Are questions about game mechanics in litrpgs allowed on this site?

Question

In a recent question, the idea of discussing worldbuilding in the context of game mechanics and litrpg things was discussed. KerrAvon2055 and sphennings stated that game mechanics were off limits for worldbuilding.

I disagreed, since litrpg is now very common for stories and worldbuilding, like He Who Fights Monsters, or The Completionist Chronicles, or Sufficiently Advanced Magic where game mechanics and ranks of powers are a core element of how worlds work, such as how in He Who Fights Monsters you rank up by fighting monsters from Iron to Bronze to Silver to Gold to Diamond with steps for each rank and the mechanics of each stage are important to the world and the plot.

What do people think?

Answer 1

I suspect the problem is that many (maybe even most) people don't know what LitRPG is.

It is a special kind of fantasy, where the game mechanics is fully visible to the characters and very much part of the world. The work doesn't have to be a game; it can be a conventional novel, or a movie or whatever. The defining characteristic is that the characters are living and adventuring in a game-like world.

Compare and contrast:

• Conventional fantasy:

  SQUIRE STRAIGHTMAN: The merchants we met said that whoever slays the dragon will get half the king's gold and his daughter for a wife.
  KNIGHT SLAYSALOT: What are we waiting for? Let's ride to the dragon's lair and do battle with it!
  NARRATOR: And thus they mounted their trusty steeds and proceeded at a canter towards the barely visible mountains, to find the dragon and fight it to the death.

• LitRPG fantasy:

  SQUIRE STRAIGHTMAN: We are prompted that there is a dragon to be slain for 10,000 gold and 2 ranks status elevation.
  KNIGHT SLAYSALOT: What are we waiting for? Let's use 5 transportation points and move to the dragon's lair!
  SQUIRE STRAIGHTMAN: We don't have 5 transportation points. We need to complete two quizzes to get them.
  KNIGHT SLAYSALOT: All right then, we do two quizzes.
  NARRATOR: And thus they proceeded to solve two quizzes. The first quiz was as follows: ...

In the LitRPG genre, the fictional game mechanics is a fundamental part of the world. It is just as fictional as the other parts of the world. It does not have to a game mechanics which could actually be played in real life. It is just as fictional and fantastic as dragons, elfs, dwarfs and wizzards.

The fictional game mechanics, as any fictional element, might be only gradually known and understood by the characters; it can change in mysterious ways; it can be changed by the characters themselves; and so on.

Answer 2

TLDR: If you want help examining the impact of your game mechanics upon your fictional world ask away but questions of game design, should not be asked on this site.

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Most topics can be embedded in a worldbuilding question. RPG mechanics are no exception. I could for instance say "In my world there exists a slack clone, what would the source code for that chat program look like?" I've successfully embedded a programming question within a worldbuilding question, but it's ultimately a programming question with the most tenuous relationship to building a fictional world. Similarly if you're asking us to construct mechanics for a game, the connection to worldbuilding is tenuous at best. You can select whatever mechanics you want and they'll be equally valid from a worldbuilding perspective.

We already reject embedding story questions. You can't salvage asking "What should my dark lord do?" by transforming it into a question of backstory "500 years ago what should my dark lord have done?" You're still asking about a story which isn't permitted on this site. Game mechanics share many of the same issues which importantly include not being about worldbuilding.

Once you create your game mechanics asking about the consequences of them upon the world is something we should continue to support, but asking questions about what mechanics to create isn't something we should support.

Answer 3

Asking about game-design can be on-topic

World building includes geography, culture and creatures for the world, not to mention magic and planetary physics, in short, everything from the physics underlying your reality to the entire universe you want to build.

^{From "What topic can I ask about here?"}

As long as you ask about something related to the world you are currently building, it's on-topic. This "something" includes common disciplines like physics and biology, but also more unusual ones, including game-design.

If your world is so tied to game rules -like an isekai or a Virtual Reality MMORPG world-, then it's very likely game-design will come into play, which in turn means that game mechanic issues can be found. How can I keep the players' stats universal acrosss Earth companies's games? For a futurist VRMMORPG, how can you entice players to stop and not overexert their body through in game-mechanics only? If answered, these questions could help in creating a better, more immersive world for your reader/listener/player/spectator. This is also what can prevent from people to complain about the implausibility of a game world :).

But why did you vote to close this question as off-topic, then?

It's quite tricky for me to answer without feeling I'm obfuscating it, so please bear with me 🐻. When asking, you have to make clear you're creating, you're building a world. In other words, that the issue is one you're facing as a worldbuilder, not a theorical one as a biologist or a physicist. For instance, you can ask whether the rumor of a sniper firing from space would hit its target could be ever true. It gives a world the issue can attach to, the question is directly bound to it.

In contrast, you shouldn't ask how much energy an anvil would have when it falls and hits the ground without describing anything else. If you have anvils litterally thrown out of the window in your world and they need a precise amount of power, then it is quite likely to be on-topic. But without any, most would consider as a pure physics question as few would see why people would drop anvils randomly and think casually about the exact energy on impact in the first place. To sum-up, it's advised to bring some basic worldbuilding context and relates it directly to the question you are asking to be understood as a worldbuilding issue.

And this is where the limitation of game design lies. Unlike physics, biology, social sciences, ... which are grounded into a fixed reality -our reality-, game-design is -for a good part- rooted in the artist's mind, and some is invented/chosen as they see fit¹. This doesn't prevent one from being on-topic, but it makes things quite harder as this real-world discipline is blended with the world you're making. After all, both happens in one's mind. Therefore, it's very hard to make the difference between something designed and balanced from inside the world (on-topic) with something designed by you, the game-designer (pure game-design, so off-topic). Starting with this confusion-inducing element is not ideal :/.

This is why I chose to close the question as off-topic. As it was only speaking of the world on game-mechanics terms, there was absolutely nothing I could hang on to distinguish the question as a worldbuilding one or as a question you could genuinely ask as a game-designer. So I just couldn't answer even with a bit of worldbuilding, only as a game-designer 😣. To be reopened the asker needs to tell us about their world, how they blend it with the game rules; Here, I think it's more than advised to differentiate the world from the discipline it is soaked in, it is almost mandatory. Indeed, regardless if it's an isekai, lite-rpg, 4th wall-breaking videogame, can we really find a world in a tower of rulesets and game systems alone?

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^{1 : This subjective choice implies questions which are more likely to be opinion-based than others. There are quite some traps with game design questions, actually 🪤🐭.}

Answer 4

This little-read and little-voted-upon post deserves a LOT more attention than it received

Ignoring our 3rd-party/commercial world rule for the sake of this example,¹ there's a clear line between the following:

• Off-Topic: Questions asking how to develop game mechanics or player interfaces as found, for example, in the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook.

• On-Topic: Questions about world rules in the context of game mechanics such as TSR's Greyhawk.

From a practical standpoint, both of those documents contain rules. The difference is that one contains rules that explain how someone plays the game and the other contains the rules for interacting with the world.

An argument could be made, what's the difference?

The difference is that game mechanics involve rolling dice, referencing charts, and can be applied to any world. A perfect example is the Unreal Engine, which can be used to implement pretty much any world, but does not inherently impose restrictions on the expression of any world.

We're not here to help people build their version of the Unreal Engine. We're here to help people create worlds they may later implement using the Unreal Engine.

And that's the difference.

Had I seen the linked question while it was still open I would have voted to close it. It doesn't matter to me how integrated the process by which players play the game is integrated into the world. If we open that particular pandora's box, then we'll be answering questions about how best to explain information that was once found in game play manuals to players via the world in the game.

That's not what we do.

In fact, it's not worldbuilding. It's user experience building.

No matter how integrated the process of playing the game the reality is that the two can always be completely separated. In fact, Nepene's linked question could have been asked by replacing the example of the fireball with a laser pistol, or a sword, or Jungian Psychiatry, or any other example, because the question was about how players interact with the game and not the world. The rules may be intrinsic to how the game is played, but they're not intrinsic to the world at all. Once the question was answered, it could be universally applied to any game Nepene chose to create because it's independent of the world.

Do we have a precedent?

Kinda yes: Does the Stack wish to allow questions concerning the profession of worldbuilding?

And kinda no: How would you make money by "worldbuilding"?

If we don't answer questions about worldbuilding as a career, then I believe it's quite a stretch to allow game mechanics no matter how tightly bound to the world's design. If we were to allow questions about game mechanics, I believe (very strongly) that it would first require convincing the Mods that twelve votes constitutes community consensus toward an adjustment to the Help Center pages permitting career questions.

But until that and a similar modification is made on behalf of game mechanics, the simplest answer is that they just don't meet the Help Center rules.

Conclusion

Questions about game mechanics are off-topic.

However, if there isn't another stack focused on developing game mechanics, that seems like it would be a shoo-in for Area 51.

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_{¹ And this is important because I'm going to advocate that we are NOT the place to develop the game mechanics. In other words, if you create your own game mechanics and then want help building a world around those mechanics, we're glad to help. But developing the game mechanics themselves... not our job.}