Effects › Social
Contested fairness
Players are prone to dispute an outcome’s legitimacy because a human judgement or a deliberate asymmetry intervened in it.
18 mechanics carry this tag.
Aspects and Tags
Short free-text phrases written on a character, item, or scene, such as Ex-Cop or On Fire, carry mechanical weight: invoking one that fits the situation adds dice or a bonus, and some can be turned against their holder.
Ball Possession
One side at a time holds the right to advance and score with a single contested object, and that right transfers by turnover, by scoring, or by a rule such as a boundary or a violation, so play alternates between attack and defence.
Clue Giving
One player who knows a secret word or target composes a clue under rules that forbid the obvious, and teammates must guess the target from it, with the quality of the clue deciding the score.
Difficulty Settings
A rule-level parameter, chosen before play or adjusted by the system during it, scales enemy strength, resources, or margins for error so that the same content can be played at several levels of challenge.
Group Finder
An automated queue assembles players, usually strangers, into a temporary cooperative group for a chosen piece of content by filling required role slots such as tank, healer and damage, then places the group in it together
Handicapping
A rule-sanctioned adjustment gives the weaker player a stated advantage, such as extra pieces, a head start, or an adjusted score, so that players of unequal skill can contest the same game on roughly even terms.
Hunt Games
Two sides on one board are unequal in number, movement and goal, so that one or a few strong pieces try to capture the others or escape while many weaker pieces, unable to take them, try to hem them in
Loot Distribution
A cooperating group allocates each shared reward, such as a boss drop or a treasure hoard, among its members by a stated rule, such as ranked need and greed rolls, turns, a leader's award, banked points or per-player loot
One Versus Many
One player runs the opposition against all the other players, who cooperate to defeat them; the two sides play by different rules, the solo player is a competitor rather than a facilitator, and their position is not secretly logged.
Player Invasions
A player enters another player's ongoing single-player session as a hostile, uninvited or on a trigger the host has set, and the intrusion ends when one of them is defeated or the host clears the area
Player Judge
One player, usually in rotation, serves as the sole arbiter of a round, choosing which other player's submission wins according to personal taste rather than a fixed rule, and the role then passes on.
Rating and Matchmaking
A numerical rating moves after each game by transferring points from loser to winner in proportion to how unexpected the result was, and a pairing rule uses the ratings to decide who plays whom next.
Referee Adjudication
The success and consequences of a declared action are decided by a designated neutral person applying judgement under published guidance, rather than by a table or randomiser alone, and that ruling is binding on play.
Shared Holdings
A group pools assets in storage it holds in common, behind access rights set by rank or role, and any member with access can withdraw them, within any limit the rules set
Shared Narration
Authority to narrate what happens in the fiction is distributed among all players by rule, passing by turn, by interruption, or by spent currency, so no single facilitator owns the story.
Tournament Formats
A fixed schedule and pairing rule composes many individual games into one larger contest, such as a knockout bracket, a round robin, or a Swiss system, and decides who advances, who is eliminated, and how the field is placed.
Vulnerability Windows
A player-owned structure can be damaged, captured or destroyed only in a scheduled period, often after an attack has put it in a protected state whose end the defender partly sets, so sieges are fought at appointed hours
Word Building
Players form valid words from a limited supply of letters, by placing tiles on a shared grid or assembling them from a rack or draw, and score by letter values, word length, or placement.