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#DesignTalk number five! This time, an opinion that not everyone might agree with. But I think it makes better games. System is setting.
What does 'system is setting' mean? All mechanics contribute to the experience of gameplay. Setting is implied by the system, and if implied setting does not match narrative setting, you get disjointed experience. You can't play LoTR in 5E and you can't play Harry Potter in 1E.
(Side note: You can play LoTR in 5E with Adventures in Middle-Earth, if you have a copy. But AiME makes systemic changes to make this possible. Which goes to my point; system is setting, and in order to make the setting work with LoTR, it was necessary to adapt the system.)
This is something that @DyingStylishly knows very well and talked about while designing Dungeon Bitches, on KS now. She designed mechanics of the game not just to create the desired gameplay experience, but to reinforce themes and tell a story about the world at the same time.
So back to system is setting. All systems create an implied setting with what they put in the book, even if they don't have a specific setting. Some of this is place names and monsters and so on, some of it is mechanics.
This was commonly seen in 3E, where people would use the demographics and magic shop tables from the DMG to create the setting of their world.
Another common example is when people try to play Star Wars in whatever system they like, often 5E currently, and it doesn't work at first. You can't just add mechanics and make the system Star Wars; you need to remove mechanics too.
For Jedi to make sense and tell the same stories that they tell in SW, you can't just have space monks with laser swords. You need traditional spellcasting to not exist, you need armor and weapons to work differently, and you need the Dark Side to be a thing.
This is in part why generic systems almost always lead to kitchen-sink fantasy worlds. Again, something that we saw a lot of in 3E. As book after book was released and more and more options crowded their way into the world...
whatever setting you started with became less distinct over time as it just continued to be the same kitchen sink as every other setting that had all these same elements in it.
5E was originally designed as a modular generic core where you'd add only what you needed for a given campaign, and you can still see an echo of this in the DMG in the section where it just has ~100 pages of optional rules.
That would be a very flexible system, where you could just have your core resolution mechanics as reliable and then add in what you needed bit by bit.
But even then, something as generic as a core resolution mechanic of roll d20 + mods vs DC still implies things about the setting. . It doesn't work for professionals doing professional tasks; a character with +5 vs a DC 10 (Routine) task has a 25% chance of failure!
But a roofer, even a 1st level one, does not have a 25% failure rate per roof or per shingle.
The d20 is designed to create that failure chance to generate interesting gameplay in the aspects that D&D focuses on, high-tension moments, and is not well-suited for reliable tasks in low-tension moments (see previous DesignTalk about variance for more on the d20).
So we can see that even a mechanic as simple and generic as the d20 + mods vs TN still contributes to the implied setting and expectations of what the characters will be doing. Any mechanic that is generic enough to work for every possible setting is too generic to be interesting
Similarly, we can see the same kind of thing in a healing system; imagine a system where all characters are healed to full after every encouunter, all resources recovered, everything is perfect.
It would be impossible in this system to tell the story of a group of rag-tag adventurers getting beaten down over time but refusing to give in, because they're always at full resources! The system influences and guides the kind of stories that the gameplay can tell.
This is part of why I feel it is so important, when creating a system and making mechanical design choices, that you consider these important core questions.
What kind of setting is implied by this mechanic? What kind of stories does this mechanic enable? What kind of stories does this mechanic make more difficult or impossible?
System is setting, and it's important and valuable to ensure that your system supports and enables the kind of stories that are core to your setting.
Prevous DesignTalks if you missed them! The first one is here. https://twitter.com/aryxymaraki/status/1348358652814626822
And the second one is here. https://twitter.com/aryxymaraki/status/1348731472962875397
And the third one is here. https://twitter.com/aryxymaraki/status/1349864470525435904
And the fourth one is here. https://twitter.com/aryxymaraki/status/1352314811703504900
