Mechanics Have Feelings Too: Wooden Stacking Blocks
Mechanics Have Feelings Too: Wooden Stacking Blocks
Fear Requires Hope
By BRANDON GUTOWSKI, C22 SYSTEM
At first glance this may seem like the obligatory Halloween episode of the series, and if it does not, you have not been using wooden stacking blocks in your RPGs correctly.
Wooden stacking blocks became most popular as a game mechanic via the board game Jenga. In that game you take turns removing wooden blocks stacked in sets of three. You take a block out of one row with your hand, and then place it on the top. After waiting a few seconds to ensure the tower's stability, your turn ends. Whoever causes the tower to fall, loses the game.
Mechanics Involved and Feelings Evoked
Breaking down the rules and steps I listed above we can target the feelings evoked and the moments they occur.
The Fall: First, we have the most obvious mechanic that ends the game, The Fall. When the tower falls, the game ends, someone loses. It is a very obvious, clear, and impactful event. While Jenga uses the game end as the stakes to bring its meaning, The Fall has emotions of its own. When the tower collapses, there is the sudden sound of blocks hitting the table. The tower takes a dramatic visual change of state. The sound is often shocking and then the game stops itself from being able to be played. This is a very clear transition that something is different. Once The Fall occurs, if you want to continue the game, the mechanics require a reset where there is time to reflect what just happened. There are few game mechanics that have such a strong transition.
The Pull: Secondly we have The Pull. You use one hand at a time to remove a block from the tower and place it on the top. Your dexterity and skill are on full display as you perform this action. This creates a strong association between the results of the pull and you. Essentially, pass or fail, you were completely responsible. The Pull has an additional component where, as the tower's stake becomes more and more precarious, the chances of failure increase but the feeling of reward also increases. So The Pull has a strong built-in association between player and results, and a natural difficulty progression.
The Waiting: Finally, we have the waiting. During The Pull from first contact to placing on the topic there is a natural tension that only increases as you watch the tower hoping its new state does not cause it to fall. Then once the block is placed you have a second dose of this tension. The tension's intensity scales with the state of the tower. More precarious, more tense. The elegance of these two moments where all players are anticipating the resolution of the result, is the lack of clarity in its occurrence timing.
If the tower is particularly unstable, it will immediately trigger The Fall, if it is only slightly, then The Fall happens in slow motion. This lack of predictability of the occurrence timing only draws out this anticipation period and creates a feeling that the tower could fall at any moment. Therefore, the feeling of anticipation of The Fall lasts for the longest possible time. If the tower falls between .5 and 10 seconds after the pull, then unless the tower falls, the length that the players anticipate the fall is always 10 seconds. This method of evoking feelings is naturally baked into mechanics themselves, irrespective of the stakes from the game.
The Stakes From the Narrative
So far in this series we have not covered a mechanic with so many feelings packed into the mechanics themselves. That is a good and a bad thing in that it amplifies games that play off these feelings but is inflexible in the games and stories that can be told with them.
So how do we guarantee we are using the wooden stacking blocks where it can enhance our game rather than hinder it? If we work around the three feelings outlined above we can.
The Fall delivers the feeling of finality, of end but also something you want to avoid. The Pull delivers the feeling of player effect and responsibility. The Wait delivers the tension.
Finality and end is the strongest and most defining feeling so it makes sense to focus on how that shapes the narrative. The Fall is impactful and feels like a transition, so the narrative stakes that occur with it need to align with its feelings or the game’s overalls feelings get muddy. If the reward for succeeding on a pull is a successfully disarmed trap but the fall is that a guard heard a noise, the game's feelings become confused from its core. Furthermore, The Fall must be something the players benefit from delaying. Without this the player is incentivized to fail The Pull to force the benefits of The Fall to occur. So to appropriately use The Fall, it needs to have a narrative inevitably that triggers a significant change. A major milestone in a story, the end of a scene, the end of the game; all of these would be appropriate.
The Pull and the waiting are both accessories to The Fall in any wooden block based games. Adding player ownership and adding tension can fit many tabletop roleplay game stories.
How the Fall Can Create Fear
Now to tie this back to my favorite use of The Fall in roleplaying games and this article's Halloween theme. It’s not enough just to fail to pick a lock when the tower falls. The emotional resonance of The Fall demands higher stakes. The mechanics, and their feelings, influence play. You need an event of suitable gravitas to represent that crash. For instance, When the tower falls, a character dies.
This mechanic being tied to The Fall hits everything we want. It is something we want to avoid, it is a literal end, and it is something we need time to process as the tower is restacked. But let's look further into why the TTRPG element of character death during The Fall fits so well with the other aspects.
The Pull means ownership and responsibility. At no point in the game will the players feel they died due to someone else's actions or a bad roll. Their death is literally in their hands. The Wait builds tension, it makes us dwell on the TTRPG element of The Fall. If that element is something as scary as death, then the entirety of The Wait is dwelling on that death. But what happens during both The Pull and The Wait is what truly makes the Fear of The Fall so much greater.
Hope. Hope that the tower won't fall, hope that you find a loose block. These mechanics create hope, which is essential for fear, because otherwise there is just despair which is not an engaging experience.
I use this as an example of how all three built-in mechanics of stacking wooden blocks can be engaged in a TTRPG to give context to all of the previous explanation. Designers looking to use this as their main mechanic, focus on The Fall as it shapes the entire landscape of your design. Game Masters looking to spice up your games, look for session-long duration effects or scenes and have the tower represent that. A few examples:
A decaying ship that the players need to escape.
The eventual breakdown of the relationship between characters
A demon breaking out of its prison
The collective ignorance of guests at a supernatural-laden party.
Of the mechanics discussed this far in this series, Wooden stacking blocks have the most clear emotions evoked thus far that can be a huge boon to games when used right. Next time you play a TTRPG with wooden stacking blocks watch for the four core emotions: tension, player ownership, finality, and hope.
This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network’s blog series. The content of this article reflects the views of but one member of the IGDN. This IGDN blog article is brought to you by Brandon Gutowski of the C22 System. If you want to get in touch with the contributor he can be reached on Twitter at @c22system, on Facebook @PagodaGamesLLC, or visit their website at www.c22system.com.