Dev Burbles: Positive and Negative Mechanics (Patreon)

Last week I talked about making mechanics fit thematically as well as having them work in sync with other game mechanics. So as a continuation of that, in regards largely to the camping and party interaction elements, I started thinking about game mechanics as a whole. For a long time I've felt that a game mechanic shouldn't exist purely to punish the player. So I didn't want the camping mechanic to exist just to making things harder, I wanted a system that would help as well as hurt, because having a system that only hurts if you don't interact with it properly can be a huge pain, especially when it's not an enjoyable mechanic for the player. As an example, lock picking in Skyrim is cute and fun for a while, but 200 hours later when you have 99 lock picks, it's just a pain and a time sink. (That mechanic is made a bit worse by the fact that difficult locks tend to have shitty loot and is generally not worth the trouble) I decided to think back on some games I've played, and see if I could find any with some mechanic similar to what I wanted for Fungeons and Fagons. I ended up thinking about some mechanics in Darkest Dungeon, and Pokemon XY oddly enough. Starting with Darkest Dungeon. Darkest Dungeon has a sanity mechanic, it's only purpose is to hinder the players. Have characters with high sanity doesn't help you in anyway, but have them with low sanity hinders your ability to use them in the dungeons. This mechanic is SUPER ingrained in the game, it's one of the major purposes of the town, there's tons of micromanagement mechanics, like camping in dungeons, enemies have sanity influencing attacks, characters can gain traits that hinder them from recovering sanity normally, etc. This mechanic works really well because it's been worked into the overall system of the game very thoroughly, it essentially becomes a more complex healthbar (which I'll talk about later). Aesthetically the sanity mechanic just makes sense. The whole game is about eldritch horrors, and is very Lovecraftian, which has always had huge ties to the concept of insanity and madness. That makes the whole mechanic work really well in game, since playing I haven't ever felt like that mechanic was there to shit on me. On the COMPLETE polar opposite end of the spectrum we have Pokemon XY, with Pokemon Amie. So thematically Pokemon Amie is just like Darkest Dungeon's sanity mechanic, it fits REALLY well. Pokemon throughout it's entire franchise length has always been hugely about "Forming bonds with Pokemon" and "Pokemon are friends, not tools" with the introduction of Pokemon Amie that FINALLY gets to be a mechanical element of the game. The reason Pokemon Amie is so different from Darkest Dungeon is Pokemon Amie is NOT ingrained in the system at all. It's a side mini-game you can do it, or you can just ignore it and continue the game just like it was any of the other Pokemon games. It's also different from the sanity of Darkest Dungeon, because it's a PURELY positive mechanic. Not interacting with your Pokemon doesn't punish you at all, but interacting with them gives you some REALLY awesome (and a little overpowered) results. Forming a strong bond with your Pokemon can prevent them from fainting, they can shrug of status effects (which makes no sense but whatever) they land critical hits more, and a bunch of other stuff. Even though it's kind of a grindy system, and the mini-games aren't particularly amazing, it's still fun and very charming, so it's not hard to sit and interact with your Pokemon once in a while between battles. Thinking about mechanics and how they help and hinder the player got me thinking about one of the most common mechanics in games, health bars. Health bars (today) ONLY exist as an obstacle, if you have no health you die, game over, try again. That wasn't always the case though, back in the NES days, having high health was rewarded. In Mario what is essentially health, mushrooms and flowers, let you break blocks, shoot fireballs, and give you a buffer on death. In Legend of Zelda it let you shoot sword lasers. Rewarding players who are playing well is difficult in most games today, as many games have shifted to a regenerative health system. Day9 (Sean Plott) did a really good video on game design, and he mentioned that games are games because they're a challenge, and challenge is what makes them fun. The objective in golf is put a ball into a hole, the easiest way to do that is pick it up and put it in. But that's not fun, hitting a ball with an awkward stick, and trying to get it into a hole that's hundreds of yards away is fun. Now I feel like making mechanics that only punish the player is perfectly fine, as long as that mechanic is deeply ingrained in the game in some way. So yeah, just some musings on game mechanics and punishing versus rewarding mechanics. I've still got a lot of stuff to think about on it, but tomorrow I think I'll post some of the WIP character sheets and things that I'm working on. Might do a little post on what Fungeon and Fagons will be about and see what people think of that. =3 Thanks for reading