I want to talk about both elegant and inelegant mechanics in TRPGs, but in jumping right into that I wrote a full length article before that talking about what elegance is and isn’t in the context of games generally and in TRPGs. I decided to thus split the article in half. This first half is about elegance generally as a concept, and looking a few examples. The next article is about negative examples.
Elegance is often the goal of game designers, particularly in video game design. More elegance is better, but what is elegance and how does it apply to TTRPG design? Elegance is an imaginary ratio of two unmeasurable ideas: Depth and Complexity. The more depth per complexity, the more elegant a game is. It’s a simple concept itself, but hard to think about as, again, it is unmeasurable. The most common mistake is that simplicity and elegance go hand in hand, this is definitely not always the case. As someone who has done mostly video game design I think a telltale sign of elegance is when adding one mechanic spirals into a ton of different options and ideas for the person playing the game, when a tiny change goes from feeling like a prototype to a game that you want to play.
Applying this to TRPGs can be confusing, there exists in the world one page RPGs, where “all” the rules fit on a single page, and because by their nature RPGs allow for any action and any story to unfold, a one page RPG is the most elegant… except why is “all” in scare quotes like this?
Complexity
Let’s not answer that question just yet and talk about complexity. Complexity is: how many rules exist. How many attributes do you have? How much maths are needed to resolve an action? What details do players need to keep in mind while making choices?
For an example of a complex game I’m going to pick on Chess. Chess has 6 different pieces, each with their own movement, rules for taking pieces, and several special edge case rules that are used very rarely such as King-Castle. It’s has a large number of rules, but a relatively high depth. There are a lot of different chess games any two people can play against each other, of course this is in part due to the virtue of PvP, but either way. It’s a relatively elegant game.
A simple game is checkers. Checkers has a lot less rules. Only one type of piece, one movement rule, one way to take pieces, and only one additional rule (king-pieces) to consider if and when it comes up. Checkers though loses out on depth as there are a much smaller number of options you have at any given moment and a much smaller number of possible ways a game can go, even with PvP on its side.
An elegant game, is Go. While Chess is elegant to a point, Go is just more elegant. Go has no movement rules, instead players just take turns placing white or black tokens on a board trying to take up the most area. The game is simple, but there is more strategic and mechanical depth in the simpler rules than in Chess. Because it is both less complicated and has more depth we can say that it is more elegant than chess, with relative certainty.
In RPGs the most common forms of complexity are enumerated powers. Each feat, attribute, status ailment, effect, class feature, racial feature, etc gives another thing that both the player playing the character with that enumerated power and the referee must keep in mind. There are also procedures, a more complicated to explain type of complexity which tend to crop up the more things you try to do with a game. More on that later.
Depth
Depth is super weird, very difficulty to pin down, and just a mess. At it’s core, Depth is about choice. How many choices can you make? This is about tactical choices, calculations, etc. This is is deeply linked to the idea of Information Choice Impact where the more of these things your complexity can provide for your players the more depth you’ll often get out of these choices. Additionally we may want to consider what effects can those choices have.
The amount of unique outcomes a single rule might bring, is an important type of depth. One easy example of this is actually the idea of partial success. Imagine an RPG where all tasks are resolved by rolling a d6. On a 1 you critically fail, On a 2 you fail, on a 3 or 4 your succeed at a cost, on a 5 you succeed, and on a 6 you critically succeed. This system is very simple (no adding, no stats to consider, not a lot of numbers to keep track of, pretty intuitive to understand). It also has 5 different outcomes, that’s a lot of outcomes for one simple system: It’s elegant….or actually not really.
Depth isn’t just unique outcomes but also unique inputs. What matters in your game. The more things matter the more depth there is. This is a lot harder to come up with an example, but imagine the +1 and +2 bonuses of 3rd edition. Trying to stack those bonuses as high as possible is a huge part of the game, but it also makes a bunch of little things important. Things like “Do you have the high ground”, “How trained are you in doing this”, “Do you have the enemy surrounded”, etc. The more things matter, the more players take them into account, the more this happens the more depth your game has. Ha! Bet you didn’t see me defending 3.5s weird maths fetish did you? Well see I still have surprises.
This is the type of complexity people tend to add the most seeking depth: things to keep track of. It’s good, except it’s just about always 1 to 1. This means the deepest games have the most of these but at the same time deepest, not most elegant, as it has a poor ratio to begin with. This is why the 5e Advantage system is more elegant. It gives a lot of the same depth, but forces you to keep it simple thus meaning tons of things matter, but only if the benefits affecting you are unequal to the downsides and only 1 matters at the end of the day anyway. Still, many people dislike this system because it reduces depth, which is true, but it does increase elegance.
Seeking this type of depth is also the reason a lot of designers introduce difficulty to their games, though they do so in vain (next week’s topic). This type of depth is also complicated in RPGs because of the aforementioned tactical infinity, that is you can do anything in RPGs, so we need a way to make one something different from another something. Of course we usually do this using the most complicated rules set known to the mortal world: Language (blasted thing. Bane of my existence).
Depth is also the number of distinct things you can do. How many video games don’t let you open doors, interact with certain objects in any way, etc. The more supported they are the more depth there often is with them. This is the best kind of depth, at least for my money. If you can get a lot of mileage out of a single system it is great. The overloaded encounter die (as much as I actually dislike it) is a great example of this. If you make everything work on a generic Encounter Die you can do just about anything with this mechanic, and with a tiny bit of customisation it can be a deeper and deeper exploration of that idea. A great example of this is really deep mini-games inside other games with just a few rules, but that really give a lot of the other kinds of depth as well. It’s this in combination with those other kinds of depth that allow you to make really elegant games.
This gives us a possible maxim: A mechanic should add multiple types of depth, to be worth the complexity, and the more complex the mechanic the more imperative it is that it does so. That said, even some maxim like that doesn’t always help us, because RPGs are weird. Designing RPGs are weird. I mean writing a book that will be half read half skimmed and mostly ignored is.. as far as design goes: it’s weird. I went to school for City Design for a few years, and while yes, people will ignore your “Keep off the grass” signs (pro tip: don’t put grass down if you don’t want people walking on it) most people who walk through the part aren’t going to skip sections of the park entirely and just teleport to the other side.
This is why I want to talk about this in RPGs: because it’s just so damned complex. RPGs tend towards complexity even in cases when they are simple, even in the case of those 1 page RPGs.
Proceduralism
I am a proceduralist. I think RPGs need them, and we all use them, even if we are not conscious of it. Part of the proceduralist manifesto (from Slouching Towards Proceduralism by all dead generations) states that procedures are often unspoken and here is the catch: If you added in the “open game” or unspoken rules of RPGs almost all of them become breath takingly complicated, take Errant which is quite the large book with a great deal of text describing a great many things but could have been printed as a 1 page game if it was printed without the procedures. This is especially obvious to anyone who is a bottom up thinker or who has executive functioning issues, as top down thinkers who can break down tasks into pieces as a matter of habit don’t even notice they are doing so. RPG rules are vague, and the more vague they are the less space they take up, but space does not equal complicated or simple.
At its core, this is because RPGs are not Pop Culture, that is: corporatised mass market culture who’s use is controlled by big organisations. They are Folk Culture. Each table is an idiosyncratic reimagining of the rulebook they keep at the table. Because of this each group will have their own set of rules they actually follow and interpretation of the text in the rule book which they use at the table. Additionally each group will create procedures to suit their play culture that will take up the majority of the time spent actually playing the game.
This presents a problem, because once procedures become internalised from repetition they basically fade into the background of the game and are barely noticed any more. They don’t feel like rules in the same way the “normal rules” do because they are structure rather than rules. It feels like judging a games elegance based on the engine rather than the actual player facing mechanics. We don’t judge Pac Man’s complexity based on how it stores data or breaks the map down into 8 pixel regions. Except, procedures are probably some of the most player facing mechanics in RPGs that have the biggest impact in moment to moment game play and shape play cultures.
Procedures are a great source of elegance, and a great way to make a game overly complex. Make no mistake, however, not writing them down does not exempt you from the complexity tax they impose on your game. The more things you do, the more procedures will be implied, the more procedures are implied the more complex your game is. This is why proceduralism matters: because you can make those procedures powerful and deep, rather than leave them unstated and watch people make their own shallow complex procedures out of the implications of your text.
Conclusions
Elegance is a really complex topic in RPGs, and while I can’t offer anything definitive to say to cap this off, I want to say I’m going to continue talking about this next week. Specifically about how difficulty, and more specific mechanics and procedures and what is both good and bad about them. This is a not a list of statement, but an attempt to start a conversation. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts about this. What RPGs feel deep to you? Which of these deep games are elegant? What do you think about it all? etc. etc.
Thanks for reading
Fae Errant 
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