Cleverest game mechanics in your opinion?

[Guts]

What mechanics do you think are really clever? Be it due to innovating in some way, doing things in elegant fashion or some other reason altogether.

[Foxwarrior]

Finding out that using the gadget that seems to slow down time in heat signature actually makes you go so fast you can accidentally run through windows brought me a surprising amount of joy. Other mechanical interactions in that game were also brilliant but I don't want to spoil it for you.

Contact Other Plane is an absolutely bonkers spell that can turn the campaign into minority report but with less railroading, and I'm sort of amazed that most people lack strong opinions on it other than a few "hurr durr, the players know too much" complaints here and there.

Blindia, one of the most obscure indie games on Steam, has this neat echo mechanic where you see the walls by watching the sound waves of your enemies' footsteps. Or by clapping, which can also alert the enemies.

[Guts]

Great stuff, Fox. Is Heat Signature on Steam or PS4?

I was thinking more on tabletop rpg terms, but now that you did it, I remembered a videogame mechanic that to this day continues to impress me:

Ultima 4 virtue axes. Basically the game is a normal top-down RPG with exploration and combat. The caveat is there's also a virtue system in place that measures your actions through a set of 8 virtues: Valor, Honesty, Compassion, etc. so it puts a twist in the usual scenarios one see in this kind of game. For e.g., if you run From a fight, you lose Valor; if you don't let the enemy escape when he wants, you lose Compassion, if you lie on conversations you lose Honesty, etc. And the real condition to finish the game is getting really good in all the Virtues.

The fact this game was made in the mid 80s and to this day no other managed to implement similar mechanics is what really impresses me.

[Guts]

More:

Dark Souls: it sounds simplistic, but the fact that upon death you lose all your souls and go back to the last bonfire - while all enemies come back to life - makes for a huge impact on the players psyche. "I'm full of souls. Do I keep going or go back all the way to the last bonfire? Hmm I think I'll keep g.. hey this enemy is tough.. fuck fuck fuck".

Dogs in the Vineyard conflict resolution. If I had to pick just one mechanic this would probably be it. A single resolution that applies to any sort of conflict (social, athletical, martial, etc) with a built-in concept of escalation that brings forth the game's central theme of "How far do you go for what is right?". So, you failed to persuade the little girl to tell you where his father's hideout is. Will you escalate it to physical? Are you ready to brutalize a child to save this community?

[virgil]

Older, better designed systems people should look at for the idea of a mechanic where a single check is made for an entire conflict.
[*]Children of Fire
[*]Amber

[Guts]

Amber

Interesting. I find Amber chargen mechanic (the auction) indeed genius for bringing on the competition that's central to the stories. But then the actual resolution mechanic always felt like a bummer, relying excessively on GM fiat/mother may I. Are you praising the chargen or the actual in-game resolution?

One more:

Pendragon virtue traits. Great way to map personality/ideology traits on a game, specially in relation to it's fictional source. I don't know if it was the first to do it, but it surely was clever. BTW, I'm playing Masks a New Generation right now and it's Labels seem like a modern take on the concept.

[K]

I've always been impressed by the way that Final Fantasy games make the Blue Mage hunt for his spells. When I was playing FFXI, I could tell you the story how I got each of the over 100 spells.

Sure, some of those stories are "I went to the Windhurst noobie zone and let bees hit me until they used it." That being said, some are truly epic tests of endurance and patience, and even though I haven't played in years, I can still tell you every single story of every single spell. Some of those stories involve friends I made, enemies I made, times where I pushed my limits, times where I cleverly exploited a mechanic or a situation, and failures of an epic and humiliating nature.

Since I left FFXI, new updates have added more spells, and I actually pine to go back to the game just to add to my collection of stories.

[Ancient History]

Circles in Earthdawn. One of the major difficulties that faced any Dungeons & Dragons setting was how to handle a blatantly artificial concept like "levels" and incorporate it into the world itself. Even Terry Pratchett struggled with it in the early Discworld novels before quietly dropping it.

But Earthdawn nailed it, essentially: you make the levels an in-setting, in-character concept, equivalent to initiation grades in Shadowrun...except applied to everybody.

[Guts]

But Earthdawn nailed it, essentially: you make the levels an in-setting, in-character concept, equivalent to initiation grades in Shadowrun...except applied to everybody.

Sounds very interesting! Can you tell more about it?

[Ancient History]

We did. But, the short version:

Earthdawn was a legit effort to rationalize a lot of the tropes of D&D. You live in a monster-haunted wilderness because you just survived the magical apocalypse. You have dungeons to raid because some communities did not survive the magical apocalypse. There are classes, but these are called Disciplines, and their abilities (Talents) are unlocked by being initiated into higher Circles - mimicking the effect of levels but in a context that works in-setting. And the Circles thing extends entirely to spells too.

[Guts]

We did. But, the short version:

Earthdawn was a legit effort to rationalize a lot of the tropes of D&D. You live in a monster-haunted wilderness because you just survived the magical apocalypse. You have dungeons to raid because some communities did not survive the magical apocalypse. There are classes, but these are called Disciplines, and their abilities (Talents) are unlocked by being initiated into higher Circles - mimicking the effect of levels but in a context that works in-setting. And the Circles thing extends entirely to spells too.

This is amazing. Thanks for bringing it up. I'll read the link later.

Children of Fire

I missed this. How does this work?

[Nath]

Flashback in Hellywood.

The players can summon flashbacks when they want. For instance, as the GM describes the two cops guarding the police station, a player can say "the one on the left, I served with him during the war." The gamemaster and the player can then play a very short scene (so as to introduce the left guy's name and so on) ; or, when the team wants to break into a casino, "I know the layout, I visited the place a while ago...".

Each PC can have one flashback per adventure. Some traits may grant additional flashback (Femme fatale for instance, grants one additional flashback that must be related to a past love affair).

Obviously, it requires some level of cooperation between the players and the gamemaster, so as to not undully minimize the effect of a flashback ("oh, sure, he still resents you for fleeing during the battle" or "Yes, it used to be an exit, now it's a locker") and end the flashback quickly enough. But the result story-wise can be amazing (I remember a situation where a player who had not yet used his flashback as we were facing the bad guy in a final showdown, did so for no specific gain, just to say "You still don't remember the last time we meet, don't you?").

[Pixels]

"You still don't remember the last time we meet, don't you?"

It was Tuesday?

[Harshax]

The Juicer mechanics in the Savage World's edition of RIFTS implements the premise that lifespan for chemically induced superheroism leads to an early grave. You WILL die if you pick that option and it is baked in.

The Doom mechanics of the Conan RPG. As you watch MC's pool of fuck-you tokens accumulate, you see mechanically that the climax of the evening will be to your peril.

[MGuy]

With Guts gone I think it's safe to post in this.


I think that monster Hunter has an interesting play loop where you gain power by beating larger creatures and taking their parts which enable you to then hunt larger danger beasts. I think this provides a very natural feeling sense of progression than levels. Especially if your ability set advances depending on what you extract. It provides you with several, easily understandable interactions in world. The beasts aren't easy to take down alone so you want a group because even if you get set up and find them unsuspecting they can still kill you.

[Iduno]

It's a board game, but Lords of Vegas has enough flavor and cleverness that it can hide the fact that it's mostly a different type of Monopoly. It's a very fun game for being kind of bad.

You're building casinos. Everyone starts with 2 parking lots in randomly-determined squares on the board, with an amount of starting money intended to balance out how good the spots are (very little starting money with better properties), and better properties cost more to build. Better is mostly a function of the starting die number of the casino, and whether or not it is on the strip (mainstreet of the casino portion of Las Vegas). You pay the money to build a casino on one of your parking lots, by adding one of your dice with the number shown on the square, and adding a colored square ring around it. Adjacent properties of the same color are part of the same casino, and whoever has the highest die owns that casino, and gets points for the size of the casino. As scores increase, you need more points at one time to score (at least 2 squares in the casino, then 3, etc.). Cross streets break up the available properties into different sized blocks, most of which are large enough to support multiple mid-sized casinos, until someone wants to take over the whole thing.

Each turn, everyone draws a card, gets that property as a parking lot, everyone gets 1 million for each parking lot, and then everyone who has as casino the same color as the card gets paid $1 million x the number on their die. There are 9 of each color, and 6 colors, plus 4 "The Strip" cards which pay out to any casino touching the strip instead of a particular color, so you can guess your odds of any color paying out, and the game ends by paying out the strip one last time 3/4 the way through the deck. But in general, you make less money but any points at all by picking a casino instead of a parking lot.

Your actual turn is mildly tactical with you choosing which properties to build, which color to make them, and if you want to pay to reroll all of the dice in a casino. The last one is the normal way to take over a casino from someone else. You can also repaint a casino you own to make it a different color to change your odds of getting points (8 greens have come out of the deck, and only 1 gold, so...), or to change how many dice you have in the casino so you can more easily take control. You can also trade or gamble whatever you want pretty much whenever.

The game mechanics themselves are 100% luck. You get spots randomly, colors come up randomly, and you roll dice. The players can influence it through trading to better consolidate their power and figuring out odds, but no plan is so good it can overcome luck.

It very much feels like a casino-themed game, has rules for gambling (roll 2d6, these numbers pay the player, others pay the casino the player chose to gamble against), and encourages deals and cutthroat behavior. It's very much theme first, and have the mechanics match the theme. It's not even very good, but it's very enjoyable.

Contrasted against the similarly-named Lords of Waterdeep, which is a somewhat more complex game of competitive solitaire, but the theme is from "we call the white cubes clerics and black cubes thieves, which seems to be a D&D way to assign colors." You could re-theme it to be about recipes with 4 different ingredients (starches/grains, dairy, meat, vegetables) with players being competing chefs, and it would take you about 5 minutes to rewrite everything to fit the new theme.

[shinimasu]

I've just recently discovered an obscenely expensive board game called Kingdom Death that does something neat with it's monster encounters.

Rather than have a dedicated GM, the monster your civilization hunts is controlled by the AI deck, a randomly selected pool of moves the monster uses on its turn. Monster Controller is passed from player to player who pulls the next move from the top of the AI deck and enacts whatever the resulting card instructs.

So for example the card starts by saying who the monster targets (closest threat in range, closest survivor, random survivor, closest knocked down survivor etc) and what happens if there are no valid targets (usually a basic action).
Then it outlines what the monster does, how hard the attack hits, how accurate the attack is, etc. And then usually if there's an extra effect on damage.

Harder monsters have "smarter" AI decks involving who they target or where they target. For example standing in a monster's blind spot gives you better odds of hitting, but higher level monsters will have AI moves that target anyone standing in the blind spot and they're usually pretty punishing.

It's a cool method of automating a process that usually needs a dedicated player to manage. Instead of a GM, you just pull from the deck. The AI deck also serves as the monster's health bar, as you do damage you knock cards out of the pool. Part of the strategy of the fight is manipulating the deck and trying to knock out nastier moves and keep in some of the less punishing ones.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The AI deck is also the monsters HP. Used moves go in the AI discard (to be shuffled back in when the deck is empty), and when the monster is hurt, cards are removed from the top of the AI deck. So as the fight goes on, you get a better and better sense of what the enemy is going to do next.

I think the Dark Souls boardgame also has an AI deck which you can memorize the order of for advantage.

[Thaluikhain]

I think the Blackstone Fortress game GW has works something like that, or at least can if nobody plays the monsters. Was going to get that at some point, probably.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The Drain spellcasting mechanic in Shadowrun. It's such a simple setup that completely changes the way mages play in Shadowrun versus every other game. I'm seriously surprised no other major game uses it or even tries to use it, even hardcore OSR-style games that pride themselves on being hardcore.

[Ignimortis]

The Drain spellcasting mechanic in Shadowrun. It's such a simple setup that completely changes the way mages play in Shadowrun versus every other game. I'm seriously surprised no other major game uses it or even tries to use it, even hardcore OSR-style games that pride themselves on being hardcore.

It's hard to actually make both meaningful and fun. If you cannot avoid some drain at all, i.e. if the drain values are high enough for Drain Resist to be insufficient, or if there's an arbitrary "you cannot reduce drain lower than X by drain resist", then it means that a mage has a very limited potential, coterminous with their own survival. You can get four, maybe six spells off before it becomes a risk of just falling over unconscious.

On the other hand, if the present SR conditions of "you can have enough Drain Resist to soak anything that's not a Force 7+ spell at chargen", then actually working around Drain is pretty easy.

Maybe deleting stuff like reagents (use the spell at Force 1, set the limit by reagents instead) would help.

[phlapjackage]

Maybe deleting stuff like reagents (use the spell at Force 1, set the limit by reagents instead) would help.

A better option is don't use the clusterfuck that is SR5 and limits in the first place, and just use SR4 instead.

[Ignimortis]

Maybe deleting stuff like reagents (use the spell at Force 1, set the limit by reagents instead) would help.

A better option is don't use the clusterfuck that is SR5 and limits in the first place, and just use SR4 instead.

While I like 4e a lot more in most places, my group went with 5e for the improved Chummer and other factors (like being "current" at the moment and some people being somewhat familiar with the rules). I feel like backporting stuff I like from 5e (ban on narrow autofire, more lethal handguns, interrupt actions, some qualities) to 4e would take less time than the other way around, but it is what it is.

[pragma]

Maybe deleting stuff like reagents (use the spell at Force 1, set the limit by reagents instead) would help.

A better option is don't use the clusterfuck that is SR5 and limits in the first place, and just use SR4 instead.

I have never seen a mage take more than one box of drain from spellcasting in any of SR3, SR4 or SR5. My players didn't use particularly fancy footwork like reagents, they just starting with maxed drain stats and cast spells judiciously. I've always wished that the developers had hit a little better sweet spot with drain to ensure that casting spells had some consequence.

[virgil]

Being judicious with spells isn't a consequence?