The Mechanics
of Flavor
June 13th, 2011
Flavor, fluff, background, story, atmosphere—call it what you want, it’s vitally important in the tabletop roleplaying game business. In fact, I would argue that it’s vitally important in just about any kind of entertainment, and, really, tabletop game designers can probably get a lot more leeway from lousy flavor than Hollywood movie writers, for example (on the other hand, the success of movies that seem to rely wholly on big explosions and flashy CG effects may prove me wrong, there). Still, I think that the importance of strong flavor for tabletop roleplaying games, and supplements for those games, is painfully understated these days, and I wanted to take some time to talk about that, and how it relates to game design.
I’ve recently gone on a bit of a nostalgia trip and played a couple of the more recent Pokemon games (if your head is spinning from that jarring change of topic, have patience, I’ll get back to the point in a second). Though I do enjoy the games, revisiting the franchise 10 years after my first encounter at age 12 gave me a perspective which allowed me to realize something about the games: when you strip away all of the cute monsters and the cool-sounding attacks, at the end of the day, Pokemon is a game about emptying and filling progress bars. You empty the opponent’s health bar, and that increases your progress on your experience bar. Do that enough, and you level up, get a handful of small bonuses to your stats (at staggered levels you get extra rewards like new moves or large bursts to your stats through evolution), and repeat the process all over again. When your own health bar gets low you go to the Pokemon center, refill it, and carry on.
At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with this system. It’s ultimately what a lot of RPGs break down to, and more than a handful of D&D players view the game in largely that light. When viewed with all of the trappings of cute monsters and evolved forms and a vague storyline involving collecting badges, it’s quite fun. If all you see in the game is a collection of bars, however, it quickly becomes quite tedious.
Now, perhaps, you can see how this ties into my point today about the importance of including flavor in gaming rulebooks. At their roots, games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder have a specific flavor that they are trying to evoke with their game, namely fantasy adventure. The exact subgenre of fantasy adventure (whether the classic sword-and-sorcery, or gritty dark fantasy, or over-the-top high fantasy, etc., etc., etc.) varies from edition to edition, and campaign setting to campaign setting, but at the end of the day the point is that there’s magic, monsters, and guys in shining armor.
It’s true, of course, that not all games rely heavily on their flavor. Baseball, for example, and other sports, for that matter, don’t really have any flavor to them. On the other hand, sports matches are always more interesting when they have rivalry and subtext to them. Chess, similarly, is a game that doesn’t really make any use of what little flavor it does have, of two medieval kingdoms going to war. Rather, these games are solely about the skill and mechanics of the game involved, with the players competing against each other to see who can come up with the best strategy or hit the ball the farthest. In this case, the rules really just form a structure to rein in the competition between teams or individuals, so that it remains friendly and doesn’t end with you tackling your opponent and shoving chess pieces up his nose.
For some people, this is largely what roleplaying games boil down to as well: whoever can use the rules to create the strongest and most powerful character is the winner, to some. To others, the game takes on a competition of the players, working together, against the DM, who actively works to kill them off, restrained in his omnipotence only by the rules of random encounter tables, randomized treasure tables, and the like: though he can’t throw a CR 30 dragon at level 1 characters, in appropriately difficult encounters he will gleefully cackle as his monster minions pick off the characters one by one. That’s fine, and if that’s something you enjoy about the game, then I don’t want to discourage you from playing that way (not that you’d listen, but my point is that you shouldn’t feel ashamed of playing that way).
For most people these days, however, Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder and a whole host of similar games are primarily about a story. These games serve as a sort of collaborative storytelling, whether it’s the tale of an adventure, or a handful of heroes, or the DM’s magnum opus, or perhaps all of the above. Each member of the group contributes to the story, though the DM usually has the largest contribution.
If this sounds a little too touchy-feely-acting-classes-new-age-story-circle for some of you, that’s not surprising: after all, though the game does serve as a collaborative story, you don’t get to just make whatever declarations you want and have them stick. The rules in these games serve not so much to provide boundaries to keep competition between players from getting dangerous, as they do to reign in the storytelling aspects of the game and keep people from declaring that their level 2 dirt farmer can kill gods with his magical pitchfork (without being able to back it up in the rules, at least).
In this way, most RPGs exist on two layers: there is the story layer, which is where your character is Elric the Bastard, who has some drinking, gambling, and womanizing problems, is incredibly lazy for an adventurer, and has aspirations of retiring to a small villa when he finally gets his last “big score.” This layer is where all the fluff happens, and it’s the part of the game that most players derive the most excitement from (note that I’m not saying it’s better than the other layer, or would even be very interesting without the other layer, I’m just saying that without this layer “battling gnolls” becomes “making attack and damage rolls against an AC score of X”).
The other layer is the mechanics layer, which is composed of nothing but numbers, and words that have a specific meaning in the rules of the game. Elric the Bastard isn’t a competent swordsman, he’s a level 3 fighter. He doesn’t specialize in the bastard sword; he just gains a +2 bonus on damage rolls. He’s not charming and charismatic; he simply gains a +4 bonus on all skills that rely on the Charisma stat. He’s not durable; he just has 28 hit points. You get the idea.
Because the rules of the game (the mechanics layer) are the end authority on the success and failure of various actions, they basically form something like the laws of physics for the game world. Want to perform action X? You’ll need mechanics Y. Or else that action is simply not allowed by the game (in which case an addendum or amendment can be made in the form of a feat, class feature, racial trait, skill trick, spell, magic item, or the like). In this way, the mechanical layer is more “real” than the flavor layer, and if the two come into conflict (unless your DM intervenes), the mechanical layer will always do exactly what it wants to do, and the flavor layer will have to scramble to work around it.
In this way, if you want to introduce any kind of special element to your character (or item, or race, or spell, or class, or monster) on the flavor layer, if you want it to impact the game in any meaningful way, it needs to also have some complimentary components on the mechanics layer. You can write a 47-page backstory about how you’re the son of Zeus and have all sorts of mystical powers, or that you are the chosen one and your destiny is X-Y-Z, or even just that you’re a cool race that you read about in a book, but unless you have some mechanics to back you up, you’re going to be treated just like any other random human (or, for example, if the race you wanted to play was Klingons, you’d probably be treated like any other random half-orc).
This principle is, in a way, the very essence of what Necromancers of the Northwest has really been about. Our first book, Liber Vampyr, was all about providing mechanical ways for players to be something that many of them wanted to be, but had always had difficulty with: a vampire. It’s a theme you can see us revisit often: The Book of Purifying Flames, Marchen der Daemonwulf, The Book of Faith, any of the Ancient Warriors books: all of these products arose from a desire to take an idea on the flavor layer, and find ways of integrating it into the mechanical layer to really make it part of the game, and to make the rules of the game really reinforce the feelings and flavor we wanted to evoke with the content.
The message I’m trying to get across here, I think, is that flavor and mechanics are intimately connected. Flavor without mechanics is meaningless fluttering in the breeze. Mechanics without flavor are dull, dry, and boring. Sometimes, of course, in game design, the mechanics take the lead, and we’ve definitely written books that focus more on innovative mechanics than on tying flavor in to mechanics (Advanced Arcana, Secrets of the Staff, and Orbs of Power come immediately to mind), but there always needs to be an element of both present in order for the content to be any good. Worst of all is when the flavor and the mechanics find themselves at cross-purposes (something for another article).
It’s important to pay attention to the ties between the flavor and the mechanics, and make sure that they really tie tog ether in ways that you want. The entire purpose behind The Book of Faith was to take the cleric class, and find ways of better connecting its flavor (that of getting divine magic directly from a deity that the cleric had a personal connection with) to its mechanics (a wizard who can wear armor, fight better in combat, and blast undead, but has a slightly more limited list of spells).
Recently, I heard some people arguing about which edition of a popular game they preferred. It’s a common phenomenon, and you often hear fans discussing the merits of one game system versus another, especially among gamers like, presumably, yourself, who take a look at small and third-party publishers, and are aware that there are a lot of different games out there, and have maybe tried a few of them. One was explaining that he didn’t like the flavor of edition X, and so stuck with edition W. The other gamer argued that there was nothing stopping you from using that same flavor with the new edition, as it was your game and you can do what you want.
This is an easy pitfall to fall into, and it’s both true and not true. On the one hand, yes, you can just declare changes in flavor, especially if the flavor has to do more with the setting than anything else. And yes, it’s your game, and you can, to a certain extent, dictate the flavor of the game. At the same time, though, in good game design the flavor is tied intricately to the mechanics, and sometimes you really can’t just staple the old flavor onto the new game.
As an example of the power of creativity and DM (or player) fiat over the game, I’m currently playing a sorcerer in a Pathfinder game. For whatever reason, I decided I wanted my sorcerer to have gotten his magical abilities as an event late in his life, rather than from a bloodline. He still picked a bloodline (arcane), and had all the powers, they just didn’t have anything to do with his ancestry. In the same way, if you wanted to have a battle wizard who was able to cast spells, wear armor, and fight passably well, but were limited to just base classes (and core base classes, at that) you could get by reasonably well by playing a cleric.
On the other hand, let’s take a moment to examine the alchemist from the Advanced Player’s Guide. For those of you who haven’t picked up the Advanced Player’s Guide, the alchemist is a new base class that purports to provide support for players who really want to play characters focused on the arcane art of alchemy (but not spellcasting).
I was initially really excited when I heard about the alchemist class, because creating mechanical support for a flavor concept hitherto unrepresented is something near and dear to my heart, as that’s one of the major things we do here at NNW. An alchemist class was certainly a tall order to fill, as anyone who’s ever played much D&D knows that alchemical items tend to stop being useful after level 5 or so, and even magic potions are only able to replicate relatively low-level spells. I was enthusiastic to see what kinds of cool mechanics they had come up with in order to evoke the flavor of alchemy and make it relevant on both layers of gameplay.
When I discovered their solution was to have the alchemist’s “extracts” be spells that he could only cast on himself (flavored as drinking potions, but with great pains being made to prevent these potions being mechanically different in any way from spellcasting, to the point where they get a certain number of each level each day, take an hour to prepare them, and they fade into nothingness at the end of the day. In fact, they even use spellbooks), and bombs which are painfully reminiscent of the eldritch blast ability of 3.5 edition warlocks (albeit a limited number of times per day, and in a different shape, but the point remains that there’s an inherently bomb-y feel about the class feature, except perhaps the shape of the attack).
It’s not that the alchemist is a bad class. I’m sure it’s very well thought-out from a purely mechanical perspective. And the flavor is pretty cool as well, and certainly all-inclusive: bombs, poisons, alchemical “discoveries,” and even mutagens for the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fans. It’s just that the flavor—the names of the abilities, all the fluff descriptions about the class—really don’t sync up that much with the mechanics—what the class actually does within the rules of the game. The class could just as easily have been “the demon worshipper,” with extracts being replaced with blessings, bombs replaced by blasts of hellfire, and mutagens replaced by demonic possession, for example.
The problem here, really, is that when it eventually dawns on you that the flavor of the class has nothing to do with the mechanics, you suddenly peer through the veil of fun and excitement that the flavor layer exists to create, and are staring at the ugly, naked workings of a system where everything you do is essentially adding a random number between 1 and 20 to a static number and compare it to a third number. Or, for another example, endlessly filling and emptying various progress bars. This, naturally, shatters suspension of disbelief, and, by extension, hurts the game.
That’s probably more than enough for this week, so I’m going to go ahead and end the article here, but the importance of the interrelationship between flavor and mechanics is something that I will likely revisit in the future, as I think it’s key to good game design (at least in roleplaying games). Join me next week, when I’ll be discussing frontier settings, and, in the meantime, never underestimate the importance of either a good idea, or the machinery necessary to implement it.