Consent and How Mechanics Imply Flavor

When playing a tabletop roleplaying game, you can broadly split the parts of the game that we interact with into two broad categories: mechanics, and flavor. Mechanics are the fiddly bits that we deal with on our character sheets, the numbers, which dice we roll, when we roll them, how we engage with the GM and the game. Flavor is the fiction, it’s what we envision in our heads as we play, and it’s the setting, genre, and tone that builds the worlds we inhabit. Flavor tells us that we are wielding a magic longsword, forged by dwarves from the finest mithril, lighter and more agile than other blades, or extendable blades made from a dura-steel alloy implanted into our forearms. Mechanics tells us that both these are melee weapons that deal 1d8 damage, have +1 to attack rolls, and encumber your character less than other similar weapons.

I’ve talked before about how I think that these two things don’t have to be in opposition to each other, and how each can be used to influence the other. Today I would like to talk about how besides simply being used to inform which stories you tell, mechanics alone can imply things about the flavor and fiction of your games. As a part of this, I will show a worked example of how a game mechanic might imply the wrong things for your table, and how to design a mechanic with what it implies in mind.

What do Mechanics imply?

In any given game, a particular mechanic will be used to represent something within the fictional world of the game. It will use roll tables, stats from character sheets, dice, and rules text that allow you to resolve it in the context of your game, and this will lead to some result in the fiction of your game world.

In many games, a well-designed mechanic would allow you to look at the mechanical process devoid of much of the specific flavor, and you would be able to derive something about what that mechanic represents. For example, in Ars Magica, there is a mechanic that works like so:

Each season, a character makes a total from their Intelligence + Magic Theory + Action + Target + Magical Aura, and compares it to a level. The amount that the total exceeds the level is accrued as points. When the points meet or exceed the level, the task is complete and the character gains a new power based on the action and target, for example “create” and “fire” to gain a power to deal fire damage.

Without understanding what this mechanic is, we can look at the parts of it and derive things about it. First, it is a mechanic used to gain powers, and it uses Magic Theory, so it seems that this is some kind of action to gain magical power. It has some kind of action and target, and this is related to the final power, so this likely is a system by which a character can choose from or design new powers. Points are accrued over seasons, so this implies some kind of practice or study used to become stronger magically. In addition, some kind of magical aura is included, which sounds like this activity is best done in magical places or times of power, which depending on how common those are, maybe implies some competition between characters for access to them.

This already implies a pretty strong flavor, and indeed, this mechanic is for spell invention or learning in a wizard’s lab, which I suspect some of you guessed. In this case, the flavor implied by the mechanic aligns well with its intended use, it makes characters feel academic and like they are participating in grand research that takes time and skill and doesn’t rely on luck.

Mechanics don’t always imply flavor that aligns with the intended use, however. I think a perfect example of this in most games is the category of social skills.

Social Skills and Consent: A Case Study

There are probably as many ways to run social skills in games as there are GMs, and probably yet a few more besides. I want to talk about one particular but common use of social skills: opposed checks.

Often in games during a social interaction, a player will declare some goal that they want to achieve with a social interaction with another character, the GM will call for a skill check from the player and then will roll some kind of opposed check for the NPC, or call for an opposed roll from another PC. Then, the results of the two rolls are compared, and the one who rolled better is declared the “victor,” and the scene is played out with that result.

Examples of this include rolling intimidation versus a drunk’s willpower in a tavern to prevent a brawl, diplomacy against an emissary to compete for whose plan will be used by the ruler hearing their petitions, deception against a courtier’s perception to start a false rumor about a rival, charm opposed by an ally’s willpower to sally out against the hordes pressing against the castle gates, fast-talk against a friend’s willpower to borrow some money and let you crash at their house for a couple days, sex appeal versus a barmaid’s willpower to seduce her, etc.

Now depending on how you think about game mechanics, and whether or not you’ve got an intuition for or are used to analyzing mechanics like in the last section, these last few examples may look a little different to you. Rolling intimidation against the willpower of a drunk to prevent a fight is inherently a conflict between two characters, and the outcome can reasonably be decided by someone “winning” in that conflict.

Rolling charm against an ally’s willpower to sally out against an enemy, on the other hand, implies that your ally doesn’t want to do this with you, and that they will fight to the extent of their will against taking that action. Circumstance bonuses or penalties applied by the GM might change things slightly, perhaps a bonus is applied to your character’s charm roll because of your close bond to the ally, or a penalty is applied to the ally’s willpower roll because they have a hatred for this particular foe, but fundamentally it is still a roll that implies that your character and your ally’s character’s interests are opposed.

Or take the next example, fast-talk against your friend’s willpower to borrow some money and stay on their couch, rolling this as an opposed check implies that your friend would rather not allow you to, and putting it against willpower implies that you wear them down with your words until it’s too much of a bother to say no.

The last example I think is the most egregious, rolling sex appeal vs a barmaid’s willpower to seduce her is a staple of bard-type characters across the history of roleplaying games. Rolling it as an opposed check says she would rather not by default, and rolling it against willpower implies that at some point, no matter her own thoughts on the matter, regardless of her preferences, without consideration for the workplace environment and its affects on her mood, she will be worn down by sufficient appeal. It strips away any implication of agency or consent that could be present in a different mechanic.

Now, there may be cases where these implications match up with what you are trying to play out. Maybe your ally really doesn’t want to sally out with you against that foe. Perhaps your friend has had one too many bad experiences with lending you money and wouldn’t do it again without being pressured. You might be playing a monster who doesn’t care about consent. If those implications line up with what you are trying to play out, then there’s no reason to change the mechanic.

Maybe those implications don’t line up with what you intend, though. Your ally wants to sally out against the foe, if only someone could inspire them to courage. Your friend values your relationship and wants to help you out in a tight spot. You want to shoot your shot with the barmaid, but if she’s uninterested you’d back off like any reasonable person.

In these situations, most games don’t have a mechanic that implies flavor that lines up with these actions (except for the controversial Doors mechanic in Chronicles of Darkness if applied well), so most GMs will either just make these opposed checks as mentioned above, roleplay them out without dice rolls, or make a spot ruling about how these tasks might be done in a way that doesn’t imply conflict the way an opposed roll does (e.g. setting a static DC for a skill test). But this begs the question, how might you design a mechanic that does imply the right things?

Designing Mechanics with Flavor In Mind

I follow a basic process when I am trying to design mechanics, with four core steps:

1. Enumerate the goals you would like the mechanic to fulfill
2. Determine what the core mechanics you can pull from for your game might imply
3. Select core mechanics to support your goals
4. Synthesize them together into a system

Enumerating goals can itself be challenging, sometimes you won’t know which goals you want to pursue until they become evident through play. Even so, starting from a core set of goals helps to establish the boundaries of what you want your mechanic to deal with, and sets the foundation that can later be changed as needed when testing and adapting the mechanics you design.

Because there is a focus on what implications are being made about the fiction by the mechanics, these goals should include something about game feel, and about the sorts of things that are important to the fiction of your game.

Once you have your goals, you can enumerate the core mechanics for you game. This is a step you need only do once for any given game system if you are thorough enough, so note things down in this step. Even so, you should probably revisit this whenever you establish a new set of goals you are pursuing to see whether or not there is another core mechanic of your game system that you might have missed before.

The core mechanics of the game are those procedures that appear time and again, remixed in different ways for different subsystems of the game. They may be quite generic, or very specific. For example, in GURPS one core mechanic is rolling 3d6, summing the result, and comparing it to an effective skill number. This is repeated and remixed, and the effective skill number may come from many different sources, but the mechanic remains approximately the same in each case. In Ars Magica there is a core mechanic of generating a total, comparing it to a target level, and accruing points equal to the difference between the two until the accrued points exceed the target level. This is used at a baseline in spell invention for Hermetic Mages as was mentioned earlier in this article, but it’s used time and again in other subsystems whenever progress is made towards a goal with a baseline difficulty.

As you select mechanics, you should think about the sorts of implications that they have. Rolling with a skill bonus added implies a lack of certainty of success, and that skill plays a role in determining that success. Rolling with flat probability implies high variance, while rolling with a bell curve implies consistency. Skill bonuses that are small compared to the variance of the die implies that while skill is a factor, luck is more important, while bonuses that are large compared to the die size imply the opposite. Downtime activities that do not use dice rolls imply some level of progress with time, that many actions even out any amount of luck that may play into individual actions, etc.

When you have both a list of mechanics with their implications, and your goals for game feel and fictional impact, you can select which of the mechanics feel like they will support those goals. This process can be fairly straightforward if you have been detailed about the previous two steps, but it could be somewhat laborious if you have not, or if the game system you are working with does not have appropriate core mechanics to the goals you have in mind.

You could, at this step, also consider borrowing core mechanics from other games, or inventing new ones, but be aware that if you do, then the system you design is likely to feel less well-integrated into the game than it might otherwise; it will feel like a unique subsystem rather than just another part of the core game. This could be fine, many games have subsystems for downtime or invention or crafting that feel completely disjointed from the rest of the game, and this is not necessarily a problem.

Finally, you can synthesize the these mechanics into a subsystem for your game. How exactly this will work is not particularly distinct from other ways to design mechanics, and will be fairly specific to your game. This is a little bit like asking you to draw the rest of the owl, but there is other guidance on the internet about how to do this, and the process will generally be specific to your game system. That said, I do think that an example of this process would be both illustrative of each of the steps, and help with this final one in particular.

A Worked Example: Social Skills in Ars Magica

For this example, I will be designing a mechanic for social requests, for the game Ars Magica 5th Edition. For the purposes of this example, I will describe the important parts about Ars below.

Ars Magica is a d10-based system with a universal dice mechanic. Characters roll checks with Characteristic + Ability + 1d10 vs Ease Factor for task resolution, with Characteristics being equivalent to ability modifiers of other games, Abilities being equivalent to skills in other games, and the Ease Factor being the target number for the roll. Ease Factors usually come in multiples of 3, with 6 being considered “Easy” difficulty, equivalent to a 7 in WOiN or 10 in D&D 5e. A die is called a “simple die” if it is a regular d10, or a “stress die” if it may have critical results, which I won’t explain here.

Characters in Ars Magica have a type of stat called a Personality Trait, a score that adds to relevant Personality Trait Rolls, for example a timid knight might roll Brave -2 against an Ease Factor of 12 to stand their ground against a dragon roaring at them (impossible at this score without a crit), or a thief might roll Sticky Fingers +3 against an EF of 9 when an unguarded noble with an exposed coin purse walks past, with a success forcing them to attempt to steal it. Usually, Personality Trait rolls are not called for mundane influences on a character if they are an important story character for a player, but they are used for side characters, or situations where a character is subjected to some mystical influence. Since Personality Traits can be anything, sometimes a given Personality Trait would add to some rolls but subtract from others, so whenever a roll is made common sense has to be applied to see whether or not it should be subtracted rather than added.

Additionally, characters possess Reputations, scores that advance like Abilities but where conspicuous actions take the place of XP. A reputation is linked to the group that the reputation spreads in, and once someone has a reputation with a particular group, all their conspicuous actions add to that reputation rather than creating additional reputations unless the action is directly opposed to their existing one. When encountering someone using their public identity for the first time, the Reputations are rolled and based on the distance of the connection from the target character to the group the reputation is a part of a different EF is set. If the roll meets or exceeds the EF, the target character knows about the Reputation, and the more the roll exceeds the EF, the more details they know.

To create this system for social requests, I must first define my goals for it. The system must:

• Allow characters to apply skills to move towards social goals
• Allow actions of characters to be decided by rolling dice without implying a lack of agency
• Allow characters to pressure each other into taking specific actions
• Ensure that the relationship between characters is expressed in the way they interact

Next, I think through the core mechanics that I can pull on, and what they might be used to imply.

To begin with I have Ability checks which imply that someone with skill or aptitude can succeed more often at a given task. Most of the time these rolls are about active action taken, though sometimes a GM might choose to roll them secretly to represent passive action. Opposed Ability checks also exist, and imply some competition between interests of the two parties. If a base EF that an Ability roll must beat exists in addition to beating the opponent, it might imply that the competition is not just about beating each other out, but also that some floor is required for a task, for example two jesters competing for the best joke still need to clear the bar of being funny at all.

Personality Traits imply some aspect of a character’s psyche and how they normally act, and Personality Trait rolls show that they are inclined to act in a certain way as a part of their personality. They act as a way to see how the impulses of a character might be different from their intention, but are often used to express the agency of the character above the agency of the player.

Reputation rolls are normally only made when first being introduced to a character, which implies that a character’s impression of someone else will quickly be replaced with their personal experience with the person. The way that reputations grow with actions, however, has the interesting implication that you can directly work to increase a score. The cost of each rank also increases compared to the last, showing that it requires more effort each time you want to increase your notoriety.

These few core mechanics already form a basis that we might use to build the mechanics we need.

The first goal, “allow characters to apply skills to move towards social goals,” requires that there be some action you can take after declaring a social goal, and it also requires that Ability checks be involved somehow. We can determine exactly how later.

The second goal, “allow actions of characters to be decided by the dice without implying a lack of agency,” sounds like a good fit for Personality Trait rolls to decide character actions. These mechanics won’t be supernatural in nature, so following the normal rules of Ars would mean that a player piloting a character could choose how their character would act rather than making a roll, unless it’s a side character. This also feels nice, as it respects player agency, and means that we can use whatever the mechanic looks like in the final version against player characters too.

For the third goal, “allow characters to pressure each other into taking specific actions,” an opposed check likely is appropriate. Since this seems to go against the second goal though, this means perhaps the two mechanics should be different. In the final social system, we will have one mechanic for confrontational social interactions, and another mechanic for collaborative ones.

The final goal, “ensure that the relationship between characters is expressed in the way they interact,” seems like a good application for Reputations when dealing with a community, but that leaves on the table how you might handle personal relationships. For that I think it would be good to take how Reputations are advanced, and apply it to a Personality Trait associated with the relationship between the specific people.

Taking all these together, we can start to build the specific mechanics. To start with, it seems that an opposed roll is probably sufficient to represent social conflict between characters.

The two characters will makes rolls as appropriate, the one initiating the conflict will make some kind of Ability roll as noted above, and the target will make a Personality Trait roll if the Ability involves overpowering their will, or a Perception roll with some Ability to try to discern a lie or political maneuver. These rolls are always stress rolls because pressuring someone into an action is always stressful.

Where more than one Personality Trait applies, if they would all add or all subtract from the roll, use only the Personality Trait with the greatest magnitude, but if some would add and some would subtract, sum the Personality Traits that would contribute the most negative and most positive. For example a magi initiating social conflict makes a request that the target servant assists them with loading hay bales into a cart, and the target has the Personality Traits Helpful +3, Loyal +2 and Hard-Worker -1, then Helpful would subtract from their roll, and so would Loyal, while Hard-Worker would add to it. Since Helpful and Loyal both contribute in the same direction, only the largest magnitude in that direction is applied. As a result, the final roll is made with -2 from summing Helpful +3 and Hard-Worker -1 (recall that Personality Traits may be negated as needed to ensure they apply correctly to a given roll).

Social Conflict Situational Modifiers

Bonus	Situation
+3	The target is familiar with a reputation of yours that supports your goal
-3	The target is familiar with a reputation of yours that subverts your goal
-1 to -3	The goal would substantially inconvenience the target
-6	The goal poses mild danger of injury to body or reputation of the target
-9	The goal poses severe risk of injury or death or reputational harm to the target
+1 to 3	The target is of lower social status than you
-1 to -3	The target is of higher social status than you
-3	The goal would take notable effort from the target, requiring an hour or more of effort
-6	The goal would take substantial effort from the target, requiring more than a day of effort
+1 to 3	You offer a substantial reward in exchange for the goal
+3	The goal aligns with the desires of the target

Of course, circumstances may modify how challenging it is to pressure someone into taking a particular action, and the above table includes modifiers that are applied to the roll to account for many common circumstances. Generally, modifiers are applied to the Ability roll of the character initiating social conflict, as Personality Traits have a smaller range that they generally express than Ability rolls do. GMs should feel free to invent their own modifiers at the table, using the above ones as a basic guide.

It’s also possible that some social conflict situation won’t fit perfectly with the listed Characteristics and Abilities, and in those situations the GM should use whichever ones make the most sense.

In situations where the person initiating a social Ability roll is not wanting to pressure the target into action, this opposed roll will not be appropriate. Instead the character should generate a Social Request Total.

The bonuses are similar to those for the Social Conflict Situational Modifiers table, except that modifiers for the required effort are already included in the table of Ease Factors. Once the total is generated, it is compared against the Social Request Ease Factor, and if there is a success, then the target will consider the request.

When a character considers a request, they make a Personality Trait + stress die roll against an EF of 6. If they succeed the roll, they will work on the request. If the character making the request has sacrificed goods or wealth on their behalf recently, add +1 to the roll. If they have sacrificed their health or substantial amounts of time, add +3.

For example, a player character enters a tavern and wants to learn about the local goings-on. They approach the bartender, and make a Communication + Charm roll against an EF of 6, and succeed. They also pass a coin to the bartender as a tip for service. Since the check succeeded, the bartender considers their request, and makes a Personality Trait roll of Gossip +2 against an EF of 6, adding +1 to the roll from the sacrifice of wealth on their behalf. They roll a 3, and with the +3 total it is sufficient, they share some gossip.

This already is a pretty strong foundation, allowing characters to make requests, with their Abilities allowing them to reliably ask for more and get it relative to someone with low social Abilities. To support the final goal and allow relationships to play into these social requests, one final mechanic can be added.

When a character establishes a relationship with someone, they both gain a Loyal Personality Trait focused on the other character, similar to how True Friend acts, at +1. When a character reinforces that relationship in a story or by sacrifice of a season or substantial resources, one point is accrued in that relationship, advancing the Personality Trait as an Ability. In addition, these points may be spent like Confidence Points on Social Request rolls, up to one point per level of Loyal that the target character has towards them, with each point granting +3 on the roll where it was spent.

Using Guile or Intrigue on characters that are Loyal to you is dangerous for the relationship. If you botch on a Social Request roll using one of these Abilities while targeting them, or if they succeed a Folk Ken or Intrigue roll and discover your duplicity (though Loyal characters may not always make these rolls unless the lie is obvious), their Loyal Personality Trait accrues one Betrayal Point per botch, minimum one. Other actions may also at the GM’s discretion inflict one or more Betrayal Points. If the Loyal Personality Trait has a total number of Betrayal Points that exceeds the score in the Trait, then the Personality Trait is transformed into a negative Personality Trait appropriate to the primary source of points with the same score as the original Loyal Trait had.

Each time the Loyal Personality Trait is increased, a character may perform a penance requiring a season in which they may not gain XP from any source but Exposure to remove one Betrayal Point from the Loyal Trait.

Adapting This to Other Systems

While this specific mechanic has obviously been designed specifically for Ars Magica, you could also design a similar mechanic based on the same goals for other systems.

For example in GURPS you might design a mechanic where you use influence rolls with modifiers similar to the ones listed above in the Social Conflict Situational Modifiers table, using a Quick Contest for social conflict, but for Social Requests perhaps you can only make a social request against a character who you have a relationship with that you bought using points, like a Contact, Patron, Ally, or similar, and they roll on their Frequency of Appearance modified by recent events to determine their reaction.

In other systems, you might have to invent a new core mechanic to represent the agency of characters as they respond to social requests, or you might need to simplify it in order to fit it within the core mechanics you do have. Regardless of the system, however, you can follow the same process from steps 2-4, just using the same goals.

It’s All Just Dice Anyway

One thing I’ve heard when I talk about this subject to other people, especially those in the OSR crowd, is that when you come down to it, every decision that you leave up to a mechanic in a tabletop roleplaying game like this could fundamentally be decided by a single dice roll. You could, after all, simply figure out the probability of a success for any game mechanic and just roll a d% under that probability and the outcomes of all your rolls would remain the same, within 1% margin of error, which isn’t really relevant for a table game. Since this is true, why would any choice of dice mechanic matter if they are all equivalent to just rolling a single d%?

What I think this idea ignores is the different opportunities that the more complex game mechanic gives you for interpreting the results based on which parts of a mechanic succeed or fail. In the simplistic d% approach you get a basic pass/fail, but with a more advanced mechanic it may guide you towards specific ways that the situation would unfold. Is there a difference between you stumbling through a speech and being eloquent but it falling on deaf ears? If so, there’s little way to tell with such a simplistic approach, you have to simply fill in the details yourself.

You could also say that it’s up to how you choose to interpret rolls that imparts any flavor to it to begin with. For example, GURPS Social Engineering mentions that a Quick Contest against someone’s Will might seem combative, but that it might be that you are choosing the right words and “picking the lock” more than “using a battering ram” of intimidation, and it’s easy enough to just make an opposed check and use the results to determine someone’s reaction. On a success the barmaid is amorous and consenting, on a failure she raises her nose at the bard and moves on.

This is a fine way to play, as proven by many games over the years. You don’t have to get wrapped up in this kind of thinking. A dice roll can simply be your window into the game world, without analyzing what they say about that world much or at all. I think that this article makes it clear that I think there is some value to thinking about these things, and I believe that it can bring more life and a richer experience to your gaming table. Nowhere is this more true than in simulationist games, where the mechanics are intended to represent the game world directly, not just the story you’re telling in it.

Conclusion

I hope that this article has been useful in demonstrating how mechanics can have an impact on our games not only in how we make decisions, but in what they say about the worlds that we inhabit through our game systems. I have found this type of thinking helpful for my own games, and it has led to me developing some of my favorite mechanics. Maybe this post will inspire you to the same, and to help your intentions for the tone and fiction of your games to shine through every dice roll at your table.