Mechanics as Bits
EDIT:
Freddie Foulds over on Bluesky found the post for me! It was a Chris McDowall post: Alien Dojos.
This is now a fan post about the genius that is Alien Dojos.
Every martial art described there (for use with Into The Odd) has a resolution mechanic that involves doing something tactile with dice, beyond just rolling.
For “Bafistan Fist Fighting” each punch is a d6, “rolled” by “throwing them into the air and punching them”—but you have to punch them in such a way they still land on the table; if you miss your punch, or punch them off the table, that’s a failure.
Or, how about “Five Way Stick”:
Initiate: When fighting with a Martial Stick (d6, Bulky) stack 5d6 in front of you and try to flick the top die from the stack. If any other than the top tie fall, fail and treat the roll as 1. Continue down the stack until you fail or choose to stop.
These are:
- Functional subsystems (clear resolution mechanics);
- Thematically appropriate to fiction they are meant to represent (little minigames of player dexterity to resolve character actions involving martial arts);
- Physical spectacle (at the very least you will be focused on the “roll”, if not dodging flying dice);
- Goofy as shit (a virtue in itself).
I want to make rules like this.
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Today I spent a few hours watching this Alien-abduction themed actual play of Dread, on Smosh. I liked it a lot! More than I thought I would!
(Please don’t laugh at me too much for my very vanilla Internet media consumption! I am an old, and very uncool. Today I was watching YouTube between digging up banana corms.)
I almost never watch actual plays, mind you. I tried Critical Role and bounced right off; I have seen maybe two Dimension 20 sessions ever; the last AP series I followed really was HarmonQuest, which was—what, the twenty-teens?
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Watching the Smosh Dread thing got me wondering:
How often do mechanics / system talk come up in the course of big mainstream actual plays?
I don’t mean:
- “Pull from the Jenga tower.” (simple resolution mechanics); or
- “I cast Fireball!” (diegetic, arguably)
But:
- “Okay so let’s look it up. Fireball is 20ft x 20ft, and *doesn’t* set stuff on fire.” (non-diegetic rules clarification); or:
- “You have four ‘Mercury’ symbols, and from last round you have the "somebody will betray you” narrative trigger, let’s consult the relevant oracle table …“ (complex resolution mechanics)
This analysis by Trilemma of the transcript of a Critical Role episode [and additional commentary by Thomas Manuel] goes a ways towards answering how much general rules talk occurs, though it doesn’t make a distinction between the types of rules talk in the sense I’m thinking of.
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Here’s a (totally untested) hypothesis:
If actual plays are edited / watched for the uninterrupted flow of action / banter / emotion at the table (as ones geared towards general, non-TTRPG-enthusiast audiences like Smosh and HarmonQuest certainly are);
and:
If certain kinds of complex mechanics tend to divert attention into cul-de-sacs of meta-narrative detail, interrupting said flow of action / banter / emotion (these are generally absent from the APs I can sit through, or at least edited out);
then:
The games that work best for actual play are basically party games, with light and (more importantly, for this post) VISCERAL resolution mechanics:
- Jenga-d suspense;
- The sleep rituals in stuff like Werewolf;
- An overdramatic rock-paper-scissors game; etc
Or, alternatively, they are games whose systems can get out of the way enough to function like party games. I’d argue that D&D counts as one such game. It is go-to mainstream TTRPG actual play system because yes, of Name Brand Recognition—
But also because it is possible to not play with any actual D&D rules (and therefore avoid the tedium of looking up what stuff like Conditions mean) and still be playing D&D culturally.
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Basically:
How suitable a tabletop roleplaying game is for actual play depends on how easily its mechanics can function as bits or performances, in the improv sense.
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So this is very shaky ground for me; I don’t watch actual plays and I am talking out my ass. But through the sewage of my bullshit is perhaps the firmer ground of a design opportunity, maybe?
Namely:
Could we be designing TTRPG mechanics as performances / for performativity?
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I’d argue that Dread is so well-known because its simple core mechanic is a novel for precisely this reason: you and your friends enact your suspense around the Jenga Tower physically and viscerally (even if it is anxious silence), for each other (if not for an outside audience).
There is the sense that you are acting. Doing something.
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How else could we manage this?
Rolling dice or revealing a card are already performances, technically—but for our purposes here I’d argue that they are very "small”; they don’t have enough presence.
How can we treat dice rolls with the pomp of ritual, construct more ceremony around a card-based resolution system?
Boardgames are already good at fun counters and tactile props and click-y dials—but these are also small, in that they live mainly on the table. You are still sitting on your ass.
Props that make you get up! Rulesets that necessitate play-fighting!
LARP totally fits. Throwing pouches and yelling “Magic Missile! Magic Missile!” 10 out of 10 no notes.
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Finger games (rock paper scissors; lat ta li lat ta li tam pong; thumb war) fit.
A chase scene in fiction resolved by a game of tag is maybe too on the nose, but also fits.
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I’ve been trying to find this blogpost I vaguely recall, that proposes exactly the kind of thing I’m thinking about.
It suggested a list of unusual fighting styles (or maybe martial arts) for D&D. It has stuck in the substrate of my mind because the proposed fighting styles all had non-standard, action-based resolution mechanics.
Ie: the GM tosses a handful of dice; you (the player) try to punch as many of them in mid-air with your fists; how many you get determines how many hits you score in fiction.
Something like that. Imagine that goofy shit at the table!
I can’t find this post any more. Does anybody else remember something like it? Help! I want to find it again!
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