Moving pegs on a player mat like Scythe / Engine building for tabletop RPG?

[OgreBattleFight]

The Scythe board game has player mats that have actions that start off covered by wooden pegs, and then the actions uncover 'em making your actions more efficient. There's various tutorials of how it works out there.



It's straightforward engine building, you want to plot out your actions so the first one makes your next action produce more or cheaper to do. It just feels real good to move a peg from one area to make an action produce more, to another area to make an action cheaper cost, gets that monkey neuron firing.

I'm pondering two ways for this to apply to tabletop RPG's

A) Player Character Sheet: Character abilities get more efficient as they advance/level up. Most straightforward, but if it's happening outside of battle then the peg moving is just a gimmick that's less efficient than typing writing or printing out a leveled up sheet.

B) Somehow done round by round for a PC: So this is closer to Scythe, but Scythe is very abstracted to be "this is your nation's industrial activities".
So moving pegs around could be plot level and represent where the PC fits in the current plot, or maybe more personal like assassin marking or a shaman channeling energy into different talismans.

Have you guys seen an RPG that has this kind of mat with pegs to represent a player character?

[deaddmwalking]

I've never seen pegs on sheets.

When playing in person, there's usually a lot of accessories around (dice, books, snacks) and especially if there were a lot of them it would be something that's likely to get in the way.

Using a physical token might be helpful if you wanted to use some kind of 'variable' mechanic where each round the character has access to a different group of attacks. For example, you could have 'stances' and each stance gave you certain benefits. If you had to cycle through them (forward or backward) you could have a circle of five, each with different attacks/special moves and some incentive to move through the cycles. Tracking where you are in the cycle might be best represented with a physical token.

From a design perspective, I think making 'unique mats' is pretty difficult, and once created there'd be very limited customization. For that reason I think it would work best with very abstract characters - where a small number of action mats could cover all character concepts. Alternatively, if everyone collected tokens in the same way (for example, by taking damage from a hit) and could use those tokens in the same way (powering up attacks - like a rage meter) I think that physically collecting and turning them in would do wonders for the 'monkey brain' and keep people engaged.

Video games like ChronoTrigger had attacks with a color; using the same color would eventually allow you to use those attacks more powerfully. I could see something like that also used with tokens. Each time you make an attack you could get a token; get 3+ like tokens and you can turn them in for a 'super'.

Finding a way to use something like this to REDUCE complexity rather than INCREASE it is vital. I can see this being used to track available options on the character sheet or gather some variable resource that is unique to each character. I don't see it as helpful in anything universal (like counting rounds, which could be used with a universal counter and applies to all characters). Dividing the play space so players would have to use tokens to represent limited options is a pretty significant decision that's going to have a lot of impacts.

[Lord Charlemagne]

I have not seen peg moving as you describe it in a TTRPG. Closest I've seen is Kaelik's elementalist & that isn't really all that similar since that is just moving things back & forth to determine what abilities you have access to currently.

I don't think a peg moving mechanic would work well for a D&D-like since it would be ergonomically demanding set-up to what would by necessity have to output ways to stab someone in a fancy way, which I'm not sure could be done in an interesting way for something you would have to do 2-5 times in a "standard" meeting.

I could see it having a place in a more wargame inspired or less D&D-like game as a way to give more ergonomic feedback. I've done some very initial outlining for a TTRPG idea where the players are Sci-fi fantasy mish-mash engineers, where each meeting the party would be presented a project to do & the goal is to do the whole process to build a big machine to solve the problem, with periodic random events being added in to cause problems &/or change the condition slightly. You could probably have a "build roadmap" for something like that where you have a bunch of charts that can connect to other charts semi-randomly & then PC's use abilities to skip over or streamline through that chart with the moving, removing, & skipping of spaces being PC abilities (along with accumulation of resources & etc).
(The idea never got past a very initial & basic outline since the idea would require a lot of upfront time & work to make happen to deliver the rough & nearly definitely still broken draft of an Aerobiz TTRPG, which I feel would not have a lot of actually interested players).

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Blades in the Dark, I think? I haven't played it in a few years but I recall the PC group having similar tracking mechanics. But like you said, since it was outside of combat it was mostly a gimmick in order to improve your gang. You could have probably replaced it with... normal bonuses.

[OgreBattleFight]

Thanks these comments were fruitful.

What I'm seeking boils down to having actions not be self contained ("I move" "I attack the guy") but have some synergy or penalty to what you do next turn.

* Action A buffs/debuffs Action B in following turns
* Something depleting/increasing affect an action or othre resource (Taking HP damage-> Go berserk, casting water magic strengthens grass, etc.)
* Action A gathers a resource for Action B to use
* Distribute points between Action A and B's intensity (fire and ice elementalism etc.)

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I was putting together something full of witty amusing verse. But you guys don't appreciate humor. So here is the quick version.

These are bad ideas for TTRPG mechanics. You just want to play a board game for a bit and move some pretty counters around. So you should just do that and work it out of your system (both metaphorically and prospective game mechanically) I suggest Gizmos I reckon it will scratch your specific itch.

Just you know. Make sure your table is mildly level first. The counters in this one roll when mismanaged.

[Foxwarrior]

Having a light flavoring system like Kaelik's elemental siphon is pretty good for a TTRPG I think. It's nice to have some unique class mechanics that give you a little bit of extra stuff to think about beyond what the other players can see, especially in order to make your actions a little mysterious to add more surprise and less quarterbacking to the game.

It doesn't need to be complex at all tho, certainly wouldn't want it to be as complicated as one of those board games like Gizmo or Scythe; the ones from Frank's list of resource mechanics for classes that prove that multiclassing is bad, which I carefully studied and ripped from for my new multiclassing system I wrote a couple weeks ago, should be good enough.