So, here I am, a game designer talking about game mechanics.
Hopefully nobody got their hopes up too high, because I'm going to give an answer that seems really weird, given what you'd expect:
I don't have a (game) mechanic that inspires me.
(questions and image from autocratik.blogspot.com)
I'm not necessarily saying that to be contrarian or angsty. Nobody has to have an intervention for me; I'm in one of the happiest times of my life and I feel fine. The problem is that I legitimately can't point to many mechanics and say "Hey, that's inspiring", and when I do typically I enjoy them for a while and then they begin to wear thin. Even in my own works, I don't find a whole lot that I'm particularly fond of as a driver of play.
The Destiny system in Hammercalled, for instance, is something that I've actually become fairly cynical about.
The thing with game mechanics is that they generally suck at doing what a tabletop RPG is meant to do:
- Strike a balance between individual desires and a shared narrative.
- Provide mechanical systems for conflict resolution.
Even simple things like the notion of character advancement are not even really something that's all that important.
If you took a game and said "You're this guy, you have a 75% chance to succeed at things related to your job as a butler, a 60% chance to succeed at things that require a well-educated and sophisticated mind or background, and a 50% chance to succeed at things that are reasonably expected of the average population", you'd have both the best and worst of tabletop roleplaying in one fell swoop.
Pardon my example, I'm on a The Remains of the Day kick for some reason.
One one hand, you've got a clearly defined role, enough agency to do some important things that fall outside that, and you've got a basis for some mechanical delineation.
At the same time, the significance of your actions in the story are more or less entirely unrepresented.
This is where you wind up with little experimental things like The Quiet Year that do a much better job of storytelling than 95% of games, and that's maybe a conservative estimate.
The counter-point to this is that when you make things about following a particular element of storytelling, then you're going to wind up having a worse game, because the players lose the element of choice that's inherent to them.
There's something to be said for the notion of a social contract in the gaming group that says "I'm going to buy in and do this", but I don't necessarily believe in that. It's all fine and dandy on paper, but breaks apart real hard upon conflict with reality.
So, what's the most inspiring game mechanic to me?
My answer is that mechanics aren't inspiring. At least not the ones we have. The novelty may thrill, but in the end you're looking for something where you don't really want to be looking.
It's like the Israelites wishing for a king in the Bible; you need some means of setting the storytelling conventions for any sort of shared storytelling, sure, but you're also running the risk of blasphemy when you start making the storytelling dependent on gameplay rather than ars gratia ars.
Since people likely won't leave me be until I give a favorite, it's the FFG Star Wars stuff that I think would be the best example, since it actually does a fairly good job of encouraging a particular style without stifling people, but being the best at something that's perhaps misguided and maybe deleterious is not exactly a high honor.
Coincidentally, I'm hoping to one day find a game mechanic that can enrich storytelling, but I'm cautious about such hopes. It will certainly not be universal in how it can be applied and who it will appeal to.
Tomorrow I'll be able to give a more satisfying answer in the dice mechanics section; I'll have a hard time narrowing down what appeals to me most (the nuances will provide the challenge there).