Do Mechanics Actually Matter for a Role-Playing Game?

[Jason]

Yes, game mechanics matter. Because RPGs are games.

They don't matter as much as some other things do in creating a good experience, like who you play with and what the story and setting is, but bad game mechanics can certainly make it much more difficult to have a good gaming experience, while good gaming mechanics will make it at least somewhat easier.

One important consideration is how much time game mechanics take to resolve. Any time spent rolling dice (or shuffling cards or whatever) is time the narrative of the game doesn't progress. A reasonable amount of time can be good for building tension on important rolls, but if the system needs a lot of rolls to resolve each action and each roll takes a lot of time then momentum is lost, and with it excitement and player engagement, especially in combat.

FFG Star Wars has this problem in spades. Combat with high-level characters in that game consists of deciding as a group which player character acts on the current initiative point, with the chosen player deciding which target to attack, what combat talents of his character to use, the GM deciding what positive and negative modifier dice to use, the player deciding whether or not to use Destiny Points, the group deciding what talents of other players may influence the roll and whether to use them, counting up the different dice types needed (and probably having to borrow some from other players - the game uses a lot of dice at high-level play), rolling all the dice, picking out which results cancel out which other results to get your final result (and remembering what the non-intuitive symbols on the dice mean and which cancel out which), deciding if you have any talents that can change this final result and whether to use them (including talents that allow re-rolls and talents of other player characters), and then deciding how to spend any Advantage from the final die result to modify the result of the action, and what the results of any Triumph are, and the GM then decides how to spend any Threat or the result of any Despairs, and finally continues the narration of the action.

In other words, each roll for each player takes a lot of time.

Another consideration, especially for a game using an already established setting, is whether the game mechanics can effectively emulate the setting - whether they produce results that match what the characters in the original setting can do.

FFG Star Wars again has this problem (are you sensing what one of my least favorite RPGs is?). Jedi in that setting simply cannot duplicate some of the things they do in the movies. Full Jedi in the prequel movies are almost immune to blaster fire, effortlessly reflecting bolt after bolt unless they are seriously overwhelmed by waves and waves of attackers.

In the RPG the Reflect talent allows you to negate a few points of an incoming blaster bolt, but you would need to master multiple lightsaber talent trees (i.e. be exceptionally experienced) to get enough Reflect levels to completely negate even a low-end blaster pistol, and you still suffer Strain every time you use it (of which you have maybe a half-dozen points as a starting character and maybe in the low teens as a high-level character). Stopping a single blaster bolt from a battle droid rifle is out of the question unless you're playing a really high level Jedi (more experienced than Yoda or Mace Windu as statted in the books).

All that being said, I played a Jedi in an FFG Star Wars game for two years and still had a fun time. It's just that the game mechanics were an obstacle rather than a helper, from day one through the end of the campaign.