While working on some game ideas, I was considering what kind of mechanics, or things I should be asking from a player.
For example, in the "D&D Shadow over Mystara video game" the "things" the player are asked to do is basically:
- Dexterity: Fight monsters and avoid damage
- Resource Management: Manage expandable items, spells and gold.
A Zelda game would add for example "Puzzle" to the list above which is used in dungeons and boss monster.
Now for video game, most of the time, the dexterity part take over everything else, which means you do not have to consider much what the player needs to manage so much because it mainly about dexterity.
Let say you want to convert the game above as a dungeon crawler board game. Now you need to remove the dexterity part and end up with something like:
- Mathematical computation with dice: For combat resolution and other hazards.
- Resource Management: Expandable items, spells, maneuvers, Money to buy new equipment, etc.
- Tactical movement: positioning you heroes at the right location.
Now since the dexterity aspect is not taking over the game, you realize that the player has little things to think about. The only strategy in the game is basically resource management and movement since mathematical computation seems to have less decision.
So here you might want to add other things for the player to handle else it becomes only a resource management game. Now what else could be added:
- Development/Progression: Powering up your character in a certain path to get a certain game play.
- Puzzles: Rarely practical, but it has been done in Mansion of Madness. Also you could make a very tactical game where each maneuver affect specific squares on the board which means it becomes a kind of puzzle to know which action to do to hit your opponent.
So the idea would be to synthesize the core of the game in a series of broad mechanics determined on what players needs to do. For example:
Setlers of catan would be something like this in order of priority:
- Resource Management: Manage resources to do stuff
- Development: Progression of the player's empire
- Puzzle/Tactical: The positioning of the road and cities could be considered as a light puzzle.
The problem in attempting to designing such list is to determine where to stop. You could be tempted to fine grain the categories up to actual mechanics like auction and worker placement. But that is not the goal, the goal is to determine for which purpose those auction and worker placement are used for.
It would allow us to determine what is this game about. Is it lacking something, is there too much, is it the objective of the original design. That could make certain mechanics added or removed to comply with the broad mechanics.
Do you think it could be possible to build such list and do you think it could be useful.
By dexterity, I was implying a broad category which would include perception and other real time aspects.
As for analysing map feature, using planning and organisation, those are not dexterity, and video games does have such categories of mechanics. But most of the time, the focus is on the dexterity/real time aspect, so that if you remove that aspect (Like if you were converting a video game as a board game), the other aspects are much less important. While board games try to have more balanced categories.
If you remove dexterity from a video game too weak or simple forcing you for example, to improve the depth of the non-dexterity features. Or add new categories of mechanics to replace the loss of dexterity.
Anyway, the only applications I could see is :
- When converting video games as board games (or vice versa). If some mechanics groups needs to be removed, you might need to add or change new groups.
- When a game is inspired on another game. If you inspire yourself from another game but remove a mechanic category you do not like, you might need to replace it with a new one.
- Have an idea of the mechanics categories available. If you are searching for a mechanic replacement.
- Playing with mechanics: Moving mechanics categories around to analyse the various results. For example: "Dungeon Twister" is an inconventional dungeon crawler, so it's an example of mechanics group substitution.
But in the ends detailed mechanics like "hand management" and "auction" could be used for the same purpose. The only restriction I could see is that they must be universal to any type of game. For example, resource management can be handle in many different ways regardless of platform. A "Set Collection" mechanics can be handled in very little ways and could be restricted to certain platforms.
Anyways, I'll continue to give it some thought and see if regular mechanics could do the job.