Keep your Mechanics out of my Drama!

As Churchill should have said: "Drama is too important to be left to Mechanics".

I’ve seen a common assumption in many RPG circles: if something is important to the game, it should have mechanical support. If your game is about mystery, you need mystery-solving mechanics. If it’s about relationships, you need social interaction mechanics. If a core theme is moral struggle, you need moves or tables to push those moments forward.

I think the opposite is true.

Mechanics are support. They shouldn’t be centre stage. Often, if you put mechanics directly on top of the most interesting parts of play, you smother them.

An example: in dungeon crawls, you often disarmed traps by asking questions, reasoning about the environment, and interacting with the fiction (partially this was because Thief skills sucked). 

The thief skills (did I mention they sucked?) were an exception, not the common case. Now, compare that to modern D&D, where detecting and disarming traps is usually solved with two dice rolls. The first approach was immersive and creative; the second is functional but flat.

That’s why I like systems like Vaesen, even though some people dismiss them as “nothing special.” The mechanics stay out of the way. The game doesn’t force drama out of every situation. It doesn’t demand that mysteries have codified steps or that social encounters run on dice. You can solve a full mystery entirely through roleplay and observation. And while monsters in Vaesen can often (but not always) be reasoned with, some will resist any attempt at diplomacy, keeping the game from falling into a predictable formula.

In Vaesen, the structure of play, if any, is outsourced to scenario design, and the game suggests a structure to define mysteries worth unveiling. In fact, any scenario, or module, or adventure, should have interesting things for the characters to do. It should propose mysteries and dangers and other challenges.

The same is true for Call of Cthulhu. People often say “combat isn’t meant to be the focus,” but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Monsters here can almost never be reasoned with, but there are sometimes ways to solve the problem without direct confrontation. The mechanics are there for when the player can’t actually do what the character does, and when it matters for immersion, like combat. I really don’t want my players to run around and shoot weapons or attack me with a bat. So mechanics are helpful. Even then, I use CoC’s combat rules less than 10% of the time we play, but I’m glad they’re there: simple, intuitive, consistent with the fiction, and not too abstract. Capable of giving a feeling of realism to the fictional world, without being subject to narrative considerations. The mechanics allow you to take decisions in character, not create outcomes and then ask you to narrate them.

This is why I’m not interested in mechanising drama: pacing, spotlight balance, or thematic coherence. Those are the most important parts of a roleplaying game, and they should be left to the humans the table. Churchill once said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” For me, drama is too important to be left to the mechanics.

I’m especially suspicious of heavy mechanical support for social interaction. RPGs are one of the few spaces where you can play that out organically, in character, without having to reduce it to a roll plus modifiers. I don’t want to roll 2d6+Cool to find out if my character is charming and then retrofit a justification. I want to see if I can be charming in the moment, in the voice and mask of my character. Of course, I do think we need mechanics to model the non-roleplay part of the social interaction, like physical appearance, tone, and delivery of the character, but I do not want a roll to create an argument that convinces the culprit to confess to the crime.

That said, I do think social resolution mechanics can play an important role when players don’t feel comfortable speaking in character, or when they want their character to be more eloquent, charming, or intimidating than they themselves could manage. And like almost every rule, there are exceptions. I dislike most “social combat” mechanics, but I still love Swords of the Serpentine. As I’ve said before, Swords is a bit of a mess, but it’s a beautiful mess, and its approach to social conflict is part of what makes it sing (or laugh... mostly laugh).

But just how horrible would a mystery RPG be if you had a Solve Mystery move: you roll 2d6+Deduction, and depending on the result you can narrate a successful or non-successful investigation. 

Original RPG mechanics were designed to replace what the player can’t do for their character, not what they can. The rest can happen between people. 

Drama can be caused by occurrences in the fictional world mediated by dice. In fact, that is one of the important functions of mechanics: the failed Stealth roll that alerts the guards, for instance. But not because mechanics  impose that “drama” must be injected in the narrative, with the predictability of a cliffhanger before ads in a tv series. Because the dice dictates that something in the fictional world went not how we wanted it to go. The difference is crucial. Because only in one of the two cases do the choices of the character really matter.

Dice can shape the fictional world, but only people should shape the drama.