Oct 21, 2026 · 47 min · 16 segments
Join Ang along with Josh and JT as they talk about how a game’s system informs the stories we tell with that game. Understanding the intentions behind a game’s design can help us both run and play…
What do we actually mean when we say the game's mechanics inform the story the game is trying to tell?
So there's a saying in the world of like corporate leadership that you make what you measure.
And basically that boils down to whatever you spend time tracking, whether that's, you know, hours spent at your desk or number of calls you've made.
Insert daily boring day job task here.
If you are measuring that, that's what your employees are going to spend time doing because it's important.
And the same kind of holds true for games and their rule systems.
If there are a hundred rules for combat and one rule for social encounters, guess what? You've got a combat game.
Ultimately, the game mechanics should help the GM and players experience the genre of the story that the game is trying to bring to the table.
The mechanics set how the characters interact with the world and the types of things they're going to be doing.
Like Josh just said, if the game focuses on combat and there's not a lot there to support out of combat skills or social interactions or that, then the game is supposed to focus on combat.
You know, if it's a horror game, how does it ramp up tension and emulate fear? If it's a superhero game, how does it make the characters feel powerful and feel like they have extra human powers? Examples of games, we've got Dread with its tension in the Jenga tower as you have to make pulls on an increasingly rickety tower to do things within the game's scope.
We have the conflict between modern 5e D&D and its bombastic superhero-level adventure compared with OSR-style games where It's meant to be grittier and, you know, a slower climb and more dangerous.
You know, it's meant to be a pulp style game where you're getting into, you know, the, you know, kind of these adventure stories.
So it's like, how do those mechanics fit what the game is trying to bring to the table?
And also, if you look at games in in the same genre, right, you can you can really see the difference in the way the mechanics are informing the storytelling.
For example, if you look at something like the Sentinels comics role playing game versus like the Invincible role playing game, right? Sentinels is all about telling big four color stories.
bright optimistic superhero stories invincible is not that and so the rules and the mechanics are going to focus more on like the brutal nature of the invincible universe and the consequences that you're going to accrue whereas um like the sentinels game is going to focus on how do you be that big damn hero how do you save the day in the most dramatic bombastic sense
yeah JT, you have anything to add here?
So yeah, this is from personal experience in game design.
I'm currently building out a role-playing game with some buddies.
I've been working on it for too long, but long enough, I guess you could say, to make a quality game.
And we wanted high-action, fast-paced adventure, and our first swing at Game mechanics involved rolling four dice, adding three of them together, and having the fourth die be a comparison against a target number as well, two different target numbers.
And that's a lot of latency.
Even, you know, you think, oh, you're just going to be adding three numbers.
What do we actually mean when we say the game's mechanics inform the story the game is trying to tell?
So there's a saying in the world of like corporate leadership that you make what you measure.
And basically that boils down to whatever you spend time tracking, whether that's, you know, hours spent at your desk or number of calls you've made.
Insert daily boring day job task here.
If you are measuring that, that's what your employees are going to spend time doing because it's important.
And the same kind of holds true for games and their rule systems.
If there are a hundred rules for combat and one rule for social encounters, guess what? You've got a combat game.
Ultimately, the game mechanics should help the GM and players experience the genre of the story that the game is trying to bring to the table.
The mechanics set how the characters interact with the world and the types of things they're going to be doing.
Like Josh just said, if the game focuses on combat and there's not a lot there to support out of combat skills or social interactions or that, then the game is supposed to focus on combat.
You know, if it's a horror game, how does it ramp up tension and emulate fear? If it's a superhero game, how does it make the characters feel powerful and feel like they have extra human powers? Examples of games, we've got Dread with its tension in the Jenga tower as you have to make pulls on an increasingly rickety tower to do things within the game's scope.
We have the conflict between modern 5e D&D and its bombastic superhero-level adventure compared with OSR-style games where It's meant to be grittier and, you know, a slower climb and more dangerous.
You know, it's meant to be a pulp style game where you're getting into, you know, the, you know, kind of these adventure stories.
So it's like, how do those mechanics fit what the game is trying to bring to the table?
And also, if you look at games in in the same genre, right, you can you can really see the difference in the way the mechanics are informing the storytelling.
For example, if you look at something like the Sentinels comics role playing game versus like the Invincible role playing game, right? Sentinels is all about telling big four color stories.
bright optimistic superhero stories invincible is not that and so the rules and the mechanics are going to focus more on like the brutal nature of the invincible universe and the consequences that you're going to accrue whereas um like the sentinels game is going to focus on how do you be that big damn hero how do you save the day in the most dramatic bombastic sense
yeah JT, you have anything to add here?
So yeah, this is from personal experience in game design.
I'm currently building out a role-playing game with some buddies.
I've been working on it for too long, but long enough, I guess you could say, to make a quality game.
And we wanted high-action, fast-paced adventure, and our first swing at Game mechanics involved rolling four dice, adding three of them together, and having the fourth die be a comparison against a target number as well, two different target numbers.
And that's a lot of latency.
Even, you know, you think, oh, you're just going to be adding three numbers.
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