There’s an assumption that I see in a lot of discussions by roleplayers in various places, especially in OSR-types, or people who prefer games with fewer mechanics. This assumption is that mechanics exist in opposition to the fiction, rather than in service to it.
And I think that this assumption isn’t exactly a bad one, but is more something that doesn’t have to be true, even though it is for many people.
The reason I think this assumption is so prevalent is because for a lot of people the mechanics act as a combination of an enumeration of what actions they are allowed to take, and also because people would prefer their characters to be optimized rather than be fun. This leads these mechanics to be in direct opposition to acting creatively in service to the story that’s being told.
The other day I read an excellent article at Luka’s Corner. If you haven’t read it (you should), it covers the pros and cons of skill-rich vs no-skill systems, and I think it makes good points. It got me thinking about this assumption, and got me thinking what I could say on the subject to maybe help the people who make this assumption understand my love for detailed mechanics a little more.
The fundamental difference between conventional rules-lite games and crunchier games I think (Burning Wheel and other crunchier games that focus on story rather than simulation notwithstanding) is whether they are made to enable you to tell stories that fit into the genre fiction they are built to emulate, or they are made to help you simulate characters who live in the world of that genre fiction (which need not be like reality at all).
Take the example used in Luka’s article, of the party jumping on horses to race off after escaping baddies, but in the crunchy variant not everyone in the party took any points in the Ride skill.
In a rules-lite game without skills, you simply jump on the horses, and make some kind of attribute check subject to the GM’s guidance and ride after them, immediately getting back to the storyline that fits within the confines of the genre fiction.
With skills, the genre fiction story is interrupted with a decision point and an opportunity for creativity. Does the party go after them anyway, relying on the one party member who took skill to be able to help them pass a group check? Or do they look for another way to chase after them, possibly playing to their strengths some more at the cost of losing a little ground? Maybe the party can find a carriage with a horse tied to it and the one player with Ride skill can be a drover, taking the party along, meanwhile the rest of the party is trying to disassemble the carriage while they ride it to take weight off and help the horses go faster. Maybe they find a local train that’s about to go and make a good guess at where the baddies are fleeing to and they can head them off and get there first.
But because this interrupts the fiction, it can feel like the mechanics exist in opposition to it. And I think that’s true if you don’t have players who have had what I think is the core epiphany that leads to good roleplay: you can try to do anything. If you look at your character sheet as a list of actions you can take and anything off the sheet as something you can’t do or should leave to someone else, this does become just an interruption.
And honestly I think this is what leads (some) people away from crunchy games and to rules-lite ones, never to return. Because the very emptiness of a rules-lite character sheet requires that you have the epiphany. If there’s nothing on your sheet that lists what you can do, then you either do nothing, or learn you can do anything. This brings a huge amount of freedom to the hobby, and lets you tell stories that you want without feeling like the system is holding you back.
You can bring this feeling back with you to crunchy games though, all you need is a GM who is willing to make spot rulings (and if you play solo, then you should already have one of those!). Now you can do anything, but every character is better and worse at different things.
This feeds into what I feel about my characters in the past. When I play a rules-lite game it’s entirely on me to make a unique character and be sure it’s unique in my party. If multiple people are pulling on the same genre fiction, it’d be easy to build on the same stereotypes, and the games are built in such a way that you need to pull on stereotypes in order to make characters (though not all are like this, the choice to build for a specific genre fiction and not have mechanical choices in my experience draws people to archetypes).
But when I play a crunchy game, the choices I make in character creation differentiate my character from every other character like them. I feel connected to them and what their day to day life is like a lot more than I feel with my rules-lite characters.
This is one example of the mechanics of the game, skills in this case, informing the fiction. I make different choices and feel connected with the characters because I understand what’s happening at a deeper level than genre expectations.
I think in general good mechanics are built in a way that offers up interest to the fiction. For me one of the most interesting things about any game is knowing what it’s like for the characters, knowing their moment-to-moment experience as people, understanding the things that they do and why they do them. So for me, any mechanic which pulls me closer to what the characters are doing and feeling, rather than abstracting away what they do into some high-level conceptual mechanic, is one that I will find a way to use to inform the fiction that I play out.
I think it’s OK for someone to be more interested in the flow of the fiction though, and for them I highly recommend trying out rules-lite games. I think they will fit your fancy.