Between a couple of games I’ve been playing in and some game design I’ve been doing on my own, I’ve been thinking about something that I’m calling “Fiction Feeding Mechanics”. These are formalized sorts of designs that come directly from Mo Turkington’s theories on Push and Pull in TTRPG play.
(Also for new readers, whenever I say “Fiction” in reference to tabletop RPGs, I mean the imaginary stuff that’s happening in your campaign and session that you are playing. Not necessarily whether the game is tied to an existing property or book series, nor the setting stuff specifically.)
Fiction Feeding Mechanics
Game mechanics that take place in the course of regular play that specifically ask questions for people in the play group (players, GM, sometimes specified, sometimes not) to answer that feed into the fiction directly.
The most popular example these days is Apocalypse World Moves – stuff like “You get to ask the GM ‘What is the biggest threat I should be looking out for?'”.
Consider how much more directed this is, than “I rolled 3 successes on Perception. What happens?”. The classic traditional game mechanic measures success but doesn’t direct narration, which means sometimes you get weak or empty answers, and not necessarily because the GM is trying to cut you out of something, but because it’s a non-directed mechanic and there’s a lot to track and do in play.
Also compare to narration trading games – in those games the key component is who gets the right to TELL something, but it’s not well directed. The benefit is at least the creative work is spread around so the GM isn’t the only one stuck doing the work, but if the game also expects to limit the scope of outcomes, it simply moves the question of “What are 3 perception successes in the fiction?” to a different player.
As I have often said, the easiest game mechanic is “I say it and it happens.” So, the second easiest game mechanic is “I ask about it and someone tells me.” A set of directed questions allows play to move in meaningful directions and avoid things like the jokes about players poking at a normal chair for hours.
Fiction that shows up in play
An important point here, is that a lot of traditional games have a lot of questions during character generation, but much of them end up left behind once play starts. Sometimes these are because the questions are… not good questions (“What’s your character’s favorite color?” etc.) but also it can be because the game doesn’t have good ways to bring the answers into play.
By putting the directed questions into regular use mechanics in play, you find that it builds a loop of “fiction drives mechanics, mechanics feed fiction”.
Anyway, if you’re designing games, consider what questions would regularly show up in the kind of story you’d want of your game. The key to a good question is that it either leads to more questions or it leads to more choices/decisions/actions, but not resolving everything.
For example, in a murder mystery game, “Who is the killer?” resolves the situation and ends play, while “Who is hiding something? Who is afraid? Who is desperate? Who is resentful?” are more interesting questions, because while none directly solve the scenario, they bring you along towards it’s resolution (and often along the way show you dead ends, albeit interesting ones.)
