Emulative Mechanics

EMULATIVE MECHANICS

Broadly speaking I’d describe emulative mechanics as specific rules or mechanics in a game that support the feeling of doing the thing you’re trying to do. 

In practice, many mechanical systems in RPG’s are divorced from the nature of what’s actually going on. Sometimes this is necessary for the purposes of convenience. Attribute checks are a prime example of this. While rolling a single d20 against an intelligence doesn’t really make you feel like you’re actually figuring something out, sometimes it can be necessary as a backstop when roleplay attempts fail.

In other instances though it’s certainly possible, if not desirable, to change these rules to reinforce the feeling of the action being made. As another example let’s take attack rolls. In many cases attack rolls are made the same way; roll one die to hit, then roll damage based on the weapon. This is often universal regardless of the weapon being used. A battleaxe, or a dagger, or a bow; when it comes to the mechanical resolution of the attack they all feel the same.   

Now what if we were to change this, say with the battleaxe and the dagger. With the battleaxe we still only roll 1 die to see if we hit, but we roll many dice to see how much damage we do. However with the dagger we roll many die to see if we hit, but each hit only does a small amount of damage. This is of course a simple example, but immediately we see that it reinforces what’s going on at the table.

The MDA framework (Huneke et al), suggests approaching design from the Aesthetic perspective. That is to say the gameplay experience (or Aesthetic) should be the starting point and that the mechanics should be written to support the intended experience for the player. 

“When working with games, it is helpful to consider both the designer and player perspectives ... In addition, thinking about the player encourages experience-driven (as opposed to feature-driven) design.”

When we do this it becomes easier to identify what the experience game should be and reverse engineer these to produce the mechanics required to support that experience. These are what I term emulative mechanics.

Further to the above example with the axe and the dagger, emulative mechanics don’t need to stop at modifying existing structures and mechanics, or indeed adding complexity.

I recently test played a mech game I’m writing called Salvage Union (watch this space) and I was giving the elevator pitch and someone asked about the mechanics. For me the most important mechanics are that each player doesn’t have a name but a Callsign, not only that but you don’t get to pick your own. You either roll it up off a table, or if playing a campaign the other players assign you one based on the things you do. It is also a rule that you must speak in radio parlance at all times when inside your mech. There is even a guide included to give you a run down on terms and phonetic alphabet etc.
​

This is the WIP doc, there will be better layout!

This may seem fairly light and frivolous, an add-on if you will to the ‘real’ rules. I see these as the core rules of the game. When we played the game (online over discord) we all did the radio speak and gave each other callsigns, and honestly it was the most fun part of the game. Without these rules in the game it’s possible that you could use the same ruleset and have it play out as a wargame. The entire roleplaying experience would be lost. The dice could be different, it could be with or without maps and it could feel the same.

Mew-Tants!, a game I recently made, uses a fairly conventional dice pool system based on attributes for its core resolution. This is intentional as I wanted to keep it light and easy to manage, and they don’t have much of an impact beyond providing a method to determine uncertain outcomes. The aesthetic comes from the item mechanics and the superpowers. The superpowers are purely narratively described to encourage players to use them in inventive ways. If they affected the dice in any way, of course the players would seek to use the dice. This way it will encourage them to use the power itself descriptively, reinforcing the feeling of having and using the superpowers themselves for what they are. 

The item system is dice based and provides a spendable bonus die when interacting with items. Because the players are cats they can’t actually carry items as such, so the items (such as scratching posts, boxes, catnip etc) are instead used at the point you encounter them. This way we encourage the player to do cat-like things, reinforcing the feeling of being a cat. Also in the collecting of the bonus dice we provide an inventory of sorts that players can use in tricky situations.

I suppose in summary it’s back to the MDA framework and putting the gameplay experience first, but I find that actively questioning each and every mechanic and saying ‘does this emulate what I’m trying to do here, and if not, should it?’ has been very helpful to me as a designer.
​​​