The "Friction" Theory of TTRPG Mechanics

The Idea

I often see a rules light game complimented by saying its rules, "get out of the way" or "don't slow things down" during play. Whereas I also see (usually different people) say that rules light games are too ephemeral, or there's not enough "meat" there.

I've had the thought that both of these statements are actually talking about the same thing.

Mechanics in a TTRPG provide friction. They slow things down, and they provide grip.

When you encounter a situation that requires interfacing with mechanics, that often means pausing the narration, consulting the rules (depending on complexity), and rolling dice before you can continue.

This can be bad, if it interrupts an otherwise good flow of conversation and narration. But it can also be good, if it provides a slight pause at the right time. That pause can build tension, provide a moment of bated breath before the dice hits the table and we know what happens next.

The friction from mechanics also lets the players grip the game, and the game world. Mechanics provide knowable, predictable ways in which the players can interact with the world. A bit of grit to help hold onto the otherwise nebulous shared space of ideas everyone at the table is contributing to.

Not enough friction, and your grip might slip causing the fictional world to become ethereal and unreal and difficult to properly interact with. Too much friction, though, and it might become hard to move easily and lead to spending more time thinking about mechanics than what's going on in the world.

First Example: Increasing Friction

This is something I was thinking about recently while working on my Cairn hack Meteor. My original rules for flying a space ship around a solar system were very light and nebulous; my initial instinct for RPG rules is to go as light as possible and see if it works. In this case, all I had was rough guidelines for how long it took to get to "nearby" and "distant" locations. In practice this wasn't enough. A solar system is too large, too abstract, and too disconnected from the norm to be easily imagined in a way that everyone at the table will agree with. Not enough friction.

 

So I added some basic exploration rules. Broke the system up into orbital zones, provided a basic map that can be used for any system, and some simple navigation mechanics. Still relatively light, I didn't want this to bog down the process of simply flying form point A to point B, but now it had enough friction that there were actual decisions to make during that process.

I had to add a little bit of grit to make sure players could properly grab onto the game.

Second Example: Reducing Friction

As an opposed example, in my game Brighter Worlds I was anticipating a campaign where much of the time was spend hex crawling through the wilderness. I wanted a mechanic to track supplies and interface with wilderness survival to provide pressure to return to settlements to restock and recover. I originally had a complex set of mechanics involving usage dice and opposed Saves that were dependent on the severity of the environment and the skills of the characters. At the table, this was simply too much. I found myself apprehensive when finishing a day of exploration since I'd have to now interface with a whole new system. Too much friction.

 

Instead I collapsed it down to a single Save each day (using the same mechanic as the rest of the game) plus an abstracted "Supplies" item. This created a small moment that paused conversation and had me ask "okay who's in charge of food tonight" and a single roll to see how that turned out and if they had to expend supplies. That's all that was needed to focus the conversation, remember that we're out in the wilderness, and let the players know they should usually have some emergency supplies on hand in case fishing or hunting isn't successful. Possibly most importantly, it was a nice ritual to create routines and encourage the players to develop out their character's habits and opinions. This is how we ended up with a canon where magically duplicated pickled eggs formed the basis of every meal, and one of the characters may or may not be a cannibal (he says it really depends on the definition!).

The original system had too much friction, but if I had taken it all the way down to zero there wouldn't be that slight sticking point to spark all these fun conversations.

Vague Outro

So that's the thesis here. Add friction to your game when you want to make things pause, either to breath or for dramatic effect, or when you want to provide a place for players to "grab onto" the game and interface with the world. Remove friction from the game when you want to speed things up, when you find you're spending time on something the table isn't interested in, or when you're finding the flow of the table is being interrupted by the rules.

I don't think this view of mechanics is revealing some hidden truth or particularly groundbreaking, but it's been a useful mental model for my own writing and it might be helpful to others as well.