One of the things that I do for my own games and for the freelance work that I haven't been talking much about here is that I work on game mechanics pretty frequently, and one of the things that gets overlooked in games is the concept of negative mechanics.

A lot of designers see the notion of perfect mechanics being a sort of transcendent thing that will always make a game better. For much of my game design career, I've been pretty much in love with adding more and more mechanics to games, because I'm a game designer and I like complicated games.

However, I've been taking a different approach to games and complexity recently based on my reflections.

I predominantly design for tabletop roleplaying games, which means that my games are meant to be played by human players who are using dice and rulebooks, and the concept of negative mechanics is important here.

A negative mechanic is one which actively detracts from the play experience. When you encounter such a mechanic, it is frustrating, irritating, and gets in the way of play.

The best example I can think of in tabletop roleplaying games is the matrix in Shadowrun. It's clunky, obtrusive, and while it's a really cool setting element it just tends to suck in gameplay; I had the most fun with it either in separate sessions (welcome to requiring an insane amount of commitment and one-on-one sessions), or in simply abstracting all of the game's scripted mechanics out of the gameplay. As a designer, it's one of the most head-scratching elements of the game, especially given that the trend seems to have been to expand on the matrix as the game's ruleset expands.

Image courtesy of mysticsartsdesign on Pixabay

What makes Shadowrun's matrix a negative mechanic?

The fundamental definition of a negative mechanic is that it creates a negative experience for players, and this can happen in a variety of ways. Shadowrun manages to do this in pretty much every way possible.

• It slows down the storytelling aspect of play.
• It requires a character to have a specialized role that can massively detract from their general capabilities.
• It requires a player to memorize a whole new set of rules, which may use a similar base mechanic but has new key terms.
• It leaves a lot of players out of the loop for a large portion of the game time.

Storytelling Speedbumps

I think that something can be said for Shadowrun's matrix system being a font of engaging storytelling; I've read more than a few Shadowrun novels and some of the most interesting, comical, and surreal moments occur in the matrix. However, it's also a place that tends to be an extra layer for storytellers to consider.

The result is one of three things:

Possibility 1: Double Improv

The storyteller is laying down track right ahead of the players as they progress, and now the paths have forked.

This method is incredibly dangerous and I particularly hate it. I'm largely an improvisational storyteller when I make games, but the counterpart to this is that you're just doing more than you should at a time and having to keep track of extra content.

Possibility 2: Gated Content

Another thing that can happen is that you wind up with story content that exists only in the matrix. This is not a giant issue most of the time, but the problem is that if anything happens the GM is down a lot of preparation.

This tends to lead the GM into either railroading or recycling elements, the latter of which can be okay if done well (and probably not terrible even if not done in an ideal manner), but the former of which can cause serious problems. For the uninitiated, this is when the storyteller intentionally forces a plot to go one way or another.

In video games, you see this when a false choice is presented to the player character and the same result always happens (or, worse, the player chooses an option and the character ignores them).

Possibility 3: Kill Three Goblins

What I like to call the "Kill Three Goblins" style is when a GM or storyteller throws in a fight or challenge just to pad out a session's run-time and give people a chance to have a mechanical spotlight.

I'm guilty of this a lot (as my players who recently extinguished a burning farmstead after defeating a bunch of bandits in D&D may or may not have realized), despite the fact that it's one of my most railed-against storytelling methods.

The problem with this is that it's spectacle-based storytelling, and as the name implies it may backfire. It leads you to race conditions where you need to adapt to and try to exceed the players' mechanical prowess to keep up the difficulty and pad out sessions, and it's really prone to leading you into meaningless interludes.

Painful Specialization

Painful specialization occurs when a player is stuck doing one particular thing in a game and it doesn't match up with what matters in the larger context of the game.

One of the games that I think actually handles this magnificently is EA's Syndicate shooter reboot, which was otherwise pretty well maligned.

Gameplay courtesy of Gamer Max Channel

In the moving rail shooter sections of the game, you get the ability to use all of a character's abilities at once, and you're not punished for choosing one over another (e.g. shooting over hacking).

In Shadowrun, the hacker may typically also get other benefits (they tend to use drones), but both of these systems are cumbersome (sometimes improved by some editions, often exacerbated by unique elements of each). Also, they require a lot of investment into financial resources at character creation to master, which makes them either a permanent sacrifice or a very difficult approach to master depending on the player's approach.

In addition, being in the matrix or using a drone actively provides penalties to any other actions the character may take, in the former case literally making them a sitting duck in the space that the rest of the characters occupy.

Compare this to a magician, who may gain the ability to astrally project and cast themselves out of their body, creating much the same situation, but who also gains a bunch of useful tools in "meatspace" by using spells and a bunch of magical techniques.

The hacker doesn't necessarily gain benefits, and while later editions attempted to shoehorn this in it only made more difficult rules to remember, and a lot of the new hacking opportunities were difficult or suboptimal (though one could argue that this was a small sacrifice for gaining an otherwise unique ability, I'm not wholly convinced).

Rules Overload

You essentially have three facets to player skill:

• Execution, which is dependent on a player's ability to do whichever task is required (e.g. moving a mouse to aim)
• Minimum Proficiency, which is the amount of rules a player must know to actually play
• Maximum Mastery, which is the extent to which a player can know more rules to have tactical approaches to play

In a tabletop roleplaying game, the execution part is pretty much nil; the player must be able to communicate what they want their player to do (this is non-trivial, but usually other players can help out a novice who has not mastered the process yet, and it is not dependent on any particularly rare or highly varied trait like reflexes or abstract spacial reasoning).

The minimum proficiency is where negative mechanics tend to come into play. If you have too much required knowledge for players to do anything, they aren't going to be able to play the game, and this is where the matrix in Shadowrun falls apart.

The problem is that a player needs to be familiar with (and possibly even memorize) a large section of a rulebook that nobody else at the table will know. Tabletop roleplaying games are expensive in minimum proficiency where they are cheap on execution, so a player is likely going to suffer if they don't have even a basic knowledge of rules (as opposed to something like Open Legend, which has a very simple core mechanic, Shadowrun's matrix rules are a diverse branch of the ruleset).

Maximum mastery also becomes a problem for both the storyteller and a decker (matrix-user in most versions of Shadowrun). Since the game is collaboratively competitive, a player or storyteller that massively exceeds the other in skill needs to be able to accept the limitations of the other and not exploit unknown weaknesses to make the game unfair and kill the fun.

Player-Bystanders

The biggest problem with the matrix in Shadowrun is that it just puts a regular game on hold. There's no real elegant way to plan around a matrix interlude; either you simply call a break, try to manage two timelines at once, or hold the matrix session before or after the main game, and all of these cause issues.

The real problem is that what is originally a whole-group exercise in collaborative storytelling switches over to a one-on-one experience. Both are good, but having a sudden transistion between the two can be a problem.

A video game analogy to this would be a MMORPG or other game with gated skills that require a player who has mastered them in order for content to be accessed. Dungeons and Dragons Online, which I otherwise really love, falls prey to this because only two classes in the game can do rogue skills, and even trying to learn them across classes is futile because characters need a special ability to not automatically fail (and will be incapable of getting scores high enough to bypass most of the rogue skill checks).

Many side-areas in the game are locked behind rogue skill checks, and while the main content is typically still accessible the game can be very different for players who have access to rogue skills, which are typically only available to parties with a player that can do it.

Another example might be something like the Payday series, a heist-themed shooter where players choose loadout with certain gear; lacking something is usually not cause to end a run, but it does mean that a different method will need to be used.

However, while most video games (at least real-time ones) are good at splitting up player activities in general–DDO does this by giving an alternate route, and Payday does this by constantly assailing players with hordes of enemies–any turn-based system and especially one based on a human storyteller will be limited by the amount of attention the storyteller can divide to the players to keep the game rolling onward.

Now, bystanders aren't necessarily a problem if they're willing to sit still and observe the other gameplay going on, but that's a rare experience: only a particularly noteworthy narration or event will cause a player who showed up to play a game to abandon the notion that they should be playing instead of sitting by.

How to avoid negative mechanics?

So I can't really give a good example of this. Some of the freelance work I'm doing right now is forcing me to ask this question and I'm scratching my head.

The general rule is that if you're failing a lot of the four tests in the prior section, or failing even one or two of them really badly, you've probably got a mechanic that people are going to avoid.

One game that's got a really good method of evading negative mechanics is Open Legend (disclaimer: I had a very small role as a playtester and contributor to Open Legend). Now, I'm not much of a strictly "storytelling" system game fan (e.g. I'm not a huge fan of games like Fate Accelerated, though I can see them as quality games they're not my cup of tea), and Open Legend is a little crunchier than most of thsoe games, but it has very few distinct rules outside its core mechanic, and when they're there they're almost always a very small, but distinctive, twist on the standard affair.

I've come up with five maxims I'm going to use to guide my own process:

1. Don't add any rule that won't provide value to players.
2. Clearly mark anything that shouldn't be done during standard play.
   Obvious caution: Few activities should happen outside standard play.
3. Keep it Simple, Stupid
4. Every player should have a stake at all times.
   Corollary: Invoke groups as often as possible.
5. Use existing character features when designing new rules; build up not out.

Wrapping Up

The real problem is that a negative mechanic can be really cool by itself, but flop when placed in the context of a larger game. A discrete stand-alone mechanic that seems cool (like the Elder Scrolls' and Fallouts' lockpicking mechanics, which are a good example of a discrete mechanic that I actually like) can actually turn out to be negative if it doesn't further the course of play and storytelling.

So to avoid negative mechanics, consider where an activity falls into the gameplay loop, and if it doesn't make that loop better it's probably for the best to skip it.