I had a talk yesterday with Austin about beats. They’ve been on my mind a lot lately. I think a large part of what I like so much about Vincent’s games is that they help me structure play, beat by beat. They help keep scenes from being sketchy, they make surprising outcomes and shape moments.

So, we ended up talking about Apocalypse World. Moves are beats (though, importantly, not all beats are moves). Each moment, you need to know what the next moment is, because it might trigger mechanical things, so you play it through, moment to moment. Each move has uncertain and potentially surprising outcomes, so you play the next moment after it differently than you would have had the move not happened.

But then, a creeping realization stole upon us. What you do in terms of “crunch” in that moment is dead simple, and the game still works. The interest in RPGs doesn’t come from what you do with the dice. A fancy dice game isn’t necessarily a problem, but it is such a profound misapplication of your time and energy as a designer, to think first and foremost “what can I do to make people interested in the dice”. In “what you roll, when” it is the “when” that is most important. What beats get randomized, and sure, there’s a lot of play in how you interpret the dice roll, when and whether you can change it, etc, but there’s a meaningful level at which any dice system is just “let’s get random numbers”.

So, if I want to make mechanics that help shape the moment-to-moment beats of the game I’m making, I don’t need to make a fancy dice game. I need to make good beats.