Negative Mechanics

in #gaming5 years ago

One of the things that I do for my own games and for the freelance work that I haven't been talking much about here is that I work on game mechanics pretty frequently, and one of the things that gets overlooked in games is the concept of negative mechanics.

A lot of designers see the notion of perfect mechanics being a sort of transcendent thing that will always make a game better. For much of my game design career, I've been pretty much in love with adding more and more mechanics to games, because I'm a game designer and I like complicated games.

However, I've been taking a different approach to games and complexity recently based on my reflections.

I predominantly design for tabletop roleplaying games, which means that my games are meant to be played by human players who are using dice and rulebooks, and the concept of negative mechanics is important here.

A negative mechanic is one which actively detracts from the play experience. When you encounter such a mechanic, it is frustrating, irritating, and gets in the way of play.

The best example I can think of in tabletop roleplaying games is the matrix in Shadowrun. It's clunky, obtrusive, and while it's a really cool setting element it just tends to suck in gameplay; I had the most fun with it either in separate sessions (welcome to requiring an insane amount of commitment and one-on-one sessions), or in simply abstracting all of the game's scripted mechanics out of the gameplay. As a designer, it's one of the most head-scratching elements of the game, especially given that the trend seems to have been to expand on the matrix as the game's ruleset expands.

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Image courtesy of mysticsartsdesign on Pixabay

What makes Shadowrun's matrix a negative mechanic?

The fundamental definition of a negative mechanic is that it creates a negative experience for players, and this can happen in a variety of ways. Shadowrun manages to do this in pretty much every way possible.

  • It slows down the storytelling aspect of play.
  • It requires a character to have a specialized role that can massively detract from their general capabilities.
  • It requires a player to memorize a whole new set of rules, which may use a similar base mechanic but has new key terms.
  • It leaves a lot of players out of the loop for a large portion of the game time.

Storytelling Speedbumps

I think that something can be said for Shadowrun's matrix system being a font of engaging storytelling; I've read more than a few Shadowrun novels and some of the most interesting, comical, and surreal moments occur in the matrix. However, it's also a place that tends to be an extra layer for storytellers to consider.

The result is one of three things:

Possibility 1: Double Improv

The storyteller is laying down track right ahead of the players as they progress, and now the paths have forked.

This method is incredibly dangerous and I particularly hate it. I'm largely an improvisational storyteller when I make games, but the counterpart to this is that you're just doing more than you should at a time and having to keep track of extra content.

Possibility 2: Gated Content

Another thing that can happen is that you wind up with story content that exists only in the matrix. This is not a giant issue most of the time, but the problem is that if anything happens the GM is down a lot of preparation.

This tends to lead the GM into either railroading or recycling elements, the latter of which can be okay if done well (and probably not terrible even if not done in an ideal manner), but the former of which can cause serious problems. For the uninitiated, this is when the storyteller intentionally forces a plot to go one way or another.

In video games, you see this when a false choice is presented to the player character and the same result always happens (or, worse, the player chooses an option and the character ignores them).

Possibility 3: Kill Three Goblins

What I like to call the "Kill Three Goblins" style is when a GM or storyteller throws in a fight or challenge just to pad out a session's run-time and give people a chance to have a mechanical spotlight.

I'm guilty of this a lot (as my players who recently extinguished a burning farmstead after defeating a bunch of bandits in D&D may or may not have realized), despite the fact that it's one of my most railed-against storytelling methods.

The problem with this is that it's spectacle-based storytelling, and as the name implies it may backfire. It leads you to race conditions where you need to adapt to and try to exceed the players' mechanical prowess to keep up the difficulty and pad out sessions, and it's really prone to leading you into meaningless interludes.

Painful Specialization

Painful specialization occurs when a player is stuck doing one particular thing in a game and it doesn't match up with what matters in the larger context of the game.

One of the games that I think actually handles this magnificently is EA's Syndicate shooter reboot, which was otherwise pretty well maligned.


Gameplay courtesy of Gamer Max Channel

In the moving rail shooter sections of the game, you get the ability to use all of a character's abilities at once, and you're not punished for choosing one over another (e.g. shooting over hacking).

In Shadowrun, the hacker may typically also get other benefits (they tend to use drones), but both of these systems are cumbersome (sometimes improved by some editions, often exacerbated by unique elements of each). Also, they require a lot of investment into financial resources at character creation to master, which makes them either a permanent sacrifice or a very difficult approach to master depending on the player's approach.

In addition, being in the matrix or using a drone actively provides penalties to any other actions the character may take, in the former case literally making them a sitting duck in the space that the rest of the characters occupy.

Compare this to a magician, who may gain the ability to astrally project and cast themselves out of their body, creating much the same situation, but who also gains a bunch of useful tools in "meatspace" by using spells and a bunch of magical techniques.

The hacker doesn't necessarily gain benefits, and while later editions attempted to shoehorn this in it only made more difficult rules to remember, and a lot of the new hacking opportunities were difficult or suboptimal (though one could argue that this was a small sacrifice for gaining an otherwise unique ability, I'm not wholly convinced).

Rules Overload

You essentially have three facets to player skill:

  • Execution, which is dependent on a player's ability to do whichever task is required (e.g. moving a mouse to aim)
  • Minimum Proficiency, which is the amount of rules a player must know to actually play
  • Maximum Mastery, which is the extent to which a player can know more rules to have tactical approaches to play

In a tabletop roleplaying game, the execution part is pretty much nil; the player must be able to communicate what they want their player to do (this is non-trivial, but usually other players can help out a novice who has not mastered the process yet, and it is not dependent on any particularly rare or highly varied trait like reflexes or abstract spacial reasoning).

The minimum proficiency is where negative mechanics tend to come into play. If you have too much required knowledge for players to do anything, they aren't going to be able to play the game, and this is where the matrix in Shadowrun falls apart.

The problem is that a player needs to be familiar with (and possibly even memorize) a large section of a rulebook that nobody else at the table will know. Tabletop roleplaying games are expensive in minimum proficiency where they are cheap on execution, so a player is likely going to suffer if they don't have even a basic knowledge of rules (as opposed to something like Open Legend, which has a very simple core mechanic, Shadowrun's matrix rules are a diverse branch of the ruleset).

Maximum mastery also becomes a problem for both the storyteller and a decker (matrix-user in most versions of Shadowrun). Since the game is collaboratively competitive, a player or storyteller that massively exceeds the other in skill needs to be able to accept the limitations of the other and not exploit unknown weaknesses to make the game unfair and kill the fun.

Player-Bystanders

The biggest problem with the matrix in Shadowrun is that it just puts a regular game on hold. There's no real elegant way to plan around a matrix interlude; either you simply call a break, try to manage two timelines at once, or hold the matrix session before or after the main game, and all of these cause issues.

The real problem is that what is originally a whole-group exercise in collaborative storytelling switches over to a one-on-one experience. Both are good, but having a sudden transistion between the two can be a problem.

A video game analogy to this would be a MMORPG or other game with gated skills that require a player who has mastered them in order for content to be accessed. Dungeons and Dragons Online, which I otherwise really love, falls prey to this because only two classes in the game can do rogue skills, and even trying to learn them across classes is futile because characters need a special ability to not automatically fail (and will be incapable of getting scores high enough to bypass most of the rogue skill checks).

Many side-areas in the game are locked behind rogue skill checks, and while the main content is typically still accessible the game can be very different for players who have access to rogue skills, which are typically only available to parties with a player that can do it.

Another example might be something like the Payday series, a heist-themed shooter where players choose loadout with certain gear; lacking something is usually not cause to end a run, but it does mean that a different method will need to be used.

However, while most video games (at least real-time ones) are good at splitting up player activities in general–DDO does this by giving an alternate route, and Payday does this by constantly assailing players with hordes of enemies–any turn-based system and especially one based on a human storyteller will be limited by the amount of attention the storyteller can divide to the players to keep the game rolling onward.

Now, bystanders aren't necessarily a problem if they're willing to sit still and observe the other gameplay going on, but that's a rare experience: only a particularly noteworthy narration or event will cause a player who showed up to play a game to abandon the notion that they should be playing instead of sitting by.

How to avoid negative mechanics?

So I can't really give a good example of this. Some of the freelance work I'm doing right now is forcing me to ask this question and I'm scratching my head.

The general rule is that if you're failing a lot of the four tests in the prior section, or failing even one or two of them really badly, you've probably got a mechanic that people are going to avoid.

One game that's got a really good method of evading negative mechanics is Open Legend (disclaimer: I had a very small role as a playtester and contributor to Open Legend). Now, I'm not much of a strictly "storytelling" system game fan (e.g. I'm not a huge fan of games like Fate Accelerated, though I can see them as quality games they're not my cup of tea), and Open Legend is a little crunchier than most of thsoe games, but it has very few distinct rules outside its core mechanic, and when they're there they're almost always a very small, but distinctive, twist on the standard affair.

I've come up with five maxims I'm going to use to guide my own process:

  1. Don't add any rule that won't provide value to players.
  2. Clearly mark anything that shouldn't be done during standard play.
    Obvious caution: Few activities should happen outside standard play.
  3. Keep it Simple, Stupid
  4. Every player should have a stake at all times.
    Corollary: Invoke groups as often as possible.
  5. Use existing character features when designing new rules; build up not out.

Wrapping Up

The real problem is that a negative mechanic can be really cool by itself, but flop when placed in the context of a larger game. A discrete stand-alone mechanic that seems cool (like the Elder Scrolls' and Fallouts' lockpicking mechanics, which are a good example of a discrete mechanic that I actually like) can actually turn out to be negative if it doesn't further the course of play and storytelling.

So to avoid negative mechanics, consider where an activity falls into the gameplay loop, and if it doesn't make that loop better it's probably for the best to skip it.

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The problem here is not that the Matrix is a negative mechanic in Shadowrun, but that the underlying idea/mechanics that reify threat in Shadowrun don't lend themselves to any sort of shared investment. And that is a direct result of too much mechanization, not just in Matrix experience but in the system as a whole.

I say that as someone who has played Shadowrun since first edition, with all the scars, bumps, and bruises that implies.

The Matrix/abstract computational environment is a required trope and cyberpunk literature. You can't get around not having it or talking about it and still maintain your position in creating that kind of narrative. It's got to be there. Because Shadowrun is effectively a cyberpunk pastiche, it has to have cyberspace, one way or another.

This creates a clearer narrative niche: the hacker has a place in every story because the stories are grounded in an extant genre of literature with fine examples. We, as the audience, know how the hacker is supposed to fit into stories because we have seen how they have fit in the stories in the past.

Shadowrun's problem is that the mechanics are set up so that the Matrix just has too much going on. Mages have much the same problem if they intend to astrally project and provide support spell craft – in fact, very much literally the same problem if you go by the text. The GM is handed a pile of issues and an entirely different perceptual universe for that character to interact with and deal with threats from, and expected to balance the whole narrative. It can be done, but it requires some juggling.

To do it well, you have to pace the threats being experienced by every player at the table at roughly the same time. The mechanics around the Matrix aren't all that much different from the mechanics around the guys sneaking through the hallways, and if you're doing it right they should be hitting difficulties at around the same time looking to solve the same problems.

Shadowrun doesn't help you a lot here, but very few games do. It's not a matter of specific mechanics so much as a matter of too many mechanics in general to deal with.

Consider how Wushu deals with cyberspace: since all of the exponential mechanics in the game are abstracted to the same level, and the results of failure are directly mechanized but abstracted, your hacker doesn't have to be standing in the hallway with the cybered up samurai to be engaged meaningfully and threatened meaningfully at the same time. The Threat (a mechanical representation of what needs to be overcome in the Scene to proceed) affects everyone, whether they are leaping across the hallway firing an Uzi in each hand or sitting out in the van slapping at keys and trying to break the ICE keeping them from unlocking that blast door. Successes decrease the Threat, failures decrease character Chi, and it's the same for everyone. (In fact, they can also be the awesome, near supernatural sniper perched on top of the next building and still involved in the current conflict.)

The problem is not a specific set of negative mechanics, the problem is that the system in general doesn't support a coherent narrative experience.

It's difficult to suggest a particular mechanic or subsystem or minigame "doesn't further the course of play and storytelling," because different groups and different GMs have different acceptable cognitive loads, have entirely different play styles, and want different kinds of storytelling. If you are good at and enjoy the kind of storytelling that rapidly jumps between different locations/contexts, Shadowrun's Matrix mechanics may work just fine for you. If you're not, or you don't, then they won't.

Overall, it tends to be more useful line of analysis for me to look at whether or not the mechanics as a whole are getting in the way of the play that I want to have rather than an individual mechanic. That's not to say that individual mechanics can't be bad, but it's not necessarily as clear cut.

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I actually think that the matrix in Shadowrun is amazing.

It just doesn't add to the larger game. A negative mechanic can be tremendously clever, but it just detracts from the game. A positive mechanic would be something like D&D 5e's advantage mechanic: it's a really cool way to give flavor and is super-simple to execute, so if you aren't opposed to it for some reason it's a really nice addition to a system that is pretty simple.

The problem with the matrix is that it doesn't just adapt a trope into the game, it does so in a way that makes a whole separate game within a game.

Regarding the notion of the matrix versus astral projection there's a little bit of a false correlation there; the astrally projecting magician definitely sees different things, but they're still fundamentally in meat-space. The matrix often has a connection that way (especially in installations where the matrix is embodied by a physical representation of that space), but data-runs, for instance, are going to almost always take the matrix people to an entirely isolated sphere, while a projecting mage is at least in an overlay of reality.

It's probably fair to say that some of this is a problem with Shadowrun, but it's a problem that comes from a design philosophy that is willing to accept a certain amount of fragmentation and then jumps in wholesale.

I will agree that it's possible for some groups to have a good time with Shadowrun's matrix mechanic, but it's also been something that's definitely proven to be negative more often than positive; as a game designer you want to look at the average, not the exception, and the problem is that Shadowrun doesn't have a system for the average roleplayer; it has a particularly math-heavy game.

For early Shadowrun, where there was much less user-friendliness in many ways (at least, less of an attempt at such) than in 5e, this was fine (I also think that there was some rules elegance that got lost over the years, but that's for a later date). Each character had their own nuanced elements, though deckers were almost always the most difficult in my opinion (barring really weird exotic builds).

The real issue is that you have a game that has some interesting design decisions, but which has become too clunky and bulky. A decker doesn't enjoy a separate ruleset, they use the full ruleset and then a superset (or, often as many as three supersets, since they will have cyberware and sometimes rigging), and requires the GM to do so as well. Compare this to a magician, who might also have a couple supersets (e.g. spellcasting, summoning, and projection), but will often share those duties with other characters because, unlike a decker, the other supersets don't represent a way to recover sunk costs but rather another path to excellence.

As a designer, what I'm always looking at is when there's a part of a game that reflects a problem within the philosophy or design structure. That doesn't mean that any part of the game is necessarily bad in its own right, but it could be something onerous. To use another FASA-affiliated game, the Battletech roleplaying game has life-path creation systems (and only life-path creation systems) in the Time of War reboot that my players just couldn't sort out. It's a fantastic system once you get to play, but if you don't have a lot of buy-in it just becomes a problem that players don't want to deal with.

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Oh man, I hated the matrix rules in SR 3rd edition, it's like a totaly different set of rules within an already big set of rules. And the sad part where most of the group had to wait for the decker to end his solo part. That was so bad that we never used matrix in our sessions ourself, unstead we used a npc decker to switch the rules to a pure storytelling action which was great. The players had to escort the npc and protect him while he used his matrix vodoo stuff.
That was the only solution for us to implement the matrix without ruining the flow.

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Typically I either did this or had a PC with the computers skill do a roll or two and generally glossed over the whole hardware thing. This was a little bit of a shame, but it made play go a lot faster.

I had a little more 4/5e computer stuff because of the wireless rules they introduced (maybe that was just 5e?), but most of that used a simplified system that didn't approximate decking in 3e and earlier.

It's actually a decent set of rules (if you can spare the time for it; I think someone made a roguelite out of it), and it shines in the video games when there's a solid single-player opportunity to explore the whole thing, but it just wasn't something that ever worked out in my groups.

Yep, if it's part of a video game the matrix system is great because the game does remember all of these matrix rules and if it's not a multiplayer game it's awesome to dive into the matrix but if it's within a SR 3E session it's a pain in the ass ...
I really tried to include a decker in our group but after reading the rules for hours I noticed that it's impossible to get one of my group to really understand the matrix rules. And it's hard to combine the adventures of a decker with the rest of the group because if the decker dives into the matrix the time literally freezes for the rest of the group. Having the group split into 2 groups is sometimes exhausting because you have to switch between both groups to keep them both motivated but having one decker in the matrix and the rest in the meat world is just fucked up because the meat world stops and the players will have to pause until the decker has finished his duty. That's why I never had a decker in my 3E games. 5E does a better job because of the wireless thing and I would love to test it but never had the chance to do so because my group prefers fantasy settings.

Yeah, basically.

It's a shame because the mechanics themselves are good, but the execution is flawed.

In 5e, my groups didn't try a whole lot of matrix stuff, but they did dabble a little in hacking. They generally found it to be a "side-thing", but it really required a certain amount of investment most of the characters weren't willing to make.

Yep
It would be great if a decker could do every action wireless and without that time dilatation because it kills the flow.
Hmmm if it were like the astral stuff that wpuld be great. The decker could see the defending ICE within the physical world and fight against it if he wants to manipulate a system guarded by it. That would make it easier but it would also reduce the matrix to a mere copy of the astral stuff.

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I love your five guide rule to games. I think the important one is to keep it simple and stupid. No one wants something too over complicated. If you gave a group of players you just want to play and not spend time trying to work out how to play.

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