Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Game Mechanics: Introduction
Some gamers say that game mechanics aren't really that important, because they're just a set of tool for representing the world, and one system is as good as another. For instance, if you wanted to run a Viking RPG, you could just as easily use the D20 system, or Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying (which is the old RuneQuest/Cthulhu system), or RoleMaster.

This claim can only be true if you accept that all game systems are as good as each other. And that's simply not true. Many game systems have really severe flaws. It is one of the great challenges of the games designer's life to create a set of game mechanics that work well.

The problem is that some game mechanics systems introduce not-fun into the game, which rises up and strangles the fun. Among the sources of not-fun deriving from game mechanics are the following.
- Mechanics that slow the game down so that people get bored.
- Mechanics that make blatantly unrealistic or stupid things happen (not intentionally because those things are meant to be possible in the game-world, but as an unintentional side-effect of the rules system).
- Mechanincs that allow power-mad munchkins to take over the game, so that the other players, who do not resort to such tactics, have nothing to do.