When designing a game of any sort, you should have a clear vision of what you want the end result to look like. Whether it be a mechanical or narrative focus, the game needs a core to base all decisions upon in order to move it forward.

I will use two of my personal favorite Tabletop RPGs as examples of what to do and what what not to do. Let’s start with the praise. The Alien RPG by Free League is absolutely top tier in this philosophy. They took the premise of Action/Horror with fast and brutal gameplay and really nailed it. The base mechanics are simple and intuitive. At its core, all you have to do as add a skill to an attribute, roll that many 6-sided dice, and count the sixes.

The stress dice add a another layer by having a resource you need to manage and making you look for ones on these dice as well. The added rules are far from complexity for the sake of complexity. As characters become more stressed, their odds of succeeding do increase, but it is the only way that failure can have immediate disastrous effects. Rolling a one on any stress die automatically fails a roll regardless of any sixes and the player must roll on the panic table to see how badly their panic goes. It results in a slow buildup where the benefits generally outweigh the negatives at first but as the game goes on, characters start panicking with increasing frequency and really racks up the tension of each dice roll.

What also helps is what they decide to leave out. The game favors a cinematic approach over a tactical or simulationist one. Ammunition is not counted for most firearms, the only time a gun runs out of ammunition is if a character panics while firing or if its purposely a clunky weapon to use. Along with that, the normal grid based tactical combat you see in many traditional TTRPGs is removed in favor of a zone-based map that gives rough approximations of where characters are located in relation to each other. Since the goal is much more cinematic, being able to fudge distances a little and give players more creative liberty with how they use their environment.

Now for the not so great. Shadowrun 5th Edition by Catalyst Games Labs has its rough points for sure. I have been playing Shadowrun quite regularly with this edition for years and intend to keep playing it for some time to come, but the rules have their serious problems. Overall I’m a fan of the base rule set, it’s actually not that much different than the Alien RPG. Add your Attribute, Skill, and relevant modifiers. Roll that number of six sided dice count the fives and sixes, if more than half the results are ones then there is a complication. From there, each major section of the game has its own special rules for combat, driving, hacking, magic, etc. All that makes sense from a game about professional criminals with specific roles in a group. How better to make your players feel like a specialist than giving them a system to learn better than the rest of the party so they are the go-to person both in and out of character for that subject?

The problem comes when the rules become disjointed from the fiction. Shadowrun specifically suffers from a problem of trying to be too simulationist without revisiting its core focus often enough. It sells itself on being a tactical specialization application game about punks fighting the dystopic powers and career criminals trying to survive. At face value it meets these goals, but became very disjointed.

Hacking is meant to feel like it comes out of Neuromancer, fast as the speed of thought virtual reality hackers ripping through brain frying security measures just in time for their teams to do what is needed just as the team needs things. In reality, the rules can be quite slow and cumbersome. Virtual Reality often means hackers have to choose between being fast enough in the matrix to be useful or not being a liablity as their body goes limp and must be carried around. Especially as the mechanics have moved towards encouraging hackers to act at the same speed as combat. It’s possible in many situations to hack enemy weapons, cyberware, and other gear. Unfortunately with the way the action economy works, the amount of time it takes a hacker to get access to a device and make it do something, a combat oriented character will often neutralize two or thee enemies. Rarely is it more worthwhile than having the hacker just pick up a firearm themselves and the design gives the wrong impression to new players that a combat decker who focuses on crowd control is a viable on the fly role. To get anywhere close to that fiction requires a decent amount of preliminary battleground preparation that is limited by the same mechanic that was meant to keep players from hacking a target weeks in advance and just chilling in the target network.

Along similar lines, magic users are meant to feel powerful but niche. A well timed spell can make or break a run, but magic is supposed to be rare and dangerous. Instead, magic is very powerful and its drawbacks don’t have much teeth. In most cases, a well designed magician could replace almost every other member of a team.

The game most suffers from what it doesn’t bring to the table either. A common trope of these kinds of games it to have investigative legwork before a job is done. Collect intelligence on a target, try to get some early leverage, or acquire necessary equipment. The game itself gives almost no guidelines for how to manage this, keep it interesting, or what level of risk is appropriate. They completely leave it on the Game Master, which can be quite daunting for newbies or those who are used to very different styles of game.