The stupidity of Universal Mechanics

There has a movement among role playing games for the last decade to tout a "universal mechanic" to resolve all actions which cannot be adjudicated fairly through role play. The entire "d20 revolution" was based on this, as is Castles & Crusades' SIEGE Engine. This is a really dumb idea.

Good role playing games operate at many levels. The two most frequently encountered ones are in persona role playing (where you resolve issues through role play and group consensus) and combat. D&D 4E has introduced Skill Challenge Encounters, and there are many others of course. But each game-level must be its own game with rules well tailored to that game in order to perfect the "fit" between rules and player action. Could you imagine if my chess variant tried to use a universal mechanic to adjudicate both the chess moves and the Street Fighter matches? Neither chess nor Street Fighter would be improved thereby. So it is with any other games-within-a-game. The developers at Rockstar Games certainly understand the need for well designed sub-games.

The problem with the universal mechanic is that it places a serious limitation on the types of sub-games a given rpg can incorporate. Classic D&D could never have incorporated rules for small team combat, wrestling, mass combat, naval warfare, dominion management, multiverse wanderings, and spellcasting if it had insisted on a universal mechanic. And if D&D 4E shows us anything, it's that when you try really hard to make universal mechanics work, many things get lost while what remains ends a bland melange of actions that all feel exactly the same.

Do not fear bespoke mechanics. They're what makes each level of a game interesting.

UPDATE: Just thought of something:

Dear Old Schoolers,

Answering every "How should I resolve situation X?" question with "Roll an attribute check" or "Roll percentile dice" is a universal mechanic (see above for why that's bad). Sometimes, if situation X comes up often enough, it's advisable to develop a bespoke mechanic. Especially if the players can reasonably expect their characters to get better at situation X as they level up. That's not a betrayal of Gary Gygax's legacy, it's just good sense.

Thanks,

IR

Of Games & Sub-Games

Many games, such as chess, have just one level. But you could imagine a chess variant where each time a player moves a piece the two players resort to a Street Fighter bout to determine which chess piece takes control of the space. In this chess variant chess is "the game" and Street Fighter is the sub-game.

Most role playing games have a number of sub-games, but to know what the sub-games are you first have to identify the "highest level" of the game. In my chess variant the highest level of the game is the chessboard, and we know this because when Street Fighter concludes the player's attention returns there. So I propose that the highest level of a game is "the gameboard to where the player's attention returns when all temporary distractions are resolved." Using this definition I suggest that "the game" of Dungeons & Dragons is the in persona role playing of the life of an adventurer, from birth to death (even if childhood is either hand-waived or handled with a paragraph or two of back story). What is so fascinating about this is how few rules there are for D&D's primary gameboard. Almost all of the rules in D&D deal exclusively with sub-games, particularly combat. There are a number of rules which effect the primary level of D&D, such as rules for aging, but for the most part it is free form play mediated only by the participating group's ability to form a consensus as to cause and effect within the game world.

I think this is why D&D lends itself to so many worlds and settings (official and homebrew), and why it became as popular as it did. The core game has almost no rules at all holding it back, and what few there are (such as aging or equipment price lists) are so ancillary to the real action that they can be ignored or rewritten as needed.

This is probably also the reason so many people think D&D is about combat encounters the way Diablo is. Due to the "invisible" nature of D&D's core game (it is not written anywhere, but can only be experienced through play) many have mistake the D&D's most prominent sub-game for the game itself.

Pale Imitations

There are no new ideas. A concern of mine I have had for some time was voiced by James Maliszewski at Grognardia almost a month ago:

in the old school movement, the shadow of Gygax (and, to a lesser extent, Arneson) looms every bit as large as does that of Lovecraft in the realm of cosmic horror fiction. The shadow of TSR itself is similarly impressive and rightly so. ... I see a danger in the way many old school products use past products as explicit models, right down to the trade dress, typeface, and layout. ... The same holds true not just for presentation but for content [and] the conflation of elements intended to support content with the content itself.

Indeed. OSRIC has provided a valuable service by producing an open content reference for publishers looking to explicitly develop for AD&D 1E, but games that claim to be new (I'm looking at you, Castles & Crusades) are anything but. They have passed up a perfectly good opportunity to bring a game with old-school feel to today's gamers by confusing the spirit of old school play with specific mechanics which have long been known to be sub-optimal.

The first post

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