Marginal Mechanics and Red Herrings - Why So Weak? - Extra Credits

You ever see a system or a game mechanic that just seems useless? That just makes you go, "Why did they even bother to put that in the game?" Well, usually there is a reason. Sometimes it's not a very good one, but there is a reason. This episode is brought to you by Verve. Click the link in the description to get an ad-free trial of the Verve combo pack for 7 days. You've probably played an RPG where there's some debuff or a damage over time spell that you looked at and you asked yourself, "Why would I ever use that? Raw damage is just objectively better." And you know what? You were probably right. And you've probably played an FPS with some wacky gun that you would never ever use. Or a grenade that just seemed objectively worse than the straightforward toss grenade blow up area variety. And again, you were probably correct in your assessment. So, why are these things in these games? First off, yes, many of these things end up in shipped games because somewhere along the way somebody built them

thinking that they would be awesome. But instead they turned out sub-awesome and somebody else said, "Eh, we already built it. It's content, keep it in." Now, we could and probably will do a whole episode on that mindset later, but for right now, let's focus on the three actual design reasons that these things make it into games. The simplest of these is the idea of the red herring. Now, personally James finds that red herring mechanics are not good game design, but they do have a fascinating secondary use that is worth a lot more exploration. The basic idea behind a red herring mechanic is that as a designer, if you're making a game that's about a strategic or mental challenge, you throw a group of bad mechanics or abilities into your game in order to make the decision-making process for the player more challenging. By giving them a number of bad options, you force them to analyze more and to think more carefully about their strategic decisions. Now, that's the version of the red herring mechanic that James doesn't like. He feels it adds unnecessary confusion and clutter to your game, punishing players for not parsing your rules finely

enough, rather than punishing the player for not making interesting decisions with your rules. After all, a good designer can always find other ways to create depth. But, there is a version of the red herring that James finds much more arguable. This is the idea that by putting bad or useless abilities or gear in your game, you can actually use them as a learning tool for the player because it's often easier for us to assess why something is bad than why something is good. So, by putting in a bad ability, you allow the player to easily identify why it's bad, which in turn helps them assess what is good without telling them directly or putting another tutorial in to teach them. By leaving in an ability that you know the player will be able to see as sub-optimal, you make the player feel smart and lead them down the road to feeling smart again for subsequently recognizing which abilities are good, which is an intriguing approach. The only caveat here is that if you're going to do this, you have to playtest the heck out of it. After all, you really don't want to be wrong here and have the players frustrated because they end up

using a bad ability without realizing that it was a bad ability that they were not meant to actually use. But, there is yet another reason that these mechanics appear in games other than just being red herrings or bad ideas meant to illuminate the good ones. And, that is what we call marginal mechanics. Marginal mechanics are mechanics, abilities, or items that have high utility in marginal cases. And, there are actually two forms of these. The most common are specific case marginal mechanics. For example, imagine an RPG where poison spells weren't usually very good. But, then you get a boss that has a ton of armor and elemental resistance, but not a lot of poison resistance. All of a sudden, your poison spells become very good in a marginal case. Now, this is a little bit lazy in terms of game design as it tries to make a specific fight into sort of a puzzle. But, since the puzzle doesn't have that many solutions, can be brute forced, and is made immediately obvious by the very fact that the player has had spells that were otherwise useless staring them in

the face for the whole game, it really doesn't create that interesting of a puzzle. And at the same time, using marginal mechanics in this fashion comes at the cost of creating a whole line of spells that the player probably spends most of the game thinking are stupid and useless. Heck, the player's probably even disappointed whenever they find or learn one of these spells, which is really not the result we're looking for. The other side of this, though, is much more interesting. These are what we call combinatoric marginal mechanics. Combinatoric marginal mechanics are things that look useless by themselves, but if you can get the right set of gear, abilities, and stats together, they will actually give you an advantage above and beyond the generic good abilities. Finding these combinations usually requires a deep understanding of the game, both in terms of what sort of gear or abilities are available and exactly how the systems in the game work. And this can be incredibly rewarding for hardcore players. These are the sort of deep strategies and builds that really allow players to push the limits of the game. These are the

things that bounce around the internet and get people to discuss the finer points of how your systems work. But, too often, I see pieces of these combinatoric marginal mechanic sets introduced early in the game experience, long before the player has any chance to really see the value they might eventually have. This leaves the player viewing these pieces simply as useless, as underpowered abilities or gear. And often, by the time they are able to think through the possibilities these pieces present, the player has already dismissed them for so long that they don't even think about them anymore, which means that while you as a designer think that you're putting in a very interesting decision, all the player experiences is disappointing clutter. If you're going to include this sort of marginal combinatoric system, the pieces need to start being introduced later in the experience. Once the player knows enough about the game to not just discard them as worthless options in their strategic tool set. So, back to the question. Why are seemingly useless mechanics, abilities, and gear in your game? Well, they are there to either A,

serve as red herrings that force you to really examine what tools are available to you in order to make it more challenging to pick the good ones out from the bad. B, to act as learning aids to help make the good choices much more obvious by juxtaposing them with the bad ones. Or C, to be useful in a small margin of the situations you'll encounter in a game. So, next time you see an ability or a piece of gear in your game that seems useless, take a moment and see if you can identify which of these three it might be. Or if it's just something that got left in the game because no one could bring themselves to cut it. See you next week. This episode was brought to you by VRV, which brings some of your favorite online channels together into a single app made by the people over at Crunchyroll and available on iOS, Android, Xbox, and PlayStation. You want to watch My Hero Academia subbed? They got all of Crunchyroll shows in there. Would you rather watch it dubbed in English? No problem, Funimation's in there, too. You can find all of that plus B and Puppycat, Attack on Titan, Critical Role, and all kinds of good stuff on VRV. Use the link in the

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