I’m just curious; what are people’s favorite soft rpg mechanics? Have you ever encountered/hacked a soft mechanic that made a big difference in play?
Also, I’m still not super clear on the definition of a ‘soft mechanic’. Do pbta GM principles and/or GM moves count?
For me, I definitely see a place for Jargon, but I find it only helpful when all the participants have a clear idea of what the Jargon means.
Neither am I. What do you think it means? Do you have any examples? Or can you point me in a direction of where this term might be used?
Ah, I apologize. Luke at Wild Woods Games used the term recently (link). They used the term casually, and I’d seen it a few other places, so I assumed it was common knowledge for everyone but me.
Best I can tell, ‘soft mechanic’ means any rpg procedure or rule that does not involve hard numbers.
No one likes getting bogged down in jargon, so feel free to delete this thread.
I think the contempt tokens from The Quiet Year are wonderful. You pick one whenever you feel there is a tension, an uncomfortable moment for a part of the community you especially care about.
I like the contempt tokens especially for one reason: they are really soft mechanically in the sense that they have no mechanical consequence at all, no stat, no counting, nothing fictional. They are just sitting there, a collection of memories of past issues in a community.
Three things come to my mind, but I’m not sure if any of them really qualifies…
I can only speak for myself, but here’s what I mean when I say ‘soft mechanic’.
Partly, sure, mechanics that aren’t “hard”/numerical: Conflict phrases in Polaris, Contempt tokens in TQY, etc.
But mainly I mean… meta-mechanics, I guess? Instructions and directives which operate at the player level, and engineer the shape of the conversation the game produces.
That might be directions on how to conceptualise the game. (AW 2E: “Whenever your [as the GM] attention lands on someone or something that you own—an NPC or a feature of the landscape, material or social—consider first killing it, overthrowing it, burning it down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground.”
It might be directions on how to structure the game’s conversation. (Blades in the Dark: “Which actions are reasonable as a solution to a problem? Can this person be swayed? Must we get out the tools and tinker with this old rusty lock, or could it also be quietly finessed? The players have final say.”)
It could be instructions on what to say. (In Stonetop, during the Introductions step of character creation the GM is told to ask a lot of questions. And specifically, in addition to questions they’re naturally interested in, they’re actively directed to ask about the character’s families, their livelihoods, their housing situation, whether they’re literate. This is a very powerful way to communicate tone and nudge the initial picture of the world the players form).
Or it could be direction on what kind of things to say. (In my game The Blood Must Flow, here’s character creation: For each reveler, choose a craft - butcher, winemaker, orchard-keeper, etc - and think about their look, incorporating colour, texture, smell, animal imagery, etc. Starting with whoever last touched the soil, introduce your reveler. Describe the gift they bring to the feast: what it is, how it looks, how it was made.)
I’m sure there’s countless other examples I and others could think of. But yeah, for myself, that’s what I meant: player-level instructions that direct behaviour around the table and in the conversation of play.
A soft mechanic I find myself using a lot in design: leading questions.
They can be really helpful in keeping players on track with the tone of the game but there’s nothing in the rules saying they are more than suggestions.
I laughed my ass off at their use in the Friends at the Table podcast.
Honestly, you can see some really great soft mechanics in use with small, experimental games. I’d like to highlight Adam Roy’s SMS which has optional mechanics and showcases a lot of ways you can interpret rules. I think that the ways soft mechanics are used in these kinds of sad, soft games are really great.
Specifically, in this game, I would consider something like “It’s too late and you both know it” as a soft mechanic. The deciding whether or not you already know something is wrong is also a great example. Also the 33 minute wait time is pretty brilliant.
In my game, I’m basically eliminating the need to roll for knowledge. Here’s how it’s set up:
In an overwhelming number of cases in games like 5e, you “know” something, so it’s silly to say “Oh, you’ve studied this extensively, but because you rolled badly you don’t know it”
So, I just got rid of that, leaving rolls purely in the domain of academic expertise, and even then if you specialize in that knowledge you can avoid rolling.
As far as other mechanics go for this - and apologies if this doesn’t count since it does involve rolling still - but I’m a big fan of abilities that let you swap out a roll as a “luck management” skill. One example is in Pathfinder - I believe there is an Oracle specialization, or maybe just a divine spell (I can’t quite remember sorry) that lets you make a roll at the beginning of the day and you can choose to use that in place of another roll at any time throughout the day.
I feel odd about creating a distinction between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ mechanics as I think the sad truth is that at the table in the heat of the moment number based mechanics can take on a greater importance than the narrative or meta-game counterparts in a way which is behavioural rather than the games intention and can change the execution of the game. For example in some PBTA games there are player principles - playing to them shapes the game in an important way, but when faced with a challenge people are more likely to go for the Moves and the numbers to solve it and forget about doing that in the context of the meta-game stuff.
I’ve played games with no numbers in them at all, and I’ve written games with no numbers at all.
The most important meta-game technique I can think of is for the GM to hold off talking for 2 beats longer than they are comfortable with - to encourage the players to fill the silence. I use it in everything I GM these days.
The concept of “soft mechanics” is new to me, but I find it very useful to think about! To jump from rpg to larp a little, you could say that much of what Nordic Larp does is based on this kind of thinking, for example in workshop design where social design is used to create a distinctive social situation without necessarily using hard rules.
In play, I’ve often avoided mechanics that involve clear numbers because players so often focus on them so much. This concept helps me articulate that situation much better!
To me “soft mechanic” is almost oxymoronic. A mechanic is a mechanic precisely because it has a trigger and an output. Things like “ask questions” and “incorporate a craft into their look” aren’t mechanics at all, they’re something else - guidance? Principles? Directions? They shape play in a non-mechanical fashion.
That might seem kind of pedantic / semantic, but I think it is quite helpful to think in terms of a division between the stuff you must do, procedures you must follow, and the stuff that tells you how to play but is more a matter of judgement, shaping, “how” rather than “what”. I think it’s kind of confusing to use the word “mechanic” in relation to the latter.
But with that said, clearly I agree with the distinction you’re making.
Here’s an interesting one then, for your consideration:
I guess in your lingo you’d regard the whole thing as a “soft” mechanic.
If anything I’m thinking hard and soft are the wrong way round. Working out which dice to throw and rolling them adding a couple of stats is the easy bit. Making a required creative contribution in a particular way to advance the narrative… that is the hard stuff 
One of the core principles of PbtA games is a soft mechanic: the GM gets to decide which move to make.
Not sure about the proper naming of the rule, but the rule of the narrative right going to players for failed tests and to the gm for successful tests works wonders for me. I’ve found it in Trollbabe but I’m sure it’s used in other games too.
Mine has to be GM moves from Dungeon World.
Same with Agenda and Principles. So many early story games would have been so much clearer with that.
Somewhere sometime one of Vincen’ts games has the words “Say Yes or Roll the Dice” that has changed the way I play and GM ever since I saw it.
Weapon tags in Dungeon World are a good example, I think.
Messy and forceful have no hard mechanical effect, in that they don’t change how many hit points are lost or anything. They don’t even give -1 forwards or anything, but can change a combat dramatically.
The dangerous perhaps tag even more so, because its effect might not apply directly to the effect of an attack. It’s presence simply informs the fiction.
Beginning Dungeon World players often stumble over these tags, because they seem like such a hard mechanical thing. Why would the Fighter choose them over +1 damage on their signature weapon, for instance?
But going outside of RPG’s, I think my favourite soft mechanic of all time comes from the board game “Snow Tails”. It’s a charming little game about racing husky sleds, and comes with a “Big Paws” token. Anyone can give the token to a player who takes too long to think about their turn, and they can only pass it on when another player takes even longer. It has no other mechanical effect.
Gonna get very slightly pedantic here, but for good reason. Obviously @lumpley should correct me if I am wrong, but the phrasing is “roll dice or say yes.” The difference is subtle but important: the part before the “or” is the default state the GM should follow. “Say yes” as the default tells the GM to just let the players do whatever in general, use the improv “yes, and,” etc. Putting “roll dice” as the default says: look for the conflict, look for the challenge, but if it isn’t there or nothing interesting will come of it, then “say yes.”
I think there is a sense of GM agency implied when “roll dice” is first but a subtle lack of agency when “say yes” is first.
I haven’t seen anyone mention the structure of AW2e’s “History” questions, where each player introduces themselves and then asks (e.g.) “Which of you has stood up to me, gang and all?” or “Which of you put a hand in when it was needed?”
While these have a “hard” mechanic (setting Hx) attached to them in AW2e, I don’t think that’s where their power comes from. Their power comes from setting expectations for each playbook about they might relate to other PCs, allowing the player to pick which of those expectations they want to embrace, and allowing the other players to “opt in” to the proposed relationship (while simultaneously creating social pressure for them to do so).
I love this approach so much that I’ve used in both Stonetop and Homebrew World, without any mechanical benefit. They just do so much work in setting up the world, the starting situation, the PCs’ nature and their relationships with each other. I’ve had entire games be defined by those questions, which seem almost like throwaways when you start playing.