Simulating Pain in TTRPGs
After writing Rules Don't (Necessarily) Elide, I've been thinking a lot about mechanics that exist not to simulate a fictional space but to create other kinds of associations and incentives for players.
I had this thought recently that the nature of the diegesis in most tabletop roleplaying games is such that players have very little mechanical connection to the sensations experienced by their characters. While you can care on an intellectual level whether your character is experiencing pleasure or pain, your experience of play is not really impacted by your character's mental, physical, or emotional state. A good counterexample might be the game Gloom, a somewhat macabre card game about making the lives of Addams Family-esque characters as painful and unfortunate as possible. Though the goal of the game is to make your designated family miserable, cards that cause misfortune also make the game harder for you as a player, which both adjusts the difficulty in play (if you're in the lead, the game is harder for you) but also creates a mechanical connection between your own experience and that of your designated family.
One way to implement something similar in a tabletop roleplaying game would be to create minor annoyances or inconveniences which occur outside of the diegesis and affect the players as a result of things which happen to the characters. I'm thinking of restrictions or limitations à la the card game Mao.
Here's an example for how this system might work:
Pain
Any time your PC takes damage, choose a restriction from the following list. You have 5 seconds to make any necessary adjustments to your playspace before the restriction goes into effect. If you break the restriction, take another restriction. If there are no restrictions left and you need to take a restriction, your character dies. Any restrictions are lifted when the damage that caused them is healed in-game.
- Pick a hand: you may no longer lift it above the level of the table. You can take this restriction twice.
- You may no longer sit.
- Pick an eye: you may no longer open it. You can take this restriction twice.
- You may no longer speak in the first-person when referring to your character ("Father Milius says" instead of "I say").
- Plug one of your ears. You can take this restriction twice.
Reflection
I wish I could think of more examples, but these are just the ones that sprang to mind. I like that some of them reflect actual injuries, wounding an arm, getting blood in your eye, your ears ringing. I also like that in addition to being an inconvenience, the player may need to take additional steps to prevent themselves from breaking the rule unthinkingly, like sitting on a hand to avoid raising it or limiting how much they talk to avoid speaking in first-person. This resembles in a very abstract sense the way that an actual fighter would need to make an active effort not to aggravate wounds that they have sustained in combat.
Without relitigating the issue of rule elision too much, I think it is interesting that these mechanics take place almost entirely outside the realm of the simulation. Theoretically, you can kill your character by not following the rules, but this is mostly to create a strong desire not to just ignore the limitations. Really, this is a set of mechanics that are meant to change the way the player experiences the game and relates to the fiction without changing the way the underlying simulation works (and since it doesn't make any assumptions about underlying mechanics, it's compatible with any system).
As an actual mechanic for play, I doubt I would use this. I suspect the silliness of the system would be at odds with a more grim ruleset, though something darkly humorous like Mork Börg might actually be a good fit. In any case, I think this is a neat proof of concept for extradiegetic mechanics and I would love to see ways others have implemented similar ideas.