(A) Feedback loops in design: Fate, DnD, OSR, BitD
This is archival material from previous blog
Let’s start with Fate. I really love Fate engine, I really do. There was a long time in my rpg career when I was basically devouring every piece of Fate design element I found. I was astonished when SRD went online. All the versions and variations. Me and my group from that time played a few times in various climates of Fate but it didn’t hook. Precisely due to the feedback loop being core of the Fate Core mechanics.
In Fate Core one of the main mechanics is spending Fate Points to add +2 to your roll or doing some other crazy things. But as a baseline you get 3 (or less) at the start of every session. In order to regain them you need to put your PC in trouble – either taking what GM offers or creating troubles by yourself. This is the issue my group had – neither of us was ready for the mindset of willingly choosing our characters’ demise. So as I recall my players usually chose throwaway aspects of trouble because they never felt they’d like to engage with something so directly detrimental. There are other feedback loops in Fate mechanics – like consequences giving opponents a chance of hurting you more in exchange for Fate Point. Fate overall is very nice to research various mechanical aspects due to its modularity. So yeah, the main case here is – in order to refill character potential you need to get in direct trouble. It’s a very self-induced, direct trouble-spiral way.
If you’re not that familiar with Fate maybe I can show you similar (in theory) feedback loop in DnD-like games. Healing and regaining abilities. After you lost some of the hit points you can lead your character to rest. Some resting systems give you full health back, some only part, some old school and old school revived systems heal only 1 hp per night of rest. It does also the same with spells and in later editions with other abilities. So from the Fate perspective it is very weak loop – the only thing your character need to do to regain their full potential is to go sleep. It makes sense as long as there are accurate conditions in adventure. If you cannot sleep anywhere, if it is dangerous and if your adventure has certain timer – so you won’t go to sleep after any lost hp/spell/ability use – only when it makes sense. Basically in dangerous wilds and in a dungeon. If you’re doing city adventure or sleeping in a dungeon is not risky it creates known in DnD communities problems. I cannot count how many posts from GMs I’ve seen asking for advice “what to do if my players just go out of the dungeon to sleep after every encounter”. It is very condition-dependent loop.
And then we have Blades in the Dark. It excels at creating these loops. You have payoff and entanglements after each score. That happens automatically. But you sometimes get hurt. To clear Harm you need to use a downtime action, probably more than one. It actually assumes that you never have enough time to lick your wounds, by design the world is like DnD dungeon in this terms. And since downtime actions are tangible you need to decide whether you go for healing or you spend it somehow else. It is like an elaborated system in DnD, where you may not rest in order to accomplish other things. I must say – this aspect is something I have always wanted in dnd-like systems. And the case which is similar to Fate is stress and vice mechanics. You get stress from doing crazy things, additionals, special abilities. Then you relieve it by indulging your vice (which is also an alternative to getting healthy). And overall indulgence is not something that instigates problems every time. Usually it is just fire-and-forget where you clear some stress. But if you want to relieve stress and don’t have too much then it is a gamble. Overindulgence means trouble.
These feedback loops are what makes the game going. I purposefully don’t mention systems for getting experience and development, because they are very specific kinds. So like, the DnD-ish system for getting health back works really great when you use it with old school premises. In the dungeon, with risky resting, and random encounters incentivising quicker crawling. Not sure about Fate, I mean, a lot of people played it and created content for it but in my experience we never pulled it off. I guess I have the wrong mindset. Blades creates a lot of options of choice, deciding how to spend downtime action, weight if it’s reasonable to clear stress now or wait to accumulate more (risking trauma for life). These are very fun in-game feedback loops but too much of them makes it very procedural, very mechanical, uninspired even. I made a mistake of focusing on some loops and in the end consequences of crew actions weren’t aligned with their actual activities.
Thinking of those dependencies in a system is very important. Being aware what really hides behind these seemingly minor mechanics can be decisive force behind the ‘feel’ of the system. And you can add certain fun ideas for your games and homebrews. I always think of how it could work for magic. How is it regained. I always tinker with it and what it actually accomplishes. If a wizard regains spells only in certain conditions they will seek those conditions – or be mad if adventure doesn’t incorporate them. Like if they need starry sky at night and adventure leads underground. If you get power by sacrifice then you’d be making these sacrifices or resorting to other things and treating magic as a last resort – if the system allows it. That’s also why magic-classes by design need easy to get, stable systems of regaining magic because it is the thing you do regularly – unreliable magic systems suggest magic is more in hands of the GM and is more of an adventure thing than just a tool in players hand.
There are endless possibilities of creating such loops and designing them around what you want to accomplish. Thinking of these loops as an abstraction can lead to better decisions. Though sometimes just acknowledging them might be hard.