GenCon panels have argued about it for years: What’s more important, a game’s setting, or its mechanics?
The purpose of asking obviously isn’t to solve the problem once and for all, because as with all aesthetic investigations, there can’t really be a right answer. But because there’s absolutely value in the discussion, I put it to you, Gameplaywright readers, your question for the weekend’s commentary:
I believe in the best type of strong-setting games, the distinction is false. The setting is the fiction that you produce, and the mechanics are how you produced it. It’s a bit like saying “What’s more important, our sensory impressions, or the purportedly real objects that cause them?”
That’s answer asks a lot of questions, to me, Nick.
What about the places where setting and mechanics don’t jibe? In D&D, the mechanics make it essentially impossible for a character to be killed by a single arrow from a bow. Does that mean that in the world of D&D, no one has ever been slain by a single arrow to the heart? Or that arrows never strike people in the heart? Do people go through life knowing they’re minions or not?
If the setting isn’t a literal interpretation of the mechanics, then the seam between the two must be measurable, right? They don’t truly overlap altogether do they?
What about anything but the “best type” of strong-setting games? Is synergy or seamlessness between setting and mechanics what makes a game fall into your best and most favored category? What about games that don’t qualify for the “best type of strong-setting game” — would you be more likely to, say, try one for setting or mechanics?
I’m being a little pedantic here, sure, for the sake of getting some discussion going.
Which one is more important, the car or the driver? Even better, an iPad or Microsoft Word?
I would choose 42 myself. 😉
Mechanics, sadly.
Exalted 2nd Ed is ruined for me because I hate the mechanics, even though I love the setting. As is ArM5.
You can tag any setting onto a good mechanic and have a good game. Pairing a great setting with a poor system usually ruins the game.
Well, it’s like this….
In general, I’ll initially consider a game based on its setting (which includes the look-and-feel and all that), but the mechanics determine if I’ll actually play the game. Well, mostly. If I’m *really* interested in a setting, I’ll deal with an average mechanical set, though I’ll probably not get into a game with cool mechanics if I really can’t get into the setting.
I’m going to echo Nick. It’s the point of fusion between setting and system that’s the most important, because a disconnect between the two can damage the “promise” of what the setting is supposed to be about and so forth. But more constructively, actively supporting the important stuff in your setting with system is how you can give a feeling of weight, of importance, of tangibility, to that stuff. But in this, system may need to serve the setting, or setting may need to serve the system, depending on which part of it is unable (or unwilling) to budget to meet the other.
Experience is more important than explanation.
I don’t care how things work, I just want to have fun doing them.
To echo a few people I have a good example of how the mesh between setting and mechanics is where it’s at.
The Doctor Who game by Cubicle 7 has an initiative mechanic that reinforces the feel of the show/setting. Initiative order happens in this order; saying something, doing something, moving somewhere and finally fighting. What this encourages is talking your way out of a fight, or if that fails then doing something to avoid the fight like hiding, or if that doesn’t work then you run, and finally you can shoot. The show pushes the premise that there are better ways to conflict than hitting someone. The game mechanics do the same thing.
Setting is (part of) the promise the game makes to it’s players.
System is how it delivers on that promise.
For my money, implementation is far more important than planning.
I think the mechanics should be very tightly bound to the setting (including ancillary considerations such as the intended tone of the game). If you can slip so much as a postcard between them, you’ve missed an opportunity to improve the game.
Setting is what attracts me to read/own the game.
System is what attracts me to run or play in the game.
One beautiful example of this would be Alpha Omega. It has one of the most compelling stories and presentation I could imagine. It honestly inspires me in a great number of ways. Most of the systems and mechanics in it mean that, while it was worth owning and reading, I will never play in a game as written. I respect the company, but the crunch present means I am actively avoiding playing in a game of it.
The ideal game should have a compelling setting and mechanics which interface directly with that setting to reinforce it mechanically. It is that interface which I find the key and it is something I often find lacking in some of the generics.
I would say that more than 3/4 of the games I’ve played in have been our own custom settings. For games I’ve GM’d, probably 3 of the last 5 campaigns were home-built. We’re a group that likes building our own settings, so the mechanics are more important to us.
If I am using a pre-built setting, I care very much about how well the mechanics support that world without outright ignoring rules or twisting them into a pretzel. So a game built around setting makes the rules even more important to get right. Double that if we’re talking a setting that exists outside of gaming (e.g. games based on movies, tv, or novels). I should be able to take a scene from the source material and figure out a few reasonable ways it could be described mechanically.
As a GM, I can ignore the rules and/or build scenarios where they aren’t relevant, but as if I’m required to do that too often, I’ll search for another system instead. For example, a peeve of mine is playtest games that are explicitly designed to ignore rules, because that means the rules aren’t being tested properly.
For a setting-less game, the rules are going to imply how actual games play out. For example, D&D has always avoided realism because it assumes a heroic setting. I’d also argue that a complex, detail-oriented game like D&D creates a stronger ‘meta-setting’ than a more rules-light game might. Without a lot of rework, you can’t really get away from the D&D gold economy, for example.
I’m sympathetic to the people who talk about fusion. Mechanics are bound to inform the underlying truth of the setting, so if there’s a disconnect there then the stage is set for disappointment. You can have a supposedly grim and gritty setting, but if the mechanics don’t reflect that, there will be dissonance there. So it seems that mechanics can, to a certain extent, trump setting.
But after reflection, it seems to me that setting is king. You can have the perfect marriage of mechanics and setting but if your setting isn’t that interesting nobody will care. Players will endure clunky rulesets (or invent their own, or kitbash others) to play in the settings they love: Star Wars, Star Trek, Conan’s Hyboria, and Middle-earth are obvious examples.
I guess that’s why those licenses command the big bucks.
Mechanics, Mechanics, Mechanics. The reason is simple; I can not run a setting as cannon with my players. This includes settings that allow them to grab their awesome by the short hairs and drag the rest of the world along for the ride. They buck and resists, look for loop holes and generally give me grief, so I have given up on fighting them on it.
I find it more useful to have a good mechanic that facilitates a genre and if a setting is present, one that inspires me to greater creativity. Now, that is not to say I have not bought (will continue to buy books) with settings I like and will most likely never play, but I need mechanics more than setting.
Setting sells the game. Even if the mechanics stink, a great setting can still make the game book an entertaining read, and people can and will create house rules or adapt mechanisms from other games in order to play.
Setting. New, community-driven roleplaying efforts are always setting driven, and you can swap out systems in a setting without disruption, while doing it the other way around is more onerous. Anybody can play Star Trek or Twilight or their own thing without special initiation into systems beyond “third person past tense perspective, no godmoding.”
I think tabletop roleplayers are finding refuge in systems in direct proportion to their hobby’s drift from larger cultural relevancy.
To somewhat paraphrase Nick and Jason’s posts:
Setting is who, what, when and where.
Mechanics are how.
Setting without mechanics is just fiction. Mechanics without setting is abstract action – ‘tests’ with no significance beyond themselves.
To put it another way, the former provides the context in which the latter is situated – allowing the significance of players’ moment-by-moment decisions/actions to be determined.
Further to the above, I would add:
Role-playing is why.
Role-playing provides motive by requiring players to engage with the setting as characters in order to drive action within a game. Some of these actions require mechanics in order to resolve/realise certain situations/outcomes.
Of course, in order to be an instance of role-playing, both setting and mechanics have to be present to some degree.
Given the above, however, I think its right to talk about the synergy between these things being what matters.
Mechanics are procedures, settings are contexts. In a given system, either one can be the ‘horse’ or the ‘cart’. The best systems, IMO, are ones where both work towards a common purpose.
The Doctor Who example Victor mentioned illustrates this well. Here the mechanic helps to reinforce the nature of action within the setting – e.g. what resources are required, what order/priority they have, what preconditions must exist to carry them out, the chances of success and consequences of failure.
Asking which takes precedence is like asking which is more important – the events that led you to the present moment, or the opportunities for action that you have as a result?
Hmmm. There’ve been an awful lot of “it depends” answers, as well as “false dichotomy” answers. I will agree with those, but play along with the premise: setting trumps mechanics. While there are certainly mechanics that are better suited to one roleplaying style or another, I can nonetheless envision a setting that can survive changes in mechanics without losing a narrative thread, which to me implies that setting is superior in importance. While the players may notice a change in mechanics, the impact on characters may be less pronounced. Further, the impact on players would be far more substantial if they were asked to reevaluate their character based on changes in the setting as opposed in simply reevaluating how they are describing their strength score numerically in rtesponse to a mechanics change. I would imagine that in roleplaying at least the character interaction trumps the mechanical means of conflict resolution.
If this question is about *roleplaying* games, then the answer is unequivocal. Setting. Nobody gets excited by mechanics. Nobody says “let’s play this!” because of mechanics (although they’re liable to say “let’s not” because of them, or “let’s play it with a different system”). Setting is more useful than mechanics in informing the play group how the game is supposed to work, and what events and actions “make sense” in the shared fiction. I’d say that makes it an RPG’s primary resolution mechanic.
For the record, were I to fall off the fence I now find myself precariously straddling, I’d definitely land on the setting side.
I helped run a LARP group way back when (holy crap, nearly a decade ago). Every coupla years, when we felt we needed a fresh start, no one mourned the loss of the mechanics – they missed the world we built together, and the possibilities it presented them with.
The significance is in the setting, and ultimately that’s what you take away.
What do you mean by “more important”?
Do you mean “When a setting and a mechanic conflict, which wins?”
Do you mean “What’s more important in selling a game to a potential player?”
Do you mean “What’s more important in encouraging people to play the game?”
Do you mean “What’s more important in getting players to enjoy playing (and come back for more)?”
As long as everyone’s answering a different question, how can we have a discussion?
Or maybe that’s exactly your point, fiendish Tidball.
Yes indeed! As many of you have pointed out, when posed in such simple terms, this is a question that’s more or less impossible to answer. Which, indeed, is why I like it as a question for fomenting general discussion. It’s about a general wodge of issues that are critical to roleplaying, but doesn’t artificially limit the scope of discussion. There’s been an awful lot of insight in this thread, so far, that I don’t think would have come up with a more narrow version of the question posed.