TTRPG design consists of a bunch of different things, and the relationships and interactions between them lead to something hopefully greater than the sum of its parts. 

What are the things we’re concerned with when we design a TTRPG? Well, a lot of people would say “mechanics”. You might define mechanics as the rules and processes of the game and how they interact. The mechanics define how the game works. But a TTRPG isn’t just the relationships between these rules and processes, in my opinion. It’s also the relationships between writing, world building, art and covers, layout, modules, the book’s dimensions, the community, and arguably more. These things are often equal to or greater in importance to mechanics in their impact in the game. 

A lot of TTRPG designers like to place these things under the umbrella of mechanics. The instinct is valid: It acknowledges that many things impact gameplay. It’s more useful in my opinion to acknowledge that all of these things are in dialogue with your mechanics, with their own unique ways of relating to your players, and to reserve the term mechanics for specifically the rules and processes of the game and how they interact. A car is more than the motor, and to call the seats, the exterior and everything else all “the motor” is both a misnomer and does a disservice to how everything else contributes to the driving experience, even though doing so might acknowledge that they’re all important to the car as a whole.

The city of Duskvol in Blades in the Dark is surrounded by a the lightning barrier that traps most inhabitants of the city within its walls. This takes the mechanics of the game, and places them in a city you can’t escape from. This is essential to the experience of Blades in the Dark. This phenomena is world-building, and it works in concert with actual mechanics that are in place to make life in Duskvol feel doomed and inescapable. It’s not a mechanic, but it’s still important.

The size and finish of Yazaeba’s Bed and Breakfast is really important to the gameplay: It’s a tome, a coffee table book, with a fancy cover and sleeve, and you’re supposed to put stickers in it. Now, using stickers is a mechanic: The choice to put those stickers into a very expensive, incredibly thick tome full of full illustrated premium glossy paper is not. But it impacts gameplay, and it tells you about the place this game is supposed to have in your collection and potentially in the life of the people playing it. 

In TTRPGs, it is rare for one person to be responsible for all of these things. Would Advanced Fantasy Dungeons have been the same game without Hodag’s art? Hell no. It wasn’t a mechanic I designed. I didn’t dictate specifics to Hodag at all. I gave Hodag ideas and collaborated. Would Mörk Borg be the same without Johan Nohr’s layout? Of course not. It’s a huge contributor to the gameplay. It changes how you interpret the text, compared to the plain text version. But it doesn’t define how the game works. Calling these things mechanics suggests to me, that Pille Nilsson or I were somehow responsible for this. Auteur TTRPG designers. But we weren’t: This is why we collaborate. Of course, having a vision beyond the mechanics is something a TTRPG designer might have: I imagine that many TTRPG designers think something like “I have this in mind, I will seek a collaborator that can achieve this”, but that doesn’t mean the results of that collaboration are a mechanic craeted by the TTRPG designer.

I think that embracing the multitudes that consist TTRPGs: writing, world building, art and covers, layout, modules, the book’s dimensions, the community, mechanics, and more, makes us better at creating, interpreting and playing. I want to embrace the complexity of the art we make art, and the unique ways in which embracing all of these things that consist our TTRPGs can relate to our players and readers. So, maybe we can start by not calling everything a mechanic, and instead work on being comfortable with being creators that work across multitudes of mediums.

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