Tell me an example of a brilliant game mechanic

Or you can get the FFG reskin called Rex: Final Days of an Empire.

My mistakes, I've only read of and not played. I just found that particular tidbit to be interestingly weird.

The "One Roll Engine" die mechanic is quite elegant and easy-to-use while maintaining a surprising amount of nuance and detail.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Roll_Engine

PTU's handling of movelists. 6 makes it so you'll be able to contribute to almost any situation, and helps a lot of the weaker mons out. The limit of 3 TM/tutored moves means a lot of the high tiered mons from the vidya are held back enough to not just run over everything. Additionally getting moves outside of levelup costs tutor points, which you'll also be using on increasing mobility, skills, and any trainer things that teach moves or abilities, so just gunning straight for the big moves isn't a snap decision.

Marvel Heroic's Total-and-Effect dice pool mechanic means that a low-power character who plays smart is usually as good--or even better--than a Godlike bruiser. The GM's "Doom Pool" is also a brilliant way to have a constant reminder of the stakes that it represents, and the way it interacts with villains' plans is clever as hell.

FFG's Star Wars has what I like to refer to as "slot initiative," which I use in virtually every RPG I play now.
Everyone rolls for initiative as you normally would. But: you're not rolling for your spot in the initiative count. You're rolling for a spot in initiative that can be used by anybody on your team. It's dynamic, lets the 'slower' characters go first when it's convenient or cool, and it's very fast. Plus it means that the PCs and enemies can both come up with interesting combos and interactions in combat.

I really like how FATE's aspect system a) allows for fluff to influence crunch without having to argue over specific mechanical effects and b) makes more nuanced characters important because characters without flaws can't use their strengths as much.

Same. It saves a shit ton of time by not having to look up minor rules, and it's consistent.

13th Age's Escalation Die. Every turn after the first one you get a cummulative +1 to attack rolls. It makes combat not turn into a grind and it also unlocks powerful abilities for some classes.

I really like Legendary Resistance on monsters in 5e.
>If so-and-so fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead.
It's limited to a number of times per day, usually, but I just really like the cleanness of it and how effectively it prevents would-be easy solutions from being pulled off without fudging dice or breaking rules.

I think legendary resistance is a good idea given the baggage that 5e has to deal with, but it's really just a patch over some ill-fitting sacred cow game mechanics that nobody's had the heart to fix.

It's like, why would you hand players all these instant-win buttons if they're not supposed to be used in common situations when they're needed most? The solution during game-design is to have a clear idea of how fights are supposed to go, and consciously design around that instead of just putting out random powers and releasing hotfixes over them.

How does the Doom Pool work? How does it interact with villain plans?

I really like how Raiders of Fate rolls work. When you read it, it might sound complicated, but works easily in game.

There are two dice, faces numbered 1 to 6, preferrably of different colours. One is the Die of Law, the other is the Die of Chaos. When your character does anything that requires a roll, you Gamble with Fate.

Tell the GM wht you're attempting to do and he'll assign a difficulty to it, without telling you. He'll write it down on a piece of paper before you roll.

Your basic number is you attribute modifier. You roll the two dice, add what you rolled in the Die of Law and SUBTRACT what you rolled on the Die of Chaos.

After you roll and have the final number you got, the GM will reveal the difficulty he had assigned to the task. If your number's equal or above, you succeed; below, you fail. If your number is three or more over the difficulty, the result is Glory (critical success); if three or more under, it's Disaster (critical failure). In both cases, it's up to the GM to describe your spectacular success or failure.

The evens up risus mechanic.

It takes the simplist rpg ever made and makes it even simpler by having you could the evens and not the pips.

This means the target numbers are more like 6 and not 30.

And if you roll equal to or greater than 6 your dice explode.

It's just really nice.

That only works if you're building a limited system, which is exactly what D&D tries not to be. Having a single interpretation of how fights are supposed to go doesn't really work for a game designed to allow different play styles to come together.

Any particular incarnation?

I like the way Strike! does it but I'm not him so.

Eh

I would argue that it's a decent compromise. PCs still get awesome powers like Finger of Death, because nothing says WIZARD like killing someone like that, and the GM doesn't have to worry about having to set up the important encounters to specifically counter those abilities. At the same time, those abilities remain usable, they just won't negate the encounter completely on round one just because of a bad roll.

Yes, certainly.

The bfg leadership/special orders mechanics are awesome. Most space combat systems focus on hardware, which in fiction is the first thing they handwave. Instead, bfg centers attention on captain and crew, where it belongs. It also helps scale the number of ships in a battle. The leadership rules encourage you to squadron up and use your special orders more carefully. Big battles don't take that much more time or effort than little ones, and even a duel with a cruiser and some escorts on each side can be tactically complex and interesting.

For GURPS, the SSR table. 1-1.5-2-3-5-7-10 is just 10^(1/6) rounded, but once you have that progression you can scale nearly anything in the game and have things just work. It's marvellous how something so simple can be so elegant and cover so many situations so accurately.

Finally, robo Rally's locked register system. Very clever way to make damage meaningful but manageable.

Drain, from Shadowrun. 4e, primarily, since that's what I'm most familiar with. I feel it adequately evokes the dangers of high-level magic. You can spam Force 2 Flamethrowers to singe and distract your enemies all damn day if you want, or you can overcharge your Forceball and eradicate a whole squad while you bleed your brains out through your eyeballs.

To bad It's easily abused, you very quickly get to the point where drain has very little risk.

Eh. Min-maxers are cancer in any system. Shadowrun hardly has a monopoly on people learning to abuse the rules.

The whole combat system from Riddle of Steel and its successor games like Song of Swords and Sword & Scoundrel.

Why does the GM need to hide it? I don't see what this adds other than being some sort of protection against him changing the difficulty after you roll, which if you trust your GM shouldn't matter.

It can be added to by villains using their actions in a scene to further their plot or destructively grandstand. The GM can spend dice from it to empower a villain's abilities or cause a few different sorts of things to happen in a scene that the players have to contend with. But, if the pool gets two d12s in it the GM can spend them to end the scene however they like--the villain wins the battle (though the players can have input on the terms of it and get bonus XP for a scene ending this way).

First session I ever ran ended with three of my friends playing Spider Man, Daredevil, and an ice-controlling guy we'd all designed together; versus Doc Ock, Sandman, and the Vulture who were attacking some armored trucks moving things from a super-science tech firm. From the start of the session my friends thought they were being clever in a few ways (like converting Physical damage to Emotional and Mental representing mounting exhaustion as they avoided attacks, stacking on top of some gained by dealing with their messy social lives), but this actually empowered the villains who were able to use the stress dice against them to split them up and accelerate how things were getting out of hand. And to cap it off, the PCs were also having some rotten luck with dice rolls the whole game.

As things came to a climax (and to stop the fight from going on *too* long) I used two d12 to end the scene: Doc Ock managed to rupture the emitter/nozzle of the new guy's ice gun, the briefly uncontrollable beam catching the blades of an observing news chopper. Quickly the three heroes worked together to stop the crash and save a dozen people who would have been caught in the carnage of it all, but at the cost of the three Sinister Six members getting away with the world's most advanced quantum supercomputer.

Roleplaying J. Jonah Jameson ranting about this scene, to open up the next session, was possibly the most fun I've ever had GMing.

The escalation system from Dogs in the Vineyard and others.
lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/260

There's a second example of escalation mentioned somewhere, to the tune of "I would like to climb a wall" where the first attempt is a casual attempt, and even a maximum, critical failure is not going to result in serious harm. A scraped leg perhaps. A second attempt that fails (because you're escalating by trying to climb harder and climbing higher, or doing so with more risk) may cause a sprained/broken ankle. Etc.
It's an explicit way for the GM and players to be on the same page as far as far as "how much do I want to be hurt?" is considered. There's nothing worse than telling the GM you do something, and he thinks you meant a more serious attempt which injures you worse than you intended.

>Roleplaying J. Jonah Jameson ranting about this scene, to open up the next session, was possibly the most fun I've ever had GMing.

You are a cool guy who knows how to GM.

>Finger of Death
Fun fact: It's not a save-or-die anymore. It just does a boatload of damage, con save for half, and a humanoid creature killed by it rises as a permanently-controlled zombie. Before you get excited now, it's just a regular MM humanoid zombie.

To my understanding, while a handful of save-or-lose/no-save-just-lose spells linger around (hold person, sleep, otto's irresistible dance), there aren't any save-or-dies to speak of in the newest edition.

I'd like to add how 13th Age handles feats to this. Instead of having a giant chapter dedicated to feats they're all tied to your class features. It saves a lot of time and it lays out your options cleanly.

I like to pair it with Fate's stress and damage mechanics, myself.

Right, it doesn't change anything mechanically; but it creates some tension in the players about the results and keeps the "gambling" atmosphere.

If you're one of my guys I want you to know that flattery's not gonna work on me.
I am open to some bribery, though.

AEDU

I really, really don't like the system on a whole, but there's a few mechanics from 13th Age that I really think are neat.

One is the Escalation Die as this guy mentioned. I also like the idea of the "One Unique Thing" each PC character has. It's more fluff than anything, since it's not allowed to effect anything mechanical, but it can be a good tool to help give a character more personality.

I also like the idea of Icons and relationships with these Icons. Icons essentially being important NPCs or even deities, and a PC lists either a positive, conflicted, or negative relationship with a handful of them. I think it's an interesting replacement for alignment and helps give the PC some connection to the world.

Tenra's Aiki/Kiai.

Not one of your guys, just an user who loves the idea of J. Jonah Jameson ranting about the PCs losing a quantum computer.

The Marvel Heroic rules sound neat, too, I will check out the book.

What other factions are there? I'm assuming the standard Atreides and Harkonnen for sure, but do they have the Ixians or the Tleilaxu?

> GURPS SSR table
Is that in the core rules? Where can I find this to read for myself?

You have 6 groups.

Atriedes, Harkonen, Fremen, House Corrino, the Guild, and the Bene Gesserit. AFAIK, the Ixians and the Tlielaxu don't even get mentioned. Maybe offhandedly in one of the treachery cards, but that would be it.

Core rules, in the basic set. It's the Size/Speed/Range table.

GURPS spaceships also uses it heavily: for every size class, you scale length etc up according to the table, along with ST, HP, and armor values. Surface area like domes and hatches are 1-2-5-10 (length squared, skip every other number in the progression). Tonnage and volume got up by length cubed (every third number on the chart: 1-3-10). With Bio Tech, you can use it for hard sci fi genetic engineered creatures scaled up/down. All just moving along the chart rather than doing a lot of calculations.

Meanwhile, it's great for its intended purpose: bonuses and penalties for size, speed, and/or range. It scales up and down quite nicely.

D&D 4e's monster creation rules and encounter budgets. I've never had a more DM friendly system.

Wjat exactly is good about the encounter budget? Never played any dnd, but every budget system I've seen has been lackluster.

The freeform magic system of Mage the Ascension and Mage the Awakening. The fact that its so flexible and powerful while also leaving char gen trivially easy is great both as a player and DM.

Would this mechanic work in other games well? How cumbersome is it, if at all? Is it good enough to bother adding to a different game? I'm really curious about it.

Seems like it would end encounters faster. The more rounds, the greater the bonus.
>cumbersome
It's just tracking how many rounds of combat have occurred. Tick up a d10, d20, whatever.

I don't know about adding this to d100/percentile or dicepool systems, mind. d20 seems where it is intended to work.

This thread makes me happy.

I really like how FATE uses flaws, rewarding players as they are used instead of it being a single reward during chargen. Completely sidesteps any potential for players loading up on minor negatives for points.

I really like how Cypher System handles enemies. Everything you need to know about an enemy or NPC can be garnered from what level you assign them. For example, a level 5 enemy has a difficulty of 15 (this is the DC to hit or avoid being hit, as well as being their initiative count), has base 15 HP (adjust as necessary), and can move either short or long distance with their attack. They do 5 damage. You can give them other abilities and it still runs off the same set of numbers: 5 damage and 15 to resist. It makes encounter generation a breeze

Unknown Armies for mechanics of fear and insanity.
Barbarians of Lemuria for a simple and open magic system and epic heroes.

Tge parts system in nechronia - HP is for suckers, you only die when you get ripped apart and unable to do anything, and even then you're not dead dead, assuming its not a party wipe you can get patched up again.

Really sells the idea of being an undying abomination

I've never had players pick anything resembling a proper flaw though. It seems like "well-rounded" characters are just not well liked.

Z-Moves were a mistake so was sun & moon

I like the negative traits in GURPS but then again it makes every character a sexist, alcoholic, homicidal maniac because the player wants as many points to powergame as possible.

I really like exploding dice in any game system that has them. It really adds a fun wow factor when it happens. I've seen games with imploding dice as well. I don't really like those that much.

To be fair there's sort of a hand-in-hand pairing of '4e monster design expects you to use the budget, and vice versa' that helps it run smoothly. In 4e, you just have a total experience budget, along with straight transfers for going to elite (~double strength) and solos (~5 times power), along with going for minion swarms instead. I put the ~ in because some player builds could lockdown elites and solos early in the game's lifespan and trivialize encounters. Later monster design remedied that with save bonuses, extra turns, or other things to preserve action economy.

But basically it was a very smooth system that yielded consistent results. I once sat down with the group at the start of a session and had a sudden internal panic because I'd totally forgotten to punch up the encounter for the night. 20 minutes later I had something ready to go and I'd done this on the sly why the players were talking and debating with NPCs.

I really don't give a crap about Z-moves, megaevolutions, or the like, but Sun and Moon was the most fun I've had with a pokemon game since silver and gold.

Hate to break it to you, but even late-generation solos are SO easy to fucking trivialize with debuffs.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the "plot map"/transmission system for GMing TechNoir.
When you run the game you generate the core connections driving the plot off of tables based on the city where it takes place, and improvise connections between them. As players hit up their contacts their own relationships to the mystery get generated. It's all a very sharp way to procedural generate cyberpunk intrigues. It sets it well apart from other systems.

The Push dice/Tag mechanic is also pretty nice and makes sure that the characters get properly embroiled in gritty noir hallmarks: when the protagonists start asserting themselves into the mystery they are getting themselves in over their head.

Forgot a picture. Here's part of the explanation of how it works.

I have a serious nerdboner over the roll and keep system.

I also have a similar over the WoD dots for character creation for reasons I don't know.

Needless to say, I was all over Dungeons: The Dragoning when that came out and used both.

That's fair and I'll believe it. I'd gotten out of habit of using Solos early on and never went back, so that was my reading from the newer ones in later books. I never got a group past mid-paragon either so I didn't have much experience with the big crazy solos.

My usual way of ramping up encounters on players was to have difficult encounters be a regular/easy encounters worth of budget on the table, and then either X turns in, or after a key guy was killed, the actual heavies would appear. Manner didn't matter, I've done everything from 'killing that cultist completes the blood ritual and now demons' to 'SURPRISE SORRY TO BE LATE I AM H4N-S AND HE IS F-R4N-S AND WE ARE HERE TO ROBO FUCK YOU UP'

>'SURPRISE SORRY TO BE LATE I AM H4N-S AND HE IS F-R4N-S AND WE ARE HERE TO ROBO FUCK YOU UP'
if there's a storytime backing this up I wouldn't mind hearing it
because that sounds pretty funny

user who asked here. My main gripe is that they dont account for what state the party is in when the encounter happens, nor do they account for where/how the encounter takes place. Beyond that, all the ones ive ever dealt with just use the party's level to base off of, not considering their actual options or utility.

But that does help me understand what you meant. Basically an exp budget with monsters being worth a base exp and modifying/scaling up from there.

Overall they are better than megas (from design and balance perspective). Power scales off the base move and it eats that oh-so-important item slot. Works as a concept since we already have basically every mon able to use/learn hyper beam and the like, these are just typed and have wierd effects for some species.

Christ, 4e's monster design is so good. Monsters are one of six roles, and can also be minion, elite or solo. It just...makes sense.

>Yes, the spacing guild wins at the end if nobody else does, and the Bene Gesserit have their predict-a-win
So... if the Bene Gesserit manage to do it right, they can declare their insta-win to be "at the end of the game, Spacers", and actually pull it off?

Deadzone's Battle Cards. Situational advantages, but you get a choice of two with each card, so that if you've got a, say, +1 Shoot and +1 Melee, and you're running no models with ranged attacks, you can use the Melee half instead.

I wasn't so keen on the "required to use one or discard one at the end of the round" aspect.

I am considering making a similar mechanic for a game I'm running. I cant decide how to go about it though. The game is WHFRPG, and as magic items are very, very rare, I don't want to be giving them out like candy, but all the players have expressed an interest in getting their grubby paws on some dope gear and I don't want to "no fun" them.

The GURPS 3d6 probability curve.

I'm not sure if that really qualifies as a mechanic but by the same token I adore Traveller's 2d6.

Traveller's Career Path system, my god. I've never even played an actual session, I'm not sure I even really know the rules, but every few weeks I'll just sit down and make a few characters while catching up on podcasts. It's a game in itself! Or like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book!

I do fucking love a bell curve instead of a single die. I don't play GURPS but I do like the system.

I wish more systems had something like it. But so many people I've told about don't like the idea of not being in total control of your character. And I get it, sometimes I have something perfectly in mind, but it's still cool to let the dice shape who you are. You don't control where fate takes you in the games you play, and sometimes it's fun to let fate steer your character before the first session even starts.

Gm needs to guard these carefully. If they're enforced, players are more cautious.

Personally I limit psychological/ behavioral disadvantages to avoid this.

Or they take a Siamese twin, pile all the disads on him, and then immediately go into surgery to get him removed.

Sounds good. The surgery costs, and you have to buy off every negative you want to remove.

> 3d6
Hero System/Champions also does this.

I think there might be a market for RPGs that are more about character creation in itself than actually playing them. I would go so far as to say that it is the definitive feature of D&D 3.PF and the key to its longevity.

I feel like an outlier for preferring straight d20 type systems with a flatter probability distribution. As much as 3d6 systems give a nice bell curve that more closely mimics real probability curves, I find it makes bonuses wind up having a massive effect if you can stack them at all and few systems are able to limit then effectively without GM fiat.

D20 has its place. In the system my group is running we use dice pools for skills (since its better for showing developed prowess) and d20 for accuracy checks and other things that are random but arent influenced by skills.

>I feel like an outlier for preferring straight d20 type systems with a flatter probability distribution.

You shouldn't. That's what most roleplayers prefer, especially because it's much easier to calculate your chances and to otherwise work with flat distribution.

I like Android: Netrunner for a lot of different reasons, the main one of which is probably the idea of actions themselves being limited with the "ticks" system. It's simply not possible to get into a feedback loop where the player can refresh their resources and keep granting themselves additional chaining actions.

I also adore the asymmetric gameplay

I like Numenera's "player always roll".
PC is attacking? Player roll to attack.
PC is being attacked? Player roll to defend.

Keeps the player engaged instead of wandering off when it is the DM turn to attack with 10 goblins, passively waiting the DM say "you're hit for X".

GURPS Ring Dream's 'fan points' was a quick and easy way to get non participating players in a match involved in the match by allocating points they could use towards giving bonuses to the wrestlers.

It simulated the 'power of the fans' and second wind that wrestlers often get when they get cheered/booed as each fan point spent could either 1) recover stamina, 2) give a bonus to move success (great when trying to use your finishing move) or 3) Kick out of a pinfall automatically.

How does it work in terms of involving the non-participating players? Do they roll to cheer loud enough or is there some kind of decision involved?