stops and enjoys the pain.
◊ Unnatural smile despite the face being
disfigured by the attack.
◊ The skin cracking like a bloated
larva, and blackened pus oozing out.
◊ An arm is cut off and continues to
writhe on the floor.
◊ One leg is mutilated and is dragged
along at an unnatural angle by the
nepharite.
◊ The nepharite falls to the ground,
seemingly dead, but rises a
moment later.
◊ The nepharite’s head is
destroyed, and it is rendered
harmless until it has been
recreated.

When it takes a wound, one of these actions happens. It really keeps combats creepy, engaging, and descriptive for a horror game.

[CallMeBagel]

I like 4th Edition Mage initiative:

You get actions dice to perform all your actions offense and defense. Lowest Ini said what they did first, how many action dice they use or save for attack and defense. Highest went last, they get to see what everyone else is doing and decide how to use their dice. Once that's all figured out, combat is resolved in opposite order. I like, though I wasn't a huge fan of Mage; I think that was more to do with the GM, and how poorly the explained a lot of things.

[gatorized]

My favorite two are:
Weapons hits eventually cause ruinous criticals
Magic use eventually causes headsplosion

Warhammer and Forbidden Lands both feature these.

My least favorite is: Dice Pools
Unfortunately Forbidden Lands also features those. Otherwise it'd be an amazing game.


Narrative mechanics / meta currency is a special case for me. I generally prefer games where the players play a character, not the world. Otoh the few times I've had a chance to play one it's been a nice change of pace. It's like normally eating strawberry ice cream and trying some chocolate once in a while. It's clearly inferior and people that like it are weird, but all in all it's honestly just different and worth it once in a while. It's not like biting into a steaming pile of dog poo*. Or worse, licorice.

And now I need to go get some ice cream. :smallamused:

*That'd be finding out my GM is trying to "tell a story".

Meta currency doesn't mean you play the world.

[KorvinStarmast]

And now I need to go get some ice cream. :smallamused: We'll get you some licorice flavored ice cream. :smallsmile:

[Eldan]

Perhaps my favorite system that I've learned in the last few years is Unknown Armies, and part of it is that especially the new edition is very mechanically unique in a way tha treally fits the setting and ideas of the game.

In Unknown Armies, players play some kind of outsiders and outcasts. In fact, Unknown Armies characters are generally so weird and outside the norm that they learn magic. One learns magic by having obsessive, unhealthy ideas and convinced that one's own view of the world is true and everyone else is wrong. So utterly convinced, in fact, that reality bends a little to accomodate your obsession. One becomes stronger in magic by ritualistically living out that obsession in self-destructive ways and making painful personal sacrifices.

The basic character stats in Unknown Armies Third Edition have five basic stats, called meters. They are called Sense of Self, Reality, Violence, Isolation and Helplessness.

Now the interesting mechanical quirk: each of those meter gives you two broad skill areas. And for each meter, you get better in one skill if the meter is low, and better in another if hte meter is high. The higher your violence meter, the better you are at fighting. The lower your violence meter, the better you are at social skills. Sense of self? Lying. Helplessness? Evasion. Isolation? Stealthy observation.

The system has what is called a Trauma test. Experience something violent (see someone you care about being killed. Get brutally injured) and you test for violence. If you pass, you get Hardened and your meter goes up. Fail, and you are instead Traumatized. Fill your meter all the way with Hardened notches, and you are now an uncaring psychopath and your character is unplayable. Fill your meter all the way with Trauma and your character gives in to paranoia, anxiety, fear, addiction or other such things, and also becomes unplayable.

So, gameplay is in fact all about carefully balancing on the knife edge of your sanity. Eventually, you are going to break yourself, but it's not like the kind of person you are playing could stop doing it.

It is by far the best mental health system I've ever seen in a game, because not only do you not just have a sanity meter, you have five, each representing a different kind of sanity, you can also fail on each sanity meter in two different ways.

[Tanarii]

Meta currency doesn't mean you play the world.In theory it's a broader category that encompasses / overlaps narrative mechanics. But in practice, it's most often implemented as a way to play the world instead of the character.


We'll get you some licorice flavored ice cream. :smallsmile:
just unleash some corporate ninja detectives instead it's less painful.

[Easy e]

An interesting idea from Modiphius' 2d20 system is the idea of Attribute stats and Values stats. To get a target number for a test, you add the two stats together. The value stats typically help align you to the themes of the game. Typically a TN challenge is set with the GM naming the Attribute and the player choosing which Value they can apply to the test and how they are applying it.

This gives the players a quick insight into how to role-play the character and provides a mechanical reason to do so. It also really helps players grasp the key themes of the setting quickly and intuitively.

[JellyPooga]

Got to put out a shout to The One Ring. Many elements come together to produce the overall feel of the game, but each element in itself is worthy of mention. In no particular order;

1) Auto-pass mechanic. Distinctive Features and Specialities allow for someone good at something to merely declare (simple) success. This means that random chance is only invoked on things your character is supposed to be good at if you, the player, choose to invoke that chance of failure in exchange for a chance of greater success. RNG's should only be a thing when there is a random chance of failure; no more (or less, at least) big strong guys being unable to bust down the door whilst the weedy wizardly guy rolls a 20 and succeeds. Flipside, there's still always a chance of success, even if it's a long-shot; PC's are supposed to be big damn heroes after all, doing big damned heroic things!

2) Combat efficiency based on your fatigue and wounds. How much gear you carry determines how much punishment you can take to your fatigue (and you can even "recover" a little by removing your helmet to "get a breather") before taking a penalty, but how much armour you're wearing will determine how easy it is to actually damage you. This makes it something of a balancing act between being able to fight for a long time and take a lot of minor hits vs. being able to resist the damage that's actually life-threatening. This is achieved very simply by making your Encumbrance a Threshold against your Endurance and by divorcing fatigue from actual wounds.

3) Corruption. Yes, if you willingly and actively do something with negative connotations (lie, cheat, steal, etc.), you're getting hit with a direct punishment for being a bad-guy instead of a heroic type. No save, no arguments; you know what you did and that you deserve it. Clear direction of what the game is and who you, as PC's, are supposed to be creates depth and immersion in the system & setting. If you hang around bad dudes in bad places, handle cursed objects, or the like, the power of the Shadow can still get to you, but you can resist it with a check. Fail enough or do enough bad things and your character degenerates, gaining a negative Trait to reflect the development in your character. Not gaining numerical penalties, but a narrative one, is far more engaging.

4) Lateral as well as vertical character development. Like any other system, yes, you can make the numbers on your character sheet bigger, but you can also change the context of those numbers as the game progresses by gaining more or changing existing Traits as the game develops. This influence on the narrative of play is key to the elegance of the games design. In addition to improving your character, you get to interact with the world at large; making/breaking relationships, improving strongholds and towns, exploring and so on and so forth. These narrative aspects and the timescales of expected play are much more in keeping with maintaining verisimilitude of the setting and campaign as a whole (no meteoric rises from lvl.1-20 within the course of a few months to a year, for example).

5) Combat is abstract. Not only is combat not the primary focus of the system, it's abstracted in a way to make narrative beats hit harder than merely counting squares and adding numbers. Combatants can break shields, disarm, parry, terrify their foes, leap upon the backlines, taunt, move around and use terrain as well as their own features and abilities. Weapons and armour have qualitative differences, not just numerical ones. All of this without having massive look-up tables, a hundred different modifiers or any of the other complication that most systems that aim for that level of depth in combat require.

6) "Dead" is not the end. The game focuses on the continuing narrative, not the life-points of individual characters. There are options in the game to have your legacy endure; passing weapons or other equipment or learning from one character to the next. Retiring a character is actively encouraged vs. flogging them until they're dead or insane, in turn encouraging you to have your old PC's come back into the narrative as an NPC. On the flipside, you can't really die unless you want to; it's remarkably hard to actually shuffle off the mortal coil (failing extremes, like being splattered by a cave troll or falling into Mt.Doom).

7) Travel rules that are worth a damn. Yeah, it's a minigame that isn't going to appeal to everyone, but for anyone that likes maps, route planning and random encounters that aren't just combat encounters, TOR has a system that encourages being engaged in the aspect of adventuring that takes the most in-game time i.e. getting from A-to-B. Is it the best system possible? Probably not, but it's a damned sight better than skipping over it as unnecessary or boring and I've not seen a better one.

[kyoryu]

The way of handling mixed results in most PbtA games is great - offering the player a choice about what their partial success looks like is great. Especially if the GM can frame it in character terms.

While Fate gets most attention for Fate Points and Compels, I think Create Advantage as a general framework for "helping actions" that actually has teeth is really great. With a lot of players, Conflicts become less about resource attrition and more about trying to jockey for position.

Similarly, invokes do some really cool things, especially when used with "the ellipsis trick". The idea of "it looked like it was going to succeed, but then this happened" is really cool, especially when you get a couple of them - it can create very cinematic back-and-forth moments without having to do super granular levels of time tracking.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Yeah, Fate Core unifying everything into four types of actions makes it really easy to model pretty much anything. It's a flexible mechanical vocabulary without being so complex that it loses people. It does a great job of enabling actions that might be very similar on paper (or in a realism oriented system) but are very different in practice, like "Superman lifts a car to help someone escape" (Overcome) vs "Superman lifts a car to use as a weapon" (Create Advantage) vs "Superman lifts and throws a car at Zod" (Attack). A stunt that says "Gain +2 to Overcome with Might when helping civilians escape a scene" would really differentiate between those three actions.

[Beelzebub1111]

I really like X-Crawl's Mojo system. essentially it's like a pool of hero points that you gain by having teamwork, sharing a theme, giving a rousing speech, cutting a promo, and so on. The catch is that you can't use them on yourself. Your other teammates have to be the one to give them to you. If you ask for them that immediately negates your ability to use them. It forces you to pay attention when it isn't your turn and emphases the idea that you are a team working together.

[Anonymouswizard]

A mechanic I really wanted to try out but never got to was Deathwatch's Squad Mode and Solo Mode abilities (the GM didn't want to actually read the book*). Basically because unlike the preceding two 40k gamelines the characters are all trained (super-)soldiers they have the ability to act together as a squad, getting a certain number of Cohesion points that this mission's designated leader can use to activate abilities. All well and cool, but the catch is you're meant to be all from different Chapters with wildly different philosophies, so this kind of effortless cohesion isn't the norm. Instead you all begin off in Solo Mode where you get an ability from your Chapter that boosts you and only you.

It's absence is noticeable, reading the book it's clear players are meant to act mostly individualistically until you get your **** together, activate Squad Mode, and become a well oiled fighting machine able of killing Greater Daemons. Without it you just feel like a bunch of Inquisitorial Agents with bigger guns.

* He also didn't really 'get' Space Marines, including cutting short our in-character planning session because he wanted to throw a drop pod through the roof (we wanted to land a few miles out, stealth to a couple of tactically advantageous position because hey we've all spent time as Scouts, and then hit the target from both sides at once).

[KorvinStarmast]

There's a d6 game called "Pirates and Dragons" that has "doubloons" as a piece of game currency which allows a player to modify a result. Before each session, a certain number of doubloons are issued - they are a finite resource, but they can turn an 'aw crap' into a 'yes, that worked' now and again.

[Mordante]

Talislanta:

No rolling for stats, stats are 100% based on the race/class you play.
Spells are no pre-defined. Depending on the effect of the spell it become more difficult to cast
No character levels, your character doesn't level, but you can spent point in skill increase.

[SimonMoon6]

In Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG, there are 9 ability scores: three physical, three mental, and three "mystical" (but really just charisma for most people). In each category, there is a stat that acts like DEX (you use it to hit and to avoid being hit), a stat that acts like STR (how effective your attack is), and a stat that represents how you resist an attack (sort of damage reduction and hit points, all in one).

So, mental combat (attacking someone's mind) is just like physical combat; you use a different three stats, but the basics are the same. Mystical combat (damaging someone's soul, for example) is again exactly the same but with a different three stats.

Interestingly, then, using charisma type skills (trying to persuade, intimidate, etc) uses those "mystical" stats, so any such attempt to influence a person just uses the regular combat rules, only with the three charisma stats instead of the three physical stats.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, any attempt to do anything that requires a die roll uses the same table and the same basic ideology: (1) Do you hit/succeed? (2) How much of a success did you accomplish? (How much damage did you do?)

[Koeh]

Character creation in Rule of Cool's Legend System with its tracks.

Each character class gets 3 tracks of abilities. Each track is composed of 7 circles evenly distributed so that you get a new ability option or buff every level with 2 circles given at level 1 and 1 circle given every level up through 20. You can multiclass by giving up one track of abilities and picking up another from any other class, and there are even open and racial tracks for more flexibility.

A feat will allow you to swap 2 tracks. Just the core book allows for thousands of customizations which feel unique. You can even make the game classless through a simple houserule to allow unlimited track swapping.

No dead levels, you're constantly getting stronger, definitely a high fantasy style of game. Oh, and it's free. Probably the most interesting mechanic.

[AdamSpeg]

Mutants and Masterminds' 'degrees of success' system for attacking/defending is pretty neat, considering the system doesn't have a traditional 'health' system. Failure to defend from attacks results in negative bonuses to stats, greater the difference in the toughness roll vs the damage of the attack results in greater negative bonuses. I dig the narrative of characters each weakening the other over the course of a fight, until one is eventually defeated. I also like how this kind of mechanic contextualizes character's relative strengths, because messing up against any sufficiently strong opponent means you're going to get one shot. It's very 'comic book' to me.

[Anonymouswizard]

In Nomine is a game we can't really talk about here (being based on certain topics), but there's some interesting things going on with it's dice system (in the English version at least, but I suspect it's the same in the original French).

First off it's a 3d6 system, but only 2d6 are used to determine success/failure in a toll under system. The third die is what the game refers to as your check digit, or the degree of success/failure, and is mostly independent of whether or not you actually succeeded (you get a bonus for increasing the risk and a penalty for lowering it but that's it). It's an interesting twist, but not very major.

More interesting is Interventions, the game's critical success/failure mechanic. It represents literal intervention by the highest powers in the setting, with which side it benefits being decided by the die roll (111=the forces of good, 666=the forces of evil). The biggest effects are cinematic, with a specific note that it should only kill a PC if the roll already had that possibility, but really helps with reinforcing the themes of the game.

[Easy e]

Played some AoE The EXpanse, and they have a fun little mechanic called "Stunting". IIRC you roll 3d6, with 2d6 being your success pool. If you succeed, and your stunt dice is a match of the dice you rolled you can use the dice number rolled to add "stunts" or extra successes to the result. This applies to ALL rolls so you can stunt in combat, social, skill checks, etc. It allows you to add a cinema flair to the proceedings.

[Starlit Dragon]

Something I find fairly interesting about Exalted (or at least the earlier editions? I'm not certain) is that there are punishing systems for things like food and disease, which you, as Exalted, are immune to almost by default.

In RotateBird, the principle mechanic is that your stats are determined by randomly picked symbols, which you have to interpret and justify to the gm to use.

[Reathin]

Exalted's Stunt system was fun. Instead of making dramatic action harder, it actually made it EASIER to do them, and even incentivized you on top of that with restoration of energy/willpower reserves (and even bonus EXP in the case of the very rare 3 die stunts).

[Brookshw]

The Career System from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, for a couple reasons. First of all, it's semi-random. You get a single re-roll if you don't like the career you rolled up. It makes for fun, idiosyncratic stories where a mercenary, a beggar, a hedge wizard, and an apprentice shoemaker all team up to go on adventures, and there's enough emphasis on non-combat skills that all of those people actually feel useful.

Ratcatcher for life baby. It's also a game with lots of metacurrencies, fate, fortune, resolve, resilience, advantage, dark gods, it's never ending!

[Anonymouswizard]

Ratcatcher for life baby. It's also a game with lots of metacurrencies, fate, fortune, resolve, resilience, advantage, dark gods, it's never ending!

WFRP and it's 40k versions are games I love, but could never run these days because they're so crunchy. A lot of fun when it all works, but prepping a session is a lot more hassle from the mechanical side than I'm prepared to do.

Biggest issue I encountered was when critical damage caused a character's head to explode and then they burnt a Fate Point in a location they wouldn't be revisiting (and in fact would explode soon). Had to literally retcon the hit because there was basically no vaguely reasonable way for them to disappear and pop up later.

4e is even worse, instead of the nice and neat advances for careers now you're buying Characteristics and Skills by the point!

[Morgaln]

Minor and Major Twists in Sentinels RPG, which is a superhero system.
Whenever a character fails at a roll, they can take a twist to succeed instead. Twists are complications that arise from whatever the character did. They will succeed at whatever they were doing, but something else goes wrong in the process.
A twist can be as harmless as taking some damage (in preventing the machine from blowing up, you burnt yourself) or a penalty to your next roll (you're still tangled in the vines you pried off the ship), it can be a story complication (you chucked the bomb into the water, but now the explosion makes the river flood) or even a personal problem (in stopping the car your costume got ripped, so now your secret identity might be compromised).

Minor twists are supposed to be low impact and short term, whereas major twists will have larger impacts and might even last beyond the current scene. Which you take depends on how badly you failed the original roll. Players are very much encouraged to come up with their own twists when they decide to take one. They keep the game dynamic and also involve the players more in what happens at the table and what direction a scene goes. It's a very fun system, which obviously only works because Sentinels is leaning towards the narrative side of RPGs.

[gbaji]

Games with some sort of mental stat that could influence play. CoC's Sanity is the classic example, but there are few other games that do similar things. I like the idea that there's "just so much I can take" going on in a game, which can put a sort of "clock" on any scenario being played. Similar to things like luck/fate points, and well, anything that sorta declines as you work through a scenario/adventure (but presumably/hopefully fills back up somewhat afterwards). Lots of variations in this kind of concept though.

The sanity stat was particularly fun, given the various ways it could affect you during play. Best with players who really get into the roleplay though, otherwise it can just be "GM tells you what negtives you have now", which is not nearly as much fun.

I'm going to counter what someone else posted earlier and say that I actually like dice pools. So there! There's something kinda neat about increasing the number of dice you roll rather than just increasing the value you have to hit on a single roll. And who doesn't like rolling a bunch of dice (there is something intimidating about someone picking up dice, then picking up more dice, then shaking them while grinning eviliy)?

And yeah. Speaking of tons of dice, there's Champions. Ok.The tons of dice are just part of effect calculation (but hey. therapeutic right!). As to mechanics, I think this was the one of the first game systems to have point buy and include things like disadavanages to gain points in the character build process (at least the first I recall playing). Up until then, creation was about rolling dice for stats, then picking stuff (or even doing the whole mini-game of Traveller character creation, which was still basically random rolls). The idea of actually picking your stats, and your skills, and your powers, and then the disadvantages, and tying it all together was a pretty new concept back then. The result was incredible flexibility in character creation (and to be fair, tons of opportunities for loophole abuse too!).


I suppose a mention of Pendragon traits is in order. Not sure I really loved this, but it was an interesting concept. On the one hand, it was a really great attempt to get away from the classic D&D style alignment system. But on the other, it often resulted in the character playing you, rather than you playing the character. I lean towards a "just play the character as you see fit, and let the gameworld respond accordingly" approach, rather than actual alignments. But with a good GM that wasn't using these traits to railroad you, it worked well enough. And in the theme of the game, it worked too.


Oh. I also found very "interesting" TFTs magic system (wizard/melee). My friends and I often referred to this system as RPG-lite (very simple game). One of the interesting aspects is that since there are only three stats, they tend to be used for multiple things. Specifically, the strength stat is used for what you can carry and weild in combat (higher ST meant you could wiield weapons that did more damage). But it was also used for HPs. So you lost ST if you took damage (kind of a "temporary loss", so it didn't affect the other stuff, but was a counter to death). Really interestingly is that the same stat was also used as "mana points". So you spent temp ST points when casting spells. Which made things dicey for casters. It was entirely possible to do more damage to yourself casting a spell than you did to the opponent(s) you were trying to harm with it. Fun system though. Also an early example of point buy/allocation too.

[SpyOne]

Cyberpunk, at least the first edition set in 2012, had a mechanic called Cool Under Fire. It was a penalty to all skill and combat rolls in stressful situations like being shot at.
At character creation it is based off a few of your stats, representing that some people are just naturally better at dealing with that than others, and every encounter that triggers it also works to reduce it (I believe it decreased by 1 for every 10 encounters), reflecting that everyone will get used to being shot at eventually.

[gatorized]

Hello folks.

Today I want to ask you all, what are some fundamental or non-fundamental mechanics

So your question is literally "What are some mechanics in games?"

Can you please explain what goal you're trying to achieve so we can provide meaningful answers?


In theory it's a broader category that encompasses / overlaps narrative mechanics. But in practice, it's most often implemented as a way to play the world instead of the character.

Really? Ok, list every game with a meta currency that has ever been printed, and then for 51% or more of that list, prove that each game's meta currency leads to playing the world.

[Razade]

So your question is literally "What are some mechanics in games?"

Can you please explain what goal you're trying to achieve so we can provide meaningful answers?

No, that's not what they asked. You cut off a pretty important part. They're asking for important mechanics in games that aren't in D&D. They specified that on the outset. Why misquote them?


Really? Ok, list every game with a meta currency that has ever been printed, and then for 51% or more of that list, prove that each game's meta currency leads to playing the world.

Why take this tone? They don't have to list every game to form a conclusion on the use of meta-currencies. They don't even have to have a list of half. If you disagree, why not offer why?

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I'm going to counter what someone else posted earlier and say that I actually like dice pools. So there! There's something kinda neat about increasing the number of dice you roll rather than just increasing the value you have to hit on a single roll. And who doesn't like rolling a bunch of dice (there is something intimidating about someone picking up dice, then picking up more dice, then shaking them while grinning eviliy)?


I'm probably biased because I started on nWoD, but same here! I also found it much easier to parse results than games like D&D which I was introduced to later, and there's such a nice tactile feel, like you mention, to have a physical thing (number of dice) tied to mechanics.

Also, if you like the feel of huge pools of dice, Mythender is always worth a look.

[Telok]

I'm probably biased because I started on nWoD, but same here! I also found it much easier to parse results than games like D&D which I was introduced to later, and there's such a nice tactile feel, like you mention, to have a physical thing (number of dice) tied to mechanics.

Also, if you like the feel of huge pools of dice, Mythender is always worth a look.

I started on d&d but like dice pools more. Amusingly d&d uses dice pools for damage because 1d20 +/- number is too random at low levels vs sub-20 hp and... Anyways dicepool damage is what d20 uses to smooth out the flat prob distribuion of the d20.

[Tanarii]

Dice pools are two automatic strikes against a system. It needs to be otherwise perfect to be worth playing.

[gatorized]

No, that's not what they asked. You cut off a pretty important part. They're asking for important mechanics in games that aren't in D&D. They specified that on the outset. Why misquote them?

"what are some fundamental or non-fundamental mechanics in TTRPG that are not DnD?"

This is equivalent to "what are some mechanics in games that aren't DnD?"

The question is so broad as to be meaningless. The answer is a list of every mechanic in every game that has ever been printed, minus one.

[gbaji]

Dice pools are two automatic strikes against a system. It needs to be otherwise perfect to be worth playing.

Honestly curious, since you mentioned it a couple of times? What do you not like about dice pools?

To me, they allow for a separate axis to determine outcomes. So you can create a different "weight" on things like modifiers, skills, bonuses, etc in the calculation. It also allows for a better/easier "degree of success/failure" bit. Without dice pools, all adjustments to a single roll are linear and equally weighted, and relative success/failure can only be determined via the same sort of linear math (X amount +/- the target roll basically).

Dice pools allow you to do things like "count up your successes", and based on that, different things happen. It's more complex, but IMO provides a lot more flexibility in game systems that use them (if they use them correctly).

Using dice to generate a single number (ie: roll XD6 and add up the total) is *not* a dice pool mechanic. It's just a different method of determining a single result (and is typically used to change the statistical outcome "curve" across the range of the roll value).


"what are some fundamental or non-fundamental mechanics in TTRPG that are not DnD?"

This is equivalent to "what are some mechanics in games that aren't DnD?"

The question is so broad as to be meaningless. The answer is a list of every mechanic in every game that has ever been printed, minus one.

And yet, it's still a very valid question for someone, who's maybe coming from a D&D background, to ask about different games and how they do things differently. What works. What doesn't. Etc. I'm not sure why that makes it a bad question. Certainly no one else has had an issue with this. Heck. I find it to be very interesting. I've played a lot of different systems, but there's still a ton that I haven't, so it's useful to me to hear about things that I may have just never run into before.

You never know when or where you might run into something that sparks an idea for a game you are runnning. Or thinking about running. Or want to adopt a rule into something. Who knows?

[CarpeGuitarrem]

And so far there's been a lot of interesting responses; I find it hard to criticize the premise of a thread that creates productive discussion.

[Anonymouswizard]

Eclipse Phase has body swapping as a major element, although it mostly avoids facing the philosophical issues that arise from it via having the vast majority of factions subscribe to 'mind as data' and most people being in a situation where they'd rather not think about it.

How it works varies between editions. In 1e it directly adjusts your Aptitudes, which directly adjust your skill scores and derived characteristics. Thus whenever you swap morphs not only do you have to change your Aptitudes, you've got to go through all your skills and check which has been changed by five or ten points. If you're really unlucky your new Morph will affect all seven aptitudes, and thus pretty much every numerical value on your sheet that isn't Rep or Credits.

Then you deal with the fact that morphs determine your Durability, Wound Threshold, might have a completely different set of implants, and may or may not have access to the equipment your old body had (hope you have those blueprints and access to a fabber). Thankfully most of that can be solved by splitting morphs onto their own sheets, but it's still a pain to go through for what's supposed to be the game's USP. Did I even mention that starting morphs cost XP but later ones cost Cred or Rep?

2e is much better, although still not perfect. The game brought in an extra three metacurrencies, and morphs determine these instead of modifying Aptitudes (and maybe give a small boost to the original, now renamed, metacurrency). Morphs can now be spun off into their own sheets and reserving is much, much more painless (but double check your gear!).

Best of all morphs and gear now come out of a separate budget even at character creation, meaning you'll never be down CP because you started in a Fury but could only reserve into a Splicer.

[Tanarii]

Blades in the Dark / BitD has been mentioned several times, but I didn't see the concept of Flashbacks called out. That's a unique mechanic that lets you establish the current situation by declaring that your character has previously accomplished something in the past, as long as it doesn't violate the fiction as already established. At the cost of stress.

It's a particularly appropriate mechanic for a Heist genre game system.

[White Blade]

Going to round out BitD's getting the glory treatment and say the crew and downtime systems are both really interesting. Crew is basically a shared character sheet and that's pretty cool on its own. The play loop on the downtime system is genuinely smooth. I also enjoy vices as a way to recover.

For something to round out the systems listed, I like Cortex Dramatic's resolution method - You have stepped dice (1d4->1d12) and then every dice pool is formed from one virtue (belief) + one relationship dice. Character creation was too complex (if fun for a certain kind of person) and it had a lot of problems, but I liked the idea and I keep trying to find the right fit for it.

[Pex]

I enjoy the magic system of Ars Magica. You have five major arcana and I think 20 minor arcana. The major is How - Creo for create Muto for change, etc. The minor is What - Ignam for fire, Vis for pure magic, etc. A fireball type spell would be Creo Ignam. Your score in each Thing determines how well you do it. The rules explain it better.

Rollmaster armor I found interesting. The armor you wear almost doesn't matter, and you certainly don't need the best possible if you want to get into melee. You probably want something decent though. The concept is the heavier armor you wear the easier you are to hit but the less damage you take. For example, just using numbers for show not any real numbers of the game, you have one character in plate armor and another in leather. Rollmaster uses percentiles. Plate armor character will be hit on an enemy roll of 64 but only take 2 points of damage. Leather armor character is missed on 64. When plate armor character is hit on 85 he'll take 12 points of damage. When leather armor character is hit on 85 he'll take 32 points of damage. Attack numbers 95-100 are like crits. Regardless of your armor you will take lots of damage.

[Blue Dragon]

• 3D&T: form and function are separated
• Advanced Fighting Fantasy: Luck
• GURPS: Quirks
• Street Fighter - The Storytelling Game: combat cards
• Vampire - The Masquerade: Nature and Demeanor

[SimonMoon6]

TORG (both versions) have some interesting rules.

One of the more unusual is the deck of cards that is used during fight scenes (and other scenes too). It is designed so that it gives advantages to the PCs during the early scenes of the adventure, but during the big dramatic scenes, the PCs suddenly have a lot more problems and difficulties.

Another interesting thing about the deck is that it also sometimes gives advantages to players who choose to do a specific one of the Charisma based skill checks (like Taunt, for example). I think this helps to reinforce to the players that these skills can and should be used in combat, especially if you don't have a useful combat action to take.

Also, I guess, just the fact that a lot of Charisma based skills have actual uses in combat is something that's pretty unusual.


The deck also is used when making a skill check, like trying to fix some gadget or whatever in the middle of a dramatic scene. You don't just roll one skill check to see if you succeeded. Instead, there are four things to accomplish (A, B, C, and D). The deck tells which of these you are allowed to try on a given turn; you must do them in order, so if you haven't done A but only D shows up in the deck, you're not making any progress this turn. However, if A and B both show up, then you can try to do both (instead of just one) at a penalty. And sometimes maybe something goes wrong and sets you back a letter.

[Eldan]

Blades in the Dark / BitD has been mentioned several times, but I didn't see the concept of Flashbacks called out. That's a unique mechanic that lets you establish the current situation by declaring that your character has previously accomplished something in the past, as long as it doesn't violate the fiction as already established. At the cost of stress.

It's a particularly appropriate mechanic for a Heist genre game system.

I think Flashbacks are worth a bit more discussion here, and about how they worked. The generally narrative conceit is this:

Most of the time, in Blades in the Dark, you're on a heist. Flashbacks allow you to do that heist thing where the protagonists are facing a problem and there's a flashback to the planning phase and one character says "But what about [Problem]?" and the leader says "I've thought about that. To prevent [Problem], we do this." Thinking of Oceans 11 here.

So basically, the players are surprised that there's an additional guard waiting inside the vault. So they have a flashback where they already found out there's a guard inside the vault and have previously bribed him.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Going to round out BitD's getting the glory treatment and say the crew and downtime systems are both really interesting. Crew is basically a shared character sheet and that's pretty cool on its own. The play loop on the downtime system is genuinely smooth. I also enjoy vices as a way to recover.

I'm honestly really impressed with the rhythm that the downtime phase gives play. With that larger framework of heists and downtime, it's easy to make scenes feel more purposeful.

[KorvinStarmast]

Going to round out BitD's getting the glory treatment and say the crew and downtime systems are both really interesting. Crew is basically a shared character sheet and that's pretty cool on its own. The play loop on the downtime system is genuinely smooth. I also enjoy vices as a way to recover. Amen to both.

[SimonMoon6]

Another interesting thing about the DC Heroes RPG by Mayfair is the way initiative works.

After everyone has rolled initiative, the character with the lowest initiative states what they are going to do, so that everybody with a higher initiative knows what he's going to do and can react to it; and then everybody works their way up the initiative list until the player with the highest initiative states what they're going to do. Then, we work our way back down the initiative list as each character does the thing that they said they would do.

Like this:

Thug: I rolled a total of 10 for initiative.
Superman: I rolled a total of 52 for initiative.

Thug: I plan to shoot Lois Lane with my gun.
Superman: I will interpose myself between the thug and Lois Lane so that the bullets bounce harmlessly off my chest. (I mean, realistically, a player in the game would probably punch the thug instead but this way, he doesn't risk rolling a critical miss on the thug which would still allow the thug to shoot Lois.)

[Telwar]

Cyberpunk, at least the first edition set in 2012, had a mechanic called Cool Under Fire. It was a penalty to all skill and combat rolls in stressful situations like being shot at.
At character creation it is based off a few of your stats, representing that some people are just naturally better at dealing with that than others, and every encounter that triggers it also works to reduce it (I believe it decreased by 1 for every 10 encounters), reflecting that everyone will get used to being shot at eventually.

Shadowrun has a couple of derived stats like that. There's Composure, which works similarly, and also Memory, which is what you roll explicitly to remember something, especially something the player has forgotten but the character should know.

[S@tanicoaldo]

-The secret society system in Paranoia, how it's the only PVP non cooperative game to work in my opinion.
-One character for many players from everyone is John.
-The power system in Don't rest your head.