Yes! Or... no? Maybe? As Matt Colville says, sometimes you need to light a fire under your PCs to get them moving. The misconception that action heroes are proactive - they're actually reactive. But perhaps we're not trying to roleplay action heroes? Though I think a lot of RPGs are geared toward exactly that.

I’ve been thinking about fear mechanics a lot, for my system. It’s currently represented mainly by the option of fleeing. Characters by default do not risk harm when they remove themselves from a situation (this rule will always be subject to adjustment to adhere to the fiction.) The setback will be to overall progress, and the twist is that the gm may have slightly exaggerated the immediate danger (there’s a system for this) to represent the characters’ perspective, so the players may have let fear get the better of them needlessly. (So this doesn’t align with real life, as fear may just as well be what starts a fight IRL, but this is a game about people who are naturally inclined to run away. I don’t want to tell people to roleplay as that, I want to present the world from the perspective of such characters, and then let the players choose how to react to that. Edit: (Due to not getting to playtest it sufficiently frequently, I keep forgetting aspects of it.) The players having a fight-type response to fear can happen in this system.) Then there’s the panic mechanic, where the players, when the characters are fleeing or performing a desperate action, may choose an extremely random roll which may hinder the opposition or the characters or fall somewhere in between.

Drive points could be a good name for HP, similar to how many groups translate HP to resolve.

Faithful roleplay from both players and GMs are the most powerful tool available to each, but there are elements of storytelling that I think are inescapably important to good collaborative roleplay. The question of "is this dramatic/interesting?" can and should enter into the calculation of gms and players both when deciding what sort of characters/situations to create, and which parts of those creations to foreground through play, when/how to end a scene or session, etc. Perhaps this sort of consideration can be rolled into an understanding of the pure form of Roleplay, but I don't know that roleplay can usefully be examined in isolation from them.

Most excellent video. Wish I'd found you sooner. <3

Thx God I found your channel. Thanks for your every video

There are a lot of good considerations to unpack and adress here, so I venture to choose a single criticism: What I think is important to note is that you make an unnecessary distinction between a confrontational and a cooperative set of rules. Of course, I know what you are hinting at with the wargame argument and you can have that kind of negative environment in your group... .. but that's independent from the rules! The designer's job is not to educate the players about how to be collegial. In fact, many many designers take this as an excuse to justify their bad rules ("learn to be good" - "Just have fun" - "there is no balance"). They don't need a rules system for that. They need rules to model a setting/game world to make informed decisions for their characters. A rule like "cover in combat" is neither confrontational nor cooperative be it with or without combat grid. And oftentimes designers leave it at that. But that's a mistake. No one can reliable gm with a rule like "cover is -2 to hit" , be it confrontationally or cooperatively. Everyone already knows what cover is but what ACTUALLY matters for the GM and players is missing: the frequency of cover, the appearance, effectiveness etc. ("how does it affect the campaign if I apply cover to ALL rolls?" for example). This is a question of big data. All that what constitutes to a functioning immersive game world to play a character in, a functioning pace and fairness - and what's the designer's job to model - is left for the GM with the simple statement like "just be nice to each other". It doesnt' cut it.

If you think D&D isn’t a roleplaying game you have never actually played D&D. It’s not your fault you just learned to play incorrectly by people who aren’t role players.

Hey, these are some bright game design ideas, indeed. One doesn't come across that very often in RPG design.

So luck mechanics. Edge in Shadowrun, Luck in Cyberpunk, Fate in Fate. What if they were something that existed in the setting, like the force out of Star Wars? This brings you out of character because the player is making meta-game decisions around the meta-economy of their meta currencies. But if it was modeling something in setting that the people living there are somewhat aware of, like "this is how magic works". Would that be an improvement? It would help verisimilitude.

Oooooh overthinking game mechanics channel? Easy sub.

Ooh, using descriptions to contextualize initiative is a fantastic idea

Hi Matt, I really enjoyed your video and the framework you've proposed for evaluating RPG mechanics. However, I think there's an interesting paradox worth exploring. While D&D mechanics might seem to fit your criteria better on the surface, I'd argue that Fate Points, despite appearing more 'meta', can actually lead to more in-character moments. In D&D, players can often default to simply rolling dice based on their character sheet numbers without deeply considering their character's personality. In contrast, Fate Points require players to actively engage with their character's aspects and justify how these traits apply to the current situation. This suggests that sometimes, mechanics that seem less intuitive or more 'meta' can paradoxically result in more immersive roleplaying. Perhaps a truly good mechanic is one that not only feels natural but also encourages players to actively consider and express their characters' unique traits and perspectives. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this apparent paradox and how it might refine or expand your framework for evaluating RPG mechanics. Thanks for sparking this thought-provoking discussion!

I’ve come to the conclusion that using a mechanic that’s built into the rules to force the players to roleplay (under penalty of negative mechanical consequences); is ultimately a poor mechanic. Role Playing, whether good or bad, is ultimately up to the player to engage in. Therefore people who want to roleplay, are going to roleplay, people who don’t want to roleplay are not going to roleplay. Trying to force it under the threat of penalties is tantamount to the Dm taking control of their character. It’s a “do this or else” approach to the situation. The DM might as well threaten the player with bodily harm if he doesn’t start roleplaying. A better solution is to create rules that facilitate and encourage roleplaying without actually forcing it. Take the Bard class from D&D, it’s a very flavorful class that encourages people to get into a character with a musical bent to him. Nothing is forcing players to actually sing at the table. But the very flavorful mechanics can cause some players to want to sing at the table. They aren’t being penalized for singing; but they aren't getting rewarded for singing either. Utilizing mechanical bonuses or penalties (like fate does for instance) doesn’t actually encourage roleplaying. Instead it encourages players to make mechanical decisions and call it roleplaying. Invoking an aspect in a scene to get that juicy reroll is always the mechanically superior choice. Same with suffering a complication; it’s ultimately better in the long run to regain fate points for your character than not. Sure your recovering alcoholic noir detective falling off the wagon may sound like roleplaying. But in actuality it’s a mechanic that needs to be used in order for that character to get fate points back, which he can then use in the course of his adventures to succeed.

My term for the GM that I finally arrived at after several years is DNA, which stands for Director (who simply directs the world around the choices of the players), Narrator (who describes the world and the story around the choices of the players), and Adjudicator (who referees the interactions between the players and the world).

Good stuff, Matt. Same page.

What do you think about effort mechanic? So you basically regain effort after resting, eating and sleeping. And you can use effort dice to overcome challenges. Encounters eqaul to your attribute pass automaticcaly and without a roll. The difficulty of an encounter can become more if other factors come to play, such distracted and so on. It can also lower if a player for example uses the environment.

I really enjoy your perspectives on game mechanics and the way you describe and illustrate those perspectives. This is despite the fact that i disagree with virtually every take you have on actual existing game mechanics that you have commented on haha. I love your emphasis on the human experience and how games should try to present things to the players in a human way, rather than a scientific one. It has really influenced the way I present and design rpg mechanics.

I actually think fate points, combined with character aspects, do a great job of helping a player make decisions from the perspective of their character. - But the key is that you need to have well written aspects that clearly define your character’s goals, temptations, and core competencies. - Once you have those in place, the game rewards the players with increased chances of success for pursuing their character goals and motivations and sticking to their core competencies…but it does so in a way that leaves you needing more fate points and it offers them to you through compels. In this way, the player is tempted the same way that the character is tempted. I think it is very elegant design that is very roleplay centric. It touches on all of your major points when it comes to game mechanics allowing the player to experience the world in a very human way. Ive personally not run into many games that do a better job than FATE at really getting players to view their characters’ flaws and troubles in a way that captures that mixture of reluctance and temptation that the characters themselves must be feeling. - Having said all that, i actually dislike FATE for other reasons. I think its good at roleplay but not good at being a game haha. Which is ironic, since i feel that you would say the opposite. But i truly believe that you are just making an active decision to try to play FATE in a way that you won’t like, because you’ve already decided you dont like FATE points. Personally, i think that comes down to first impressions and presentation. And so i feel that if you were introduced to FATE points as “drive points” or “willpower” then you might have developed a different first impression and ended up engaging with the system differently. But you cant just change the presentation now and expect it to change anything. Your impressions are already set, and it would take a very flexible mind to really engage with the mechanics with a fresh perspective.

Hit Points are not good mechanic! I would love to rp the injuries my character has suffered, but there must be away to translate that to the game in a meaninful way. Disadvantage is something like that in modern dnd.

This is an excellent cue to reflect on whether your table has built enough trust to dispense with some of the trust-supplementing mechanics it has so far employed. I think that there is some value in there being game structures that make players feel safer in the absence of trust, though; the overall best way to build that trust might simply be to jump into situations that demand it, but that won't be the best way for every table and every situation.

Consequences certainly are the fundamental reward that TTRPGs can provide for roleplay, but meta-considerations can guide players into rich veins of roleplay and give incentive for them to dive in harder than they otherwise would have. The best mechanic I've ever seen for incentivizing roleplay from people who might not otherwise have done so is the overarching structure of 10 Candles: 1. Character creation is structured in such a way that your character must be multifaceted, and so you will discover their nuances through play rather than planning them in advance. 2. The game is 1 session. You know they will fail and die from the outset. Anything that you do not work into roleplay in this session will be lost forever. 3. Each of your traits is a card, which you can sacrifice to the flame, using that trait in some way to extend your character's meagre life a few moments longer. 4. You know how close death is, but your characters do not. Every time a roll fails, future failures become more likely. The pace and mood created by this structure inspires desperate, frantic, intense roleplay that escalates in a way that feels true to the characters and the situation, incentivizes players to play their characters like stolen cars and take big swings because they know if they don't take this shot they won't get another. Honestly, maybe that's a better lens to look at metacurrency mechanics through; even though they are often structured as incentives, the ones that actually work seem to function more as inspiration, with the incentive mechanic just being there to draw players attention for a long enough moment to have the chance to inspire them. Vaesen's wound system is quite good as well, despite running on non-roleplaying principles; when you suffer physical harm, you mark your choice of Exhausted, Battered, or Wounded. When you suffer mental harm, Angry, Frightened, or Hopeless. In most situations, this just means you have three hit points of each type that have arbitrary names. Your character probably isn't making any choice that is modeled by the player's choice. Nevertheless, the simple act of checking that box and looking at that word inspires roleplay that might not otherwise have occurred to you, regardless of how much you might desire good roleplay.

In working through the designing of our RPG game, our motto has been, "let giddy be our guide"... if a mechanic makes use chuckle, laugh, get filled with giddiness because it feels really fun for players, we keep going with it.

Incredible video. First I've seen, instant subscribe. I think there's a space where mechanics made to incentivize certain story structures and mechanics made to enhance a roleplaying experience converge; humans often understand their own experience through narratives, and those narratives are shaped the dominant narrative forms of our culture. Spellburn and Roll-to-Cast in DCC don't really map onto any element of my lived experience, but they feel more satisfying than spell slots because they map well onto the vicarious experiences I've had through narrative fiction. The panic table in Alien, to my mind, is certainly a tool for sculpting story to fit horror tropes, but it's also a helpful tool for roleplaying a sort of character that belongs in the tropey default setting and is familiar to us, but behaves very differently than we imagine that we would do.

Your disagreement with this blog post really reminded me of some of the gameplay "typologies" out there, the most famous being Bartle's taxonomy of play styles. It seems like for the blog's creator, the heart of RPGs is measurable progression, while for you it's roleplaying. My personal preferences are similar to yours - but the view of (say) D&D as being about tactics, optimization and "success" is a common one, and I think it's important to acknowledge its validity. As I see it, TTRPGs fall across a spectrum which also includes wargames, board games, video games and make-believe not guided by any formal system. Some parts of that spectrum directly emphasise roleplay or "success" to greater or lesser extents through their systems, while many are more open-ended and could support either or both. Open-world and simulation games especially come to mind, but people also create personalized narratives or objectives for a much wider variety of games. All this is to say, I don't think we can or should try to draw clear lines between which games support which sort of gameplay experiences. The important thing is to enjoy yourself, and if you're playing with others, to enjoy yourselves together.

I think an example of what an ideal mechanic looks like would have helped this video a lot. Specifically might have helped showcase what you mean by humanity and human experience, which sounds like it should be obvious but isn’t to me. I can backtrack the idea of having to spend a limited resource to not have a facet pop up in a hugely detrimental way to experiences in my life. I don’t ever seem to get the token when I do let the detriment happen, and there are usually still issues when I do spend, but whatever. I can also backtrack the difference between someone who gets a +2 from training in persuasion/social skills compared to someone who has high charisma. Neither of these systems speak to whole aspects of reality, but nothing in an rpg will, but they are ways you can look at the world and understand it if you hold on to the metaphors very lightly. So what does a game built with emulating human experience in mind look like? Changeling the lost, 2nd edition specifically comes to mind, for its attempt at grappling with the myriad ways and forms abuse survivorship takes? Bluebeard’s bride for putting players in the position of fighting over control of one character who is in a completely unbalanced power dynamic against a spooky antagonistic character? Blades in the dark for pushing yourself so you can score big, so you can fill up your retirement plan and finally get out (a pipedream)?

So I mostly agree about not telling players what they're doing or feeling, but I think it does have a place. The most obvious case is when games have instinctual or reflexive mechanics, like panic. They ecessarily involves some unconscious process taking control of behavior, or physical things happening like an increase in heart rate that are outside of the player's control. The other is when the situation and actions aren't described with 100% relevant detail, which is most of the time. Yes we're sharing an imaginary world, but we're not sharing a simulation. As you point out, we all have somewhat different simulated scenes running in our heads. And people will inevitably only specify core things like "I run for the door" because they don't want to spend 5 minutes on each action. That means there are situations where the dice rolls imply a much more complex process, and the GM has to interpolate details to make the outcome make in-world sense. Attacking in something like D&D is an extreme example of this, because AC, HP, and "attacking" are all completely tokenized. If you want a more interesting outcome than "you hit/you miss," the GM will have to interpolate. It's a lot like an animation program tweening frames between key frames.

I don't quite subscribe to the idea that defining goals for your game is "wriggling out" of the problem of figuring out what makes a good mechanic. In fact you yourself start your own video by defining what experience you want your game to provide, by defining what roleplay means to you as an ideal that you want your games to strive towards, and then spend the rest of the video judging mechanics based on whether or not they help deliver that experience that you've defined as your goal. You present those as assumptions, but they aren't - they're your goals. The discussion of how a mechanic can help make space for character-driven decisions is an interesting one, for sure, but framing it as what makes "good" mechanics is wrong imo.

I will disagree with you on one point. You can plan the outcome of a descision in advance of making that descision. To do so is to construct a descision tree. You match a condition with a descision outcome, so when the time to make the descision arrives all you need to do is condition checking. Ttrpgs have the advantage of not requiring you to plan a complete descision tree, so unlikely conditions or conditions you don't expect can fall through the condition checking to a default of in situ roleplay.

A key difference though is cognitive load. The players are specialized: they're responsible for simulating exactly one person. The GM is responsible for simulating an indefinite number of people, along with all the physics, economics, and so on. It's only reasonable then that the GM should require more preparation and resources (hence the eternal demand for modules and generation tables).

The thing I always bring up with this: 1) Unless you want insanely complex systems with a million dice that should really be run on a computer anyway, resolution mechanics in TTRPG systems will always abstract away a lot of the actual feeling of what it takes to succeed or fail at a task. You can take a jump that realistically your character should be able to make or know they wouldn't make, and then fall to your death. So it's either the problem of the dice, or the problem of the GM, but in either case it's something out of the player's control that frustrates and breaks immersion. The connection between action and consequence in an imagined scenario is, of course, subjective, and thus subject to human biases and the limitations of the social simulation going on. 2) Related to 1, it's a well studied phenomenon that human subjective perception of probability doesn't map perfectly onto mathematical probability. Video game designers deal with this all the time, and fudge outcomes under the hood to make high probabilities more likely, and low probabilities less likely. (My impression is that humans are better at assessing odds than probabilities? But I could be wrong about that.) If you keep rolling 1s and 2s over and over, that doesn't feel like losing bad bets, because you can see the die outcome not varying. It doesn't *feel* random, it feels like a string of bad luck. Yes that's a fallacy, but it's a common one humans have, and it can ruin a night and kill your character. 3) Meta-currencies are a very simple way to solve problems 1 and 2, which also means they're easy to balance. Even just a few points returns a sense of control to the players over a process which can seem unrealistically chaotic, arbitrary, or even unfair. Because that's the problem with any random system: not when it feels random, but when it feels arbitrary. That's one reason why even a system as abstract and gamey as FATE went with a bell-curve dice system: rolling lots of maximum and minimum values feels weird. Because the FATE system of world interaction is very free form, it needs a more free form system of constraint to balance the players' ability to affect the world. People can't do anything and everything--even movie scripts rely on limitations. The advantage of something like FATE is it allows you to build any kind of world, character, or genre on the fly and run a game without lots of crunch. The drawback is that it's not easy for the designer to predict how everything should work for any given game. Fate points become a standardized way to balance the characters' capacity to act across all possible implementations. And let's be real here. Plenty of people do want plot armor. It annoys me too, but it's real. They're not faking it, and there's a lot of them. Doling it out in a controlled way can be a method to sate that craving while still allowing for sufficient risk to the character. The internet is full of advice from experienced GMs describing the elaborate ways they rescale challenges to characters, players, and unlucky rolls, so their players aren't failing every single mid-tier jump and dying 10 times a session. Now "failure" becomes a setback! And the next failure? Another setback! Every challenge becomes a dozen intervening challenges. Enemies pull their punches, or run on simple flowchart systems that restraint their aggression and make them predictable enough to defeat. Automatic difficulty scaling. Quick time events with multiple fail states. Predictable combat puzzles. It's all just video game design--with the key word being "game." Role playing games are, as well, still games. If you want people to come back and play, the odds are *very high* that you can't just brutalize their characters constantly with no ability to do anything about it. Maybe you can find enough people who enjoy only the most brutal survival horror every time, but the rest of us have to work with a more mixed bag </j>. So either we avoid stories that could ever put the characters at risk, or something else has to give to allow for the roller coaster of action and risk without the constant imminence of catastrophic failure and death. In moderation, depending on how it's used, I don't mind meta-currencies. My biggest annoyance is with games that try to turn everyone into a GM (a.k.a. "GM-less games"), and even more with Apocalypse World "moves" which straitjacket the players into a very narrow mode of play in order to fulfill the game designer's fantasy of the story that must be told. Meta-currencies barely register as an offense in comparison. I get the critique, but this specific discourse being so vehement and prevalent gives me the strong impression of a bunch of people being reactive against a dominant trend they don't like. Because the trend is the Enemy™, everything associated with the trend must be purged. It becomes emotionally poisoned by association via subtle sympathetic magic. It's an ideological micro-bloc, a subcultural clique, an aesthetic vibe: all things which I loathe. And so inevitably I must reject the absolute rejection of all "meta mechanics." Under the right circumstances, intelligently understood and turned toward a wise goal, anything can be useful.

Just subscribed, and was wondering what your recommended game systems are, what games do you enjoy playing?

Emulation is what I've heard others call it, if I've understood you correctly... I have some players who get too bogged down in the immersion that they lose the sense of humanity at the table. For example, I love how you explain why relating your HP or other stats to other characters (out of character, of course) is actually better for the emulation.

Very interesting thougts. Subscribed 👍 What do you think about handing out Stage Direction Cards to the Players from time to time? I use such cards in Horror themed Games to gain social problems for the PC‘s.

Really interesting video. That’s got me thinking. Let’s take combat, probably the least ‘roleplaying’ aspect of a RPG. Usually combat is ‘game’ NOT ‘roleplay’ . I like games so that’s ok for me, but if combat was redesigned to maximise ‘roleplay’ then it would have to take the players through some experiences over the table. Firstly the fight,flight freeze dilemma that would occur at the initiation of combat. Previous life experience in combat (either through training or just life) would give characters more agency to choose whether to fight, flight, freeze so perhaps some dice rolling with some improved modifiers Unexperienced characters would have their responses determined more by their core characteristics and pre-dispositions gained from their role/career etc. some dice-rolling modified to drive more freeze or flight responses. The characters that score best of fight would I think have the option to go first in a combat round. Using this sort of approach I think allows ‘initiative’ rolls as traditionally based get put in the bin. With something that reflects the more human experience replacing it. So what happens at flight? To me that feels like stepping out of the space of immediate harm. That space is determined by character perceptions,- ducking, dodging, hunkering into a defensive posture and running away I’d all put in a ‘flight’ bracket. Experience with combat and the characters role/career should give them more agency to choose but fundamentally they won’t be able to cause harm to their opponent until they can ‘fight’. Flight is position where the character is less likely to be harmed (opponents dice allowing of course) Freeze the worst possible outcome places the character in a vulnerable position where they are the easiest to harm. Fight- says what it does on the tin. When fightinging the options available should be 1) cause harm- this is any action that will harm the opponent if the fight action is successful. 2) Assist Harm- this is any action that will assist another causing harm. 3) Overwhelm- this is any fight action that will inhibit the opponent causing harm, grappling, pinning down with covering fire, distracting them, scaring them etc 4) Avoid Harm- anything that is an all out effort to avoids harm from an opponent. Does not move the character out of the space where that can cause harm unless they want too. Simple mechanic choices like the ones above make for a combat experience that is as much about each character having to manage their own predisposition to combat as the situation iteself. I don’t like hit points- I prefer two tallies . Tally one is how distracted your character is. Pain, tiredness fear are all distractions from being able to function normally. These are tallied as minus points. Which modify pretty much everything a character can do. Injuries are a tally only the dM sees. They indicate the closeness of death. A player with high wisdom might get a range idea but only skilled healers would be able to get a chance to discern the exact closeness. Harm therefore deals two outcomes injury and distraction. A splinter under the fingernail may cause very little injury for example but cause a massive amount of distraction. A broken neck might cause massive injury (may kill for example) but very little distraction. The interplay between injury and distraction results in some very roleplayable outcomes. The possibilities of a character to overcome the distractions is always determined by the characters build and the players choices. Any core stat can be used to overcome distractions temporarily - wisdom my character looks at the wound roll a dice to see if they can wave it off as not that bad even though it hurts like hell. My character will not let others see how much it hurts - roll a dice to see if your charasima pulls that off. My character is tough I’ll grit my teeth an bear it- roll constitution, my character has a displined mind and won’t let their thoughts wander to how much it hurts- roll intelligence. Critical fails and critical successes can play an interesting part here.

The second for second combat I'm working with isn't just to be "realistic, it's not, it's there because the system is based a lot on anime, and in that a 10 or less second fight takes up a whole episode. Health rules are brutal with limbs, bleeds, the struggle to stay conscious and fight the pain, because these things happen in good stories. the stats are less fine grain though, because rarely does a guy being a little above average in speed or strength matter, 5 human levels is enough, pitiful, poor, average, good, amazing. the nuance comes from things working together, like even if average strength you might know a martial art.

I think you’ve just explained the disconnect I have with most skill systems!

Came for what I thought would be a discussion about how to inhabit perspectives outside the human experience, stayed for the dive into what makes a good mechanic. Thanks for the video! I really like the PBTA games for this reason, moat of the game is spent asking and answering in a very natural and direct fashion and there's little to no difference between 'social' 'combat' 'exploration' etc in terms of the perception of time.

Well, Villneuve might actually be in the minority on his statement. Lots of movies are remembered precisely because of dialogue because dialogue's physical manifestation can be just so perfectly shown using film. Voice timbre, cracking, loudness. Facial expression delivering the line. They cannot be reproduced neither in books, nor in radio. Saying that dialogue script is non-native to cinema is correct, saying that dialogue as a whole does not belong to the ideal of cinema... That's just wrong. Just a sidenote.

I have been developing an RPG off and on with the goal of making combat and social play more or less seamless. Two ideas I've been messing with have been a wound system to replace health points, and an instinct system to make character decisions more mechanically geared towards actually role-playing as your character. Both of these mechanics are not complete, but here's my basic thinking: For wounds, when a given a character takes any amount of damage to a particular part of the body (currently most creatures are divided into head, upper body, lower body, and each limb). That character then incurs a wound which is determined by which body part was damaged and how badly. (E.G. taking even a small amount of cutting damage to the head may result in a damaged eye or an opened jugular, while taking a high amount of blunt damage to the stomach may result in internal bleeding.) These wounds inflict status effects upon the player (almost always negative) which include things like minor pain that reduces most skill checks, the total incapacitation of an arm or a leg, and even instant death (such as in the case of a penetrated heart or skull). So the experience goes from "The bison charges you and knocks you flat on the ground. You take 10 points of damage." To "The bison charges you and knocks you flat on the ground. You feel a sharp pain in the back of your head and a tightness in your chest. You are having trouble breathing." Medical attention would be necessary to know exactly what a character's injuries are and how to treat them. And the always very real possibility of death from even an unskilled farmer wielding a pitchfork given enough carelessness/bad luck should discourage using violence as a default solution. Instincts are meant to basically offer a bonus to an action that is in character and a penalty to actions that are out of character. The more mundane the situation, the less present this mechanic. It's easy to play a part when making small talk with a cashier, less so when you have to choose between saving your partner or a briefcase full of cash from a burning car, and the years your character has spent regularly placing material wealth over human lives goes into the split second decision you make. Does your character do what comes natural, and risk the rest of the team finding out where his priorities actually lie? Or does he fight against his instincts and try to free his friend, the whole time his own internal battle reducing his ability to focus and potentially resulting in his friend dying anyways or himself getting seriously burned. But no matter how successful he is, the choice to go against decades of ingrained behavior will be a formative moment for that character going forward. It makes the internal battle anybody must endure when making a difficult decision you logically know to be correct but that goes against your habits present in the mechanics of a game. So doing what comes naturally will always be easier, but it may or may not always be best. It also kind of makes it impossible to "fail" at role-playing your character. Anybody can decide to do something that goes against their character, but sometimes the sheer amount of behavioral inertia you're attempting to defy is simply to much. Imagine an extremely passive person finally deciding to let their boss have a piece of their mind, only to manage being slightly less enthusiastically cooperative than usual.

On Drive points and similar "adrenaline" mechanics -- I think they fail because they take the unconscious and uncontrollable side of characters and make them into a highly controlled, calculated currency. (thus breaking all 3 pillars.) This is a gripe I have with limited use per day abilities. Even if they make solid gameplay balancing tools the limitation is often arbitrary or unrelatable. Like a mixed metaphor between how tools works and how human performance works. I much prefer spending a stamina currency or health or some other shared ressource and having to ask myself tactical questions that better match those my character would be asking themselves in this context.

I think you have a narrow view on what makes a role-playing game, a storytelling game, and the vin diagram of how they overlap.

In role-playing games, I think there are multiple modes of play in the same way when we live life there are multiple modes of experience. In one instance, there is the immersive experience of life where we are experiencing what happens from moment to moment, making decisions, and experiencing the outcomes. And there is the reflective aspect of experiencing things, where we are reflecting on what we have done and experience and projecting and reflecting what our perceptions on those past experiences are. This will have instances in real life where what people 's experience of what happened is in some sense is different than what actually happened almost as though remembering and re-coding memories is a type of meta-currency retroactively applied to life. Similarly, I think in role play you can be role-playing but not in the lens of things happening in the moment but in a conversation where what's happening is reflective and transitory.

Great video as usual!

I can't express how much i love your definition of roleplaying 😊 About classical hit points, I tend now more as "combat points" , how much combat you can stand, so, when youI reach 0 hit points, you can't defend yourself anymore, and the next blow will kill you.

A big factor in this issue is short-run versus long-run goals. Games like Dread and Fiasco are great for role-playing short campaigns, 2-4 sessions, but offer not much in the way of progression.

I'll start with compliments: Fantastic, super interesting vlog! Listening to you is an absolute pleasure. At the same time... I feel like you're presenting a single, very specific way of playing RPGs as essentially the true, ultimate, best one... There are thousands of ways to play RPGs, with a thousand different settings for the play consolete. For example, you can play mysteries with full transparency, where the players have complete knowledge about the backstory - knowledge their characters don't have - and we all play with dramatic irony to tell an engaging story. Another equally legitimate setting for the play consolete would be a situation where there's absolutely no canonical backstory, no canonical solution, and the investigation is fully improvised by the GM or, on the other hand, generated (and retrospectively justified) by the game's procedures and mechanisms: oracles, resolutions, and random tables. You run a great channel, your content is genuinely interesting, and on top of that, it's super well-produced. However, my only critique is that your materials exude a kind of 'RPG essentialism,' as if there really is one Platonic way to play RPGs. That's just my very subjective impression. Best of luck! :)

Love your videos buddy very thoughtful an insightful

I've found a lot of value in Rule of Thule's blog. I think the design diaries for the alien genocide game show off how structures like hexcrawling (supported by terrain, random encounters, and reaction rolls) can enhance the believability of the world and enable players to affect the setting by thinking strategically. There's also a lot of stuff on that blog that makes my skin crawl - the fixation on hierarchy (which, for Rule of Thule, seems to be intrinsically good and natural), sharp and immutable distinctions between social roles, enforced uniformity within those roles, and a setting which is not far from "What if there was a sci-fi world where analogues to real-life conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement were 100% true, the intrinsically evil aliens are analogous to the real-life identity groups implicated by those conspiracy theories, we substitue human supremacy for white supremacy, and the goal of the PCs is to turn the tables on the aliens by Final Solutioning them?"

Immersion is impossible without engagement. The majority of people I know who play TTRPG's have ADHD. That means it is hard to keep engagement, and minimal stimulation is frustrating and aversive. Rich VTT elements are highly attractive to the ADHD mind.