If you get squicked out by kinda-disgusting descriptions of anatomy, maybe skip this one. Speaking as someone who fits in that category, why did I write this?
“Mechanics are the bones of a game.” That’s a thing I say a lot. It’s pithy, and short, and kinda communicative. Enough for a quick remark that people can nod along to and move on. But it’s grown in my head to a whole perspective on how to build games, to the point where I think it’s doing it a disservice to not present the whole grisly image. Which is what this will be!
A game in motion, being played by people, is like an animal. It has ways it moves and wants to move, things it wants to go and do, as a product of the pitch and inner workings of the game and people playing it. Maybe it wants to go frolic down to the lake and sip up some of that delicious water of tragic-vengeance-quests-ending-in-a-hollow-victory, or it wants to munch on the higher-altitude leaves of the tree of killing-god-as-an-analogy-for-coming-out-as-trans. That’s great! We love to see a strange new beast taste of the fruits of this world and learn of good end evil.
As designers, we aren’t pet owners, or caretakers, of this creature we seek to gift life. We aren’t even gengineering it, really. We’re building it. We splay out a bunch of diagrams of bones and muscles and “how the fuck do lungs work” onto a table, draft up some plans, and spend the rest of the time frequently panicking and redrawing the plans when we realize that the poor thing needs to vastly increase its oxygen intake or it simply won’t survive.
I say mechanics are bones because the big thing they do is define and support the shape of the creature. Can you make something with very few bones at all? Sure, we’ve all oohed and ahed at Lasers and Feelings, and if we consider its one mechanic to be like a backbone, it can be a pretty nice snake-worm-thing. I love snake-worm-things! But if they try to grow out, or up, or too big, that one thing isn’t going to support all the meat it wants to have. Unless it has other strong supports, it’s gonna collapse. There’s only so intricate a game of Lasers and Feelings can get, and it’s not trying to be intricate.
Suppose you want it to be more than a snake-worm-thing. You wanna give it a lump. Okay, fine, a limb, something useful, whatever. If you don’t extend any bones into its new fork-tendril, it’s kinda gonna struggle and flop there, and be limited in how it can move. It needs strong musculature to compensate, which, I’ll get to that in the analogy a bit later. So, you go, “okay, I want some space politics intrigue in my Lasers and Feelings, and I want it to work with the mechanics, let’s figure something out for that!” And you make a little faction sheet each with their own laser-to-feeling ratio and maybe a little token economy they spend on influencing the PCs to do things, and hey presto! The snake has an arm now, and it can finally fulfill its lifelong dream of punching a rock.
Unfortunately, the players don’t really care about punching rocks. Or, the space politics. So they just don’t interact with that, except for when the mechanics absolutely force them to. Whoops.
So now there’s no meat on that bone! It kinda just dangles there, while the snake-worm-thing slithers about like it would normally, and occasionally its bone-protrusion bangs into a passing rock and hurts it a bit. The thing’s worse off than if the bone wasn’t even there, and, realistically, for a game as simple as that, sooner or later the players are gonna talk and agree to just snip that part off.
See, when a designer’s done with their mad biology and maniacal cackling and “I’ll show those fools at the institute”-ing, the end result isn’t a fully living creature. It’s just a game. Like I said, a game in play is a creature. ‘Cause the players, and the specific dynamics they’ve got, bring another important component a designer can’t make all on their lonesome: muscles.
(Yeah, I said it. No game designers are swole. Not a one.)
A muscle is a way for the creature to move. It’s a way it wants to move. Specifically, it’s a way the players contributing the muscle want the game to move. They all want it to move somehow, since a game that’s still is a game that isn’t doing anything, and if the players wanted to sit around not doing anything, they could just do that in a room or discord call or some such, put on some music, hang out, and call that a day. And honestly? That’d be pretty nice! If you just wanna do that, go for it! We’ll be here grumbling and swearing vengeance against whatever part of the rpg space we imagine to be the foolish academics who cannot comprehend our brilliant but dangerously amoral designs.
But if the players do want a game, they want a game that moves. They want Lasers and Feelings to slither about through the grassy plains. And maybe they want the space-intrigue-arm to reach out and punch rocks! Or maybe they don’t want that at all. If they don’t want it, like I said, they don’t bring the meat to the bone. The arm hangs limp, and does nothing beyond get in the way when it moves.
But what if they do want it, and the bones aren’t there? That is, what would happen if they’re playing Lasers and Feelings normally, with no modified skeletal structure, but wanna focus on space intrigue? Well, bones indicate to players where the muscle might want to go, but players are gonna do what players do. They’re gonna push out a lump-arm, bones or no.
This can work! Kinda. Octopuses have tentacles and elephants have trunks that are supported all by musculature, and don’t need any bones. And there are always microbones – established tone, the frustratingly-unreliable “what would make sense to happen here”, even as simple as the play-by-post etiquette of “player one posts, then player two, then repeat”, all of these are mechanics! Freeform roleplay is not truly ruleless, even if the rules are often left to emerge from community norms. But those aren’t enough to support a whole arm unless the muscles are carrying a lot of the work, like a tentacle. The players have to really go “wow, let’s examine a lot of the power struggles between these space factions and dedicate our focus and thought to that” to grow the snake an arm with no bones in it.
Now, the fact is, the simplest answer to the players who would play Lasers and Feelings and Space Politics and not care about the space politics is “hey, what are you doing, literally just go play Lasers and Feelings“. And it’s important to note that, a lot of the time, that won’t need to be said, the players will do that on their own! Mechanical literacy in players can vary quite a bit, so it’s not something you can always consistently rely on, but mechanics are a way of signalling “this is a thing that is Important to the game”, and players will usually pick up on that enough to go “hmm, this intricate flower-arranging minigame with hooks into every other mode of play doesn’t exactly fit what I want out of Doom Tabletop, I’ll try something else”. (This hypothetical player has terrible taste, and I want to make Doom Tabletop Featuring Flower Arranging now exclusively to spite them, but, so it goes!)
As an aside – this is the core of my dissatisfaction with a lot of the OSR design ethos. (With the disclaimer that this is my understanding of what the OSR design ethos is, and I know that’s somewhat of a contested topic.) In short, the idea is that combat and health-attrition have the most hard mechanics, with other interactions favoring a “rulings over rules” prioritization of making the GM do all the actual design work and arbitration. The thing is, combat is implicitly to be avoided – it’s generally punishing, and pretty much always viewed as a punishment for failing to figure out a way to bypass the combat. Which is fine in its own right, but it means, if the players actually do play “correctly”, it’s a big ol’ ribcage floating in the open air that contains nothing! It’s the snake’s fleshless arm banging into rocks again. The upshot is that either it’s a mechanic you’re never supposed to interact with, or the game is supposed to be set up where the players can never actually do it “right”, and then they get tossed through the ribcage of you-fucked-up in a way they couldn’t avoid, so what’s the point.
Right, grumble over.
Designers are, like I said, beast-builders. Bodybuilders? Wait, but I already said none of them are swole… whatever! The point I want to emphasize is what I didn’t say – that they’re skeletoncrafters. That that’s all they are. ‘Cause it’s not! We do make skeletons, make mechanics, and slot them together, and hoo boy do we grumble and yell at each other about them, and go “ooh, that bone shape is real neat, I gotta remember that one”, but a game is more than just a jumble of mechanics. And a thing to remember about muscles, however insistent the players may be about what they want – muscles need blood to get to them to work. If they don’t have that, they can’t move.
The veins of the creature are its tone. Which, you may note, is a thing designers totally set up! When you write your paragraphs about the Vampire Queens and how the scars of their Profane Right have afflicted the stars to this day, such that every PC has a constellation in their eyes that shall eat their heart in a year and a day, yeah, that’s setting things up for what people expect! People are gonna aim for broody vibes, maybe some angst about impending mortality, probably some edginess, and then if they find out the actual mechanics are about courting your princess of choice for the upcoming ball, well, that might not be where they expected those veins to go. (But, that’s a matter of how you present the prose! You could totally lean into the angle of a temporary romance between those poisoned by the blood rites of the past, and then the tone would be communicated a fair bit more. It’s all in the presentation!)
Except, that’s a lie. It’s only some in the presentation. The rest is in the potluck – the handful of veins the players brought to the table, to stick into the creature as it is being made. They bring the muscles and you bring the bones, but both of you give the veins. Which is why the communication is so important! If you say “broody vampire game”, but don’t tell the specifics of what the point and focus is, well, they’ve got their own ideas of what broody vampires are like, and that’s gonna affect what veins they bring. You can’t control it, either. The one who reads a lot of Blade comics might bring a lot of veins to push towards the cool combat and gratuitous violence wing, and when they find out later that the game doesn’t have a combat wing, it doesn’t have any wings, it can’t even fly, well, that’s a thing to catch before they’ve gotten themselves worked up about the veins they plucked fresh this morning to bring to the potluck.
But hey, even with that example, you can present the whole schtick, and players will still have their own bits of tone to bring! Maybe their thoughts of romance trend light-hearted-adventure-swoop-them-off-their-feet-y, and the impending mortality of the player characters gets sidelined. Or maybe the players really wanna play up the angst, and how their courtship is inherently temporary! Maybe the cutthroat intrigue between the Vampire Princesses sounds most compelling, or maybe they just want a nice moment for all of them to share before half of them die. The beast template you provide them will nudge in directions, to be sure, but it won’t control which ones they take, which veins they bring to the table.
And it shouldn’t! You don’t know the tastes of every group of players who will pick up your game. They might like parts of it you consider only ancillary, and not care about the things you’d say are the point above all else. But if what you’ve got works for them, and with their tones, and their muscles, they can make it live, and set it loose to run and frolic and live, and that’s a beautiful thing.
It’s sometimes hard to remember, when measuring bones down to the millimeter and debating which vein shape will transport our brilliant new hemolymph cocktail and shaking our fist at the ingrates who dared to mock our grand vision, that what we’re making is gonna be out there, eating fruits and basking in sunlight, but we can’t be the ones to bring it all the way there. It’s the contribution of players that makes it live. And that can be a beautiful thing! But, among other things, it’s an important design constraint. If the shell of a beast you make can’t align with what players will think they need to bring to it, the best it can do is limp along. If a bone is jutting through a muscle, or the veins lead out to nothing at all and the blood spills on the ground, that poor beast will suffer, and won’t truly get to live.
And you wouldn’t be showing those fools at the institute that way, now would you?
(Postscript: oh no, I might actually want to make that vampire game. It sounds neat. This is the danger of giving examples, folks!)
Ru's Roleplay Rants 