favorite mechanics

Sometimes whether or not I like a game has mostly to do with a particular mechanic. Sometimes it's not that influential, but I just love it.

Like, Deadlands. I didn't like the playing cards thing, but you know what I loved? Fate chips. I made a 3E D&D set of rules for those, which I loved. I have tried to port it to nearly everything, because I just love how it works. I like the feeling of having this finite consumable resource which is a player-level resource and interacts with player-level mechanics like die rolls.

5E's Advantage/Disadvantage system; I really love how simple it is. Yeah, it loses a lot of granularity, but it plays fast and it's easy to use.

 

I love 5e's inspiration - being able to give someone advantage for roleplaying well or solving a puzzle or doing something cool strikes me as a great way to get people more invested in what is going on and make them want to experiment.

 

The implementation isn't perfect, but I'm quite fond of what Anima: Beyond Fantasy's initiative system is trying to do.

Basically it goes like this:
At the start of the round, everyone rolls initiative with a modifier depending on their weapon (or lack thereof). So someone with a dagger has a significantly higher bonus than someone with a giant two handed sword. And then you go through everyone's turn in that order, but the flow of combat isn't static: If you attack someone and miss, they generally have a chance to use their turn to instantly counterattack you. At any point in the process, if someone lands a hit on you you're forced 'on the defensive' and can't take further actions. And if I'm remembering correctly, you can do things like counter someone's first attack and hit them, forcing them on the defensive and preventing them from making their next two attacks, etc. It creates a much more dynamic, back and forth flow to combat than in many other RPGs I've played, which is why I'm fond of the idea. Plus, it helps to make different weapons actually feel different from each other, which is something I find a lot of games lack in. It's a bit more complicated than I've explained here (for example, if you beat someone's init by 150 you gain Surprise over them and get some pretty big bonuses, there are special rules for huge monsters that can't be forced on the defensive easily, etc), but that's the gist of it.

On the downsides, having to stop and roll initiative again at the start of every round makes things take longer. And if you are unlucky enough (or have both low initiative and low defense, which is rather unwise) it's possible to lose multiple turns in a row to being forced on the defense.

 

In my D&D game, Jesse's character, who is a Spoiled Rich Brat and went to Fantasy Eton, attempted to be polite and introduce himself to what turned out to be a demilich. As the party were fleeing he yelled "THAT'S QUITE ALL RIGHT WE'LL JUST SEE OURSELVES OUT THEN".

Sadly, he already had inspiration, or I would totally have awarded it. (And the person who announced "I have a bad idea!" and attempted to tee off on the demilich skull with the magical staff the body had been holding when they got there got inspiration on the grounds of "that was an AWESOME bad idea".)

 

Okay, several years ago, Mr. Rage and I wrote an RPG called MURDER: The Drakengard RPG. Which was largely taking the piss out of Drakengard, but had some fun ideas (and could also be good for games like Dynasty Warriors).

The mechanic I am most proud of was that distance was measured by how many dudes you had to murder to get there. Combat was dice pools (murder pools), and each successful die was one murdered dude.

 

That is just such a beautiful distance unit. Like, I thought the Chinese were awesome with a unit of distance as "time it takes to move an army", so roads could have different lengths in each direction, but this is possibly even cooler.