These mechanics are all descended from Apocalypse World’s “workspace” move. It’s a powerful one; some would argue that the workspace move is THE fundamental move in AW (or PbtA games in general), and with good reason. I’m glad to see it being put to use in other games.
What are the best/most interesting mechanics you've seen?
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I love this, reckon I’ll make six narrow cards which look like logs for the campfire, for players to flip and ask of the player on their left, or something…I’ve never had time for camp scenes and always wanted a mechanic to help me engineer them!
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At the moment, I can’t stop thinking about…
The Arrival’s “Offer someone a cigarette” move in Dream Askew. The themes of scarcity and community, the disparities between the queer enclave and the society intact are folded together so perfectly in those four words.
The way the “Fall in love / Fall out of love” moves are strong or weak moves, depending on a character’s position in the community in Dream Apart.
The Discovery Phase in Swords without Master. When there isn’t a clear conflict imperiling the rogues, the game enters the Discovery Phase, and the players take turns describing their characters interacting with new people, discovering new worlds. Then, they ask the GM a loaded question about their discoveries:
I know a ship that will take us as far south as we wish. What vile price will the captain ask of us?
I push open the door to the castle kitchen. What sight causes me to stop dead in tracks, my heart frozen in my chest?
You keep discovering new things and asking loaded questions about them until a new conflict appears that propels the rogues to action. It’s a wonderful way for the story to find new directions after the tension has gone out of an action scene.
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Scariest mechanic: The central mechanism in Dread is amazing, even if it isn’t always done well.
Best generic mechanic for any game: advantage / disadvantages to the +1/-1 mechanism
Funniest rpg rule: In the mini game Clerics (where you play Clerics trying to save your dumbass party run by the GM from themselves), there is a hilarious rule that states, as a cleric you can suggest what the other party members do., in response, the GM ahould play those characters in the opposite way.
Best PbtA game specific moves:
-Cramped quarters for Uncharted Worlds - I suspect this predated the Stonetop version to create interparty tension between the action
-Wild Jumps- This move is So helpful to prevent murder hobos in space And to introduce any random setting or space monsters or hooks into a story. Characters about to die due to a bad jump? No problem, rescue them in exchange for a mission to pay off the debt… And easily get the players to buy into the deal!
Comrades - Cradle a dying comrade - if this can’t pull out an emotional response, no PbtA move can.
For one shots -
Tags in Lady Blackbird / Uncanny Echoes
AW 2nd Ed - “love letters” - flashback with mechanics
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Pendragon mechanic, where what you roll is how good your roll is. Compare this to rolling d20, subtracting what you rolled from your skill value. (Talking BRP, not d20)
Flipping dice, where you roll d100 (with 2d10) and then have the option to flip the number around, from 23 to 32 or 94 to 49. Warhammer 1ED flips the dice to see where you hit your opponent.
Unknown Armies, of course, is using both Pendragon/Blackjack mechanic and flipping dice. A good example of a brilliant rule system.
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Zombie Cinema, where you can add dice to a roll to support someone. This is a mechanic for active listening, so you will still be interested in the scene, even if your character isn’t in it.
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HERO System’s Presence Attack is best mechanic I’ve ever seen, with the closely related Characteristic Effect Dice being a close runner up. The Presence Attack rules are the most satisfying way I’ve found of mechanizing the disparity between player social skill and character social skill without overly disrupting the pure pleasure of actually role-playing social encounters.
If you’re unfamiliar with the HERO System, characters have six Primary Characteristics (“CHA”), each with a base of 10 and a range of 0 to 20. The Characteristics are your standard D&D array: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Ego (“Wisdom”), and Presence (“Charisma”).
The attributes are used primarily determine a Characteristic Roll ((CHA/5)+9 or less) and Characteristic Effect ((CHA/5)d6). So if a character has a Presence (“PRE”) of 10, then they have a Roll of 11- and an effect of 2d6.
When a character wants to influence another character (an NPC), they can use an PRE-based Interaction skill (which has a base roll equal to their PRE Roll), or they can use a PRE Attack. To perform a PRE Attack, the player rolls their PRE Effect and compares the result to the target’s PRE. If the result equals or exceeds their PRE, they are influence. For every +10 they beat the target’s PRE, the more profound the effect they have is.
As an example, let’s say Bob (PRE 13, Roll 12-, Effect 2½d6) approaches a woman (PRE 10) at a bar and attempts to flirt with her. This is a PRE Attack, so he rolls his dice. He gets an 11. The woman has a mild, but positive response to his approach, giving him the opportunity to build on his success. Had he rolled a 9, she’d roll her eyes, grab her drink, and move to another section of the bar. If he rolled a 40 (a +30 effect, not possible for Bob), then the woman would instantly fall madly in love with him and be unable to live without him (sometimes you can impress someone a little too much).
There are of course ways to increase you PRE Effect roll – a positive reputation, a striking appearance – and the GM can apply bonuses to the dice for the quality of the player’s narrative, the appropriateness of the act. For example, the GM might give Bob +2d6 in the above example because the whole reason the woman is sitting at the bar is she’s hoping someone like Bob will approach her, and is thus amenable to being chatted up. He might apply a -2d6 penalty if Bob tries to chat up a woman while, say, a gunman is shooting up the bar. Read the situation, Bob.
The reason I love this mechanic so much is that its super easy to integrate it smoothly into role-playing. There’s a natural rhythm to conversations, and generally there are very clear “turning points” where the reaction of the NPC is going to determine the outcome of the interaction. For example, let’s say the player’s “Party Leader” is talking to a Local Noble Lord, and trying to convince the Lord to render aid. This could be reduced to a single die roll, a pass/fail skill check, but that’s dull and robs me of the chance to give this Lord any personality. So instead, we role play the interaction, and whenever the player says something that challenges the Lord’s assumptions and inherent position, I call for a PRE Attack. This gives me a metric by which I can decide which way the Lord is leaning based on the PC’s argument, without shutting down the RP. And thus the Lord is either slowly swayed to the PCs position after multiple successes, or hardens his own position after multiple failures.
Related to this is the whole concept of Characteristic Effects. Every attribute can be turned into dice of effect. This can be used in so many different ways. For example, I’ve run sessions where a player and an NPC were both trying to convince a group of scholars of the truth of a proposition – it was a debate over the fundamental nature of dragons, IIRC – and rather than a pass/fail check, I had each character roll the INT Effect, going back and forth, until one or the other passed a benchmark. This gamifies the debate, creating a sense of excitement and anticipation – will our friend, the PC, shut down his opponent and prove his thesis, or will he be demolished by his opponents superior rhetoric? Each die roll increasing the tension, until finally resolution. Likewise, I’ve had players roll DEX Effect to determine how impressive their dancing or a display of weapons skills is.
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In COntinuum, a time-travelling game, you can reach for just about any item you need and then retroactively declare that you put it there for yourself sometime in the past. For example, you can reach into a planter box and pull out a pistol, which you declare you had stashed there yesterday for just such an occasion.
During character creation in the same game, everyone gets to roll a bunch of dice and multiply by some ludicrous factor to get a hefty amount of wealth. It’s said that you used your time travelling powers to get your one big score and assumes everyone has already done that before the game starts.
In Killshot, a cinematic game where you play as assassins, there’s a really cool initiative mechanic. Each side (players vs. NPCs usually) gets a certain number of actions to use between all members of the team. You can use actions yourself or pass the torch to one of your team members who also pulls from the same action pool (IIRC).
The cool thing though is that if you’re pressing an attack, you can often keep getting actions until you miss. If you miss an attack, the enemy gets to steal the initiative and push back using their own actions.
It’s hard to describe without the rulebook in hand, but the result is a very cinematic combat in which one side keeps punching until they make a mistake, then the other side takes advantage of the opening.
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Ah, a game using the the rarely seen Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure rules of time-travel.
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I adore the way Past cards work in Zombie World. Essentially, you get assigned a past, a history, for your character, and that past comes with a perk or special move. Your Past card starts facedown; only you know what it is, but you don’t get that special perk. Everyone starts Zombie World as strangers, and so nobody knows each others’ pasts.
Each Past card also a condition to “unlock” it—some narrative beat you must complete in order to be able to use your special perk. When you have that story moment, you flip your card over and reveal your past, and thus gain the benefits of your Past.
Say, for example, my character is a Priest. The Priest perk is something along the lines of “When you Calm Someone Down, use Soul [interpersonal stat] instead of Steel [nerves/guts stat] while invoking a higher power.” It’s a pretty good perk, in the same way that any of those substitute-X-for-Y-while-Z moves are pretty good.
In order to unlock it, though, I have to fulfill this requirement (ish, I’m paraphrasing): “In a moment of weakness, profess your faith to your another character as a means of finding strength.” And then I flip my card, and the whole table knows I was—or am—a Priest.
The game builds in specific narrative requirements to unlock specific mechanical benefits. Super good design all around.
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FYI. For anyone interested…
Forbidden Lands core rules are free for a few hours more today.
Updated: The sale is over now.
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Dogs in the Vineyard makes everyone behaves like assholes, even if that wasn’t their intention in the first place.
Don’t Rest Your Head has some cool subsystems that interact with each other. You can do stuff, but the drawback in the end will come back and haunt you. Desperate choices for the win.
Svart av kval, vit av lust is what Vampire: tM should have been. No dice, only stones, in a collaborative storytelling game, where the Beast in each vampire will try to mess it up for the human side (other participants controls the Beast). To resist the Beast, you take a stone. There are a clear hierarchy, where older vampires will always win over younger vampires. Summoning the Beast, however, can make younger vampires win in a brutal way against the elders, but any participant can take a stone away from a vampire to have their Beast refuse to help them. All in all, this means that younger vampires will walk through a flood of blood if they want to achieve their goals.
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I like a lot of mechanics but use very few. Among those I don’t use, I find “rolling under a TN but using the result for effect magnitude” very elegant.
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