Brain Dump

It turns out that for the purposes of narrative generating play effective game mechanics always do one or both of two things. Of course roleplaying is not purely about generating narrative, or at least it does not have to be (something I plan to address in a future article). However, this article looks solely at roleplaying as a narrative-generating activity.

The first thing that mechanics do is teach. They provide an example of procedures for players to follow. As players utilize these procedures repeatedly over time they learn the lessons the procedures are designed to teach. As this process advances the players rely less and less on the mechanics to accomplish the goal, for they have learned how to accomplish that same goal without mechanics. This has the important effect of making these mechanics obsolete. That is, mechanics that are pure-teaching mechanics eventually teach their lessons, and then they are no longer useful to the group.

At first glance, this may seem like a bad thing. Who wants to design a set of mechanics that stops being used? However, sometimes designing rules to act as crutches to be discarded when they are no longer needed allows for significantly more flexible play, especially once the crutch-rules are discarded. (I actually plan to write an entire article on this at some point with justification, but real quick: fixed procedures such as mechanics constrain play which means that play is less flexible. Feel free to ask for clarification if you need it, I just do not want to go into this now because it would take over the article.)

An example of a teaching mechanic (though, as we will see later, not a pure-teaching mechanic) is Dogs in the Vineyard‘s town creation rules. The town creation rules provide a step-by-step set of procedures to follow to create situations for play. Each time you go through them you get a little bit better at creating situations for play in Dogs, and even cooler you get ever-so-slightly better at creating situations period. So each time you use the town creation mechanics you learn to create better situations. Those mechanics are teaching you to be a situation generating machine.

So, one thing mechanics can do for narrative roleplaying is teach procedures by guiding players through the proper way to do things. Sort of like a recipe in a cook book: once you have followed it enough times you no longer need it, and you can actually vary the quantities of ingredients to alter the final product in minor (or occassionally not-so-minor) yet significant ways. But you needed that recipe when you got started, otherwise you never would have learned enough to cook without it.

Mechanics in narrative roleplaying can do something else, and something that I think is significantly more powerful and useful in the long term. Teaching is something that mechanics can do, but things other than mechanics can do it too. For instance, you can simply teach by explaining what to do, or by providing examples of play, or by having discussions with the players. That does not mean that teaching mechanics are bad, mechanics actually provide an extremely effecient method of teaching by having players learn by doing, but they are only one method among several.
The second thing that mechanics in narrative roleplaying can do is save time and effort. Think of it this way: the human brain only has so much it can do during any given unit of time. It varies from person to person, but there is some maximum number of things you can think about and manipulate mentally. Mechanics can provide sets of procedures that lighten the load on your brain.

Let us look, once again, at town creation mechanics in Dogs in the Vineyard. As I mentioned earlier, teach you to generate situation, but they do something more. They make situation generation easier. Assuming that you already know everything there is to know about situation generation, you can still benefit from these mechanics because generating a situation (at least a situation of a specific type) is easier with them than on your own.

Good procedures act as force multipliers. They minimize the number of inputs that must be made by players to get a high-quality output. This means that situation creation is faster using Dogs town creation rules.

The reason that this is important is that, for most people, situation creation is a necessary activity for play, but it is not the reason to play. While it is important, necessary, and even fun, it is not the most fun thing about play. In order to make sure as much fun is happening as possible, procedures are developed that make the less-than-most-fun stuff take as little time as possible.

These sorts of effeciency-based procedures are the editing that I talked about three weeks ago. They let you get as much of the good stuff as possible by making the stuff you have to have to support the good stuff take up as little time and effort possible.

At some point I would love to see a discussion about how to construct and balance these sorts of mechanics take place, but at the moment I do not feel up to leading it myself. It is a simple idea, but one that is taking me a lot of time to explore. I feel as if I still have a lot of thinking to do before I really have a grip on the implications of all this.

The important part is that narratives are produced by people, and as such they must have human input. The trick is figuring out which parts can do without direct human input and thus can be replaced with mechanics, and which parts vitally need human input and how to integrate that input with the mechanics. Of course which parts are which is going to depend on the nature of the narrative in question (which is why different games are good for telling different kinds of stories: their time-saving procedures maximize the ability to address different things).

Outside of these two things, mechanics have nothing to offer narrative roleplaying. So look at your game and ask yourself: “Is my game purely a narrative game?” and if it is, “Which of my mechanics are teaching, which are helping play get to the interesting stuff, and which need to get the axe?”

Next week: Deceptively steep learning curves and why people don’t want to learn your new game.

Tags: Theory

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 10:56 and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.