Slices: Great RPG Mechanics

#RPGMechanics Week Three

Yesterday I talked about flashbacks as an element of play. Today I want to talk about them as a cornerstone. I’m using the term slice, as in vertical slice for this. I’m sure there’s a better way to say this. But these are games which anchor us to start at a specific point in time, a slice that we’re exploring. Some play happens there but the major is retrospective: incidents from the past, shared history, insights into tragedy. 

I think this represents more structure than a specific mechanic, but it is one worth pulling out. 

A couple of my favorite instances of this come from Pelgrane’s amazing rpg collection Seven Wonders. If you haven’t checked that out, you should. Each game is striking and interesting, revolving around a dynamite core concept and all very different from one another. 

Admittedly my favorite from the collection is Before the Storm by Joanna Piancastelli. It hits on many things I love: shared world building, exploration of history, tragic heroes. The game begins with the table reading through a prophecy about fighting off a potentially world-ending foe in a fantasy realm. The group then picks setting elements to define that and sets the tone. Finally each player builds a character using prompts generated from playing cards. 

Then we set the stage. It is the night before the great battle. Tomorrow our band of heroes will face off in a final confrontation with the Foe. They don’t know if they will live or die, triumph or fail. This is a last chance for the characters to talk, share secrets, and explore how they came to be here. Scenes in the present moment flash back to the past giving us insights into who these characters are.

The sketchiness of initial character creation supports this, letting up fill in details via these moments. Those Slices of the past do so much. You ask questions and explore those learning about each other. If you’ve played Final Fantasy X, you’ll recognize this as the Zanarkand moment.

There’s more to it– scenes generate cards which get played at the end. These determine both if the group succeeds or not and if the individual heroes live or die. I’ve enjoyed it every time I’ve played it and have even run it with a superhero re-skin ala Avengers: Endgame. 

Becky Annison’s When the Dark is Gone from Seven Wonders also takes a Slice approach. This rpg has a game facilitator in the form of a therapist who has brought together a group of clients with a shared history in order to make one last try at uncovering the group trauma which has so deeply affected them.

And as we discover that trauma stems from when they were younger and whisked away to a magical realm ala Chronicles of Narnia, isekai, DIE, etc. Here the present is the therapy session. The play is about playing out repressed memories and building a story of what happened in the past. The adventure has happened, it changed their lives, but they’ve not confronted that in the years since. It’s a great pitch and the game provides a lot of tools for digging into those concepts. 

I’m sure there are other games which establish a fixed point in the present with play being slices of the past. Lots of great fiction uses this flashback structure– seasons of TV shows which begin with the end and then go back to show us how we got there. I love these two especially for how both levels interact, exposing how the characters have changed. We see two versions, in some ways, of every PC and get to build a great shared setting and story.