Tabletop RPG
Role-playing games with a facilitator or shared fiction, including solo journaling games.
76 mechanics appear in this medium with at least one cited example.
Action Points
Each turn a player receives a fixed budget of points and spends them on any combination of actions from a menu with differing costs, with unspent points usually lost at the end of the turn.
Advantage / Disadvantage
A modifier applied by rolling two dice instead of one and keeping the higher result under favourable circumstances or the lower under unfavourable ones, in place of a numeric bonus or penalty.
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.
Base Building
Players spend gathered resources to place persistent structures at a home site, each of which unlocks units, production, storage, or defence, so the layout and growth of the base is the player's capability over the session.
Boss Encounters
A climactic, individually authored enemy or wave sequence closes a segment of play with its own rules, scale, and phases, so progress is gated by defeating it rather than by attrition against ordinary opponents.
Branching Dialogue
Conversation is presented as a tree of authored lines in which the player selects from a set of responses, and each selection decides which lines, information, or consequences follow.
Cooldowns
After an ability is used it becomes unavailable for a fixed interval of time or turns, so the player rations powerful actions by timing rather than by spending a pooled resource.
Cooperative Play
All players share a single win condition against the game system itself, so they win or lose together and the only opponent is an automated threat that escalates unless the group coordinates its actions.
Cover Systems
Positioning a unit behind terrain or an object reduces the chance or amount of damage it takes from attacks along the obscured line, so position becomes a defensive resource.
Critical Hits
A rare band of the attack roll, usually the die's maximum face, that amplifies a successful hit with multiplied damage or an added effect, as an exception layered on an otherwise binary hit-or-miss check.
Damage Types and Resistances
Each source of damage carries a type such as fire, piercing, or magic, and each target has fixed resistances, weaknesses, or immunities per type that scale the damage it takes, so the kind of attack matters as well as its size.
Death Penalty
On defeat a character returns to play instead of being deleted but pays a recoverable cost, such as lost experience, damaged gear, a timed weakness, or belongings left at the body to be fetched back
Deduction
Players uncover a hidden fact fixed at setup by making queries whose answers eliminate possibilities, racing to be the first to state the solution with certainty.
Degrees of Success
A resolution procedure that grades the result of a check into three or more ordered bands, such as critical success, success, partial success, failure, and fumble, each with its own consequence.
Dice Pool
A randomiser in which the number of dice rolled scales with a rating, and the result is read by counting dice that meet a target or by taking the best die rather than summing a single roll.
Downtime Phases
Between adventures or scenarios the game runs a structured phase in which each character takes a limited number of actions from a menu such as recover, train, work on a project, or indulge, and campaign time advances.
Equipment and Loadouts
Before or between engagements the player selects a limited set of items, weapons, or abilities from a larger pool into fixed slots or under a budget, and that selection defines what the character can do until it is changed.
Experience Levels
Characters accumulate experience points from play and, on crossing fixed thresholds, gain a discrete level that grants a bundle of improvements such as more hit points, better odds, and new abilities.
Exploration Procedures
Travel through unknown terrain is divided into fixed units of time or distance, each running a set sequence of steps such as mapping, ration use, and an encounter check, so exploration is a repeated procedure rather than free narration.
Fail Forward
A resolution principle under which a failed check must change the situation, introducing a cost, complication, or new development, rather than leaving the state as it was before the attempt.
Flashbacks
A player pays a cost to declare, after the fact, that their character took a preparatory action earlier, and the declared action is narrated as a brief scene and takes effect in the present situation.
Fog of War
Parts of the map and the positions of opposing pieces are concealed from a player except where their own units currently have sight, so information must be gained by scouting.
GM Moves
The facilitator's interventions are codified as a named list of moves, triggered when a player misses a roll, when the table looks to the facilitator, or when a golden opportunity arises, and governed by a stated agenda and principles.
Grid Movement
Pieces move across a board divided into discrete cells, usually squares or hexagons, spending a movement allowance per cell entered, so distance, adjacency, and terrain are counted rather than measured.
Hit Location
After an attack hits, a further roll or a called shot assigns the damage to a specific body part or component, and each location has its own damage capacity, armour, or impairment effect.
Hit Points
A numeric pool representing how much damage a character, unit, or player can absorb; damage subtracts from it and reaching zero removes the holder from play or triggers a death procedure.
Income
At a fixed point in each round or on passing a trigger, a player receives resources at a rate set by a track, a table, or a flat salary, so the inflow is scheduled rather than earned by an action in the moment.
Initiative Order
A procedure, usually a roll or rating, that fixes the sequence in which participants act within a combat round, after which play proceeds in that order until the encounter ends or the order is redetermined.
Interrupts and Reactions
A rule that lets a participant act outside their own turn in response to a defined trigger, such as an enemy moving into view or a spell being cast, with the response resolving before or instead of the action that provoked it.
Inventory and Encumbrance
What a character can carry is capped by weight, slot count, or volume, so acquiring more than the limit forces the player to drop, store, or sell holdings or to accept penalties to movement.
Item Modification
The player changes the properties of an item already held, rerolling, adding, removing or upgrading them by spending consumables or materials on it, often with a random result, so an owned item is improved in place
Legacy Campaign
A series of linked sessions in which the outcomes of each game permanently alter the rules, components, or world for every later game, through irreversible changes such as stickers, destroyed cards, and sealed unlocks.
Lifepath Character Generation
A character is created by stepping through successive periods of a prior life, choosing a career or event at each step and rolling for its outcome, so skills, assets, age, and sometimes death accumulate from a generated biography.
Line of Sight
An attack, spell, or observation is permitted only if a straight line can be traced from the acting piece to the target without crossing blocking terrain, so what a unit can affect is decided by geometry.
Loans and Debt
A player may take resources now in exchange for an obligation to repay later, with interest, a recurring charge, or a lasting penalty, so present capacity is bought at the cost of a future constraint.
Lock and Key
Progress through a space is barred by locks that open only once the player has obtained a specific key, item, or ability found elsewhere, so the order of exploration is controlled by what has been collected.
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
Loot Tables
Rewards from a defeated enemy, opened container, or completed task are drawn from a weighted random distribution, so what the player receives is decided by chance after the action is taken.
Markets
Players buy from and sell to the game at prices the system sets and moves in response to purchases, sales, supply, or events, so the rate of exchange is a changing state rather than a fixed recipe or a negotiated deal.
Metacurrency
A scarce pool of points held by the player rather than the character, earned by play and spent to bend outcomes from outside the fiction, for example to reroll, improve a result, or avoid death.
Morale and Rout
When a unit takes losses or faces a shock, a test against its morale rating decides whether it holds, and a failed test makes it break, flee, or surrender, so battles are decided by nerve giving way before every unit is destroyed.
Morality Systems
The game tracks a character's ethical standing on one or more scales, moves it in response to the player's actions, and gates abilities, content, or endings on where the character stands.
Multiclassing
One character combines the kits of two or more classes, by taking levels in each class or by pairing two masteries, so that its capabilities are the sum of what each class grants at the level reached in it
Multiple Endings
A bounded story has several authored conclusions, and which one a player reaches is decided by accumulated choices, tracked flags, or a final decision, so the ending is a readable record of the path taken.
Opposed Rolls
Two parties each make a roll and compare results, so the number one side must beat is set by the other side's roll rather than by a fixed threshold, and the higher result prevails.
Permadeath
When a character dies, all progress bound to that character is lost and cannot be restored by reloading, so each life is a single irreversible attempt.
Player-Authored Goals
Each player writes their own character's goals, beliefs, or drives on the sheet, and the rules pay experience or metacurrency for pursuing or testing them, so the players rather than the designer set what a session is about.
Point-Buy
Players build a character, unit, or army by spending a fixed budget of points on capabilities priced in a published cost table, so every ability is bought at a stated price and builds of equal total are presumed comparable.
Procedural Generation
Maps, dungeons, encounters, or other content are assembled algorithmically from random inputs at play time rather than authored in advance, so each session presents a different arrangement.
Progress Clocks
A segmented circle or track that is filled in increments as actions succeed or threats advance, so that a complex task or looming event resolves only when every segment is marked.
Quest Structures
Play is organised into discrete assigned tasks, each with a framing, an explicit objective, tracked progress, and a reward on completion, so authored content is delivered and consumed one task at a time.
Random Tables
A die roll indexes a prepared list of outcomes to generate an encounter, event, or detail at play time, so the content of a scene is selected from an authored distribution rather than chosen.
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.
Relationship Systems
A tracked measure of the bond between the player character and a specific other character rises and falls with choices, gifts, and time spent, and gates scenes, bonuses, and endings as it crosses thresholds.
Reputation & Factions
Persistent numeric standings track how each of several in-game groups regards the player, rising and falling with the player's actions and gating access, prices, hostility, and story branches.
Rerolls
After seeing a roll or a draw, the player may throw some or all of the dice again, or redraw, within a fixed allowance or at a cost, and the new result replaces the old one.
Resource Conversion
Players exchange specified quantities of lower-order resources for higher-order goods, buildings, or effects according to fixed recipes, so progress depends on routing scarce inputs through the right conversions.
Sanity
A separate track for a character's mental stability drains as the character witnesses horror or strain, usually through a roll, and falling past thresholds brings madness, breakdown, or removal from play short of death.
Saving Throws
A defensive roll made by the target of a harmful effect after the effect is triggered; success negates or reduces the effect, failure lets it apply in full.
Scene Framing
Play is organised into scenes that a designated participant opens by stating where and when the scene is, who is present, and what is at stake, and closes by cutting away once the stake is resolved.
Secret Objectives
Each player holds privately dealt or chosen goals worth points at game end, so opponents must infer what a player is pursuing from their visible actions while the player decides how much to reveal.
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.
Skill Trees
Players spend points earned through progression to unlock abilities from a branching graph in which each node requires its prerequisites, so build choices accumulate into a distinct specialisation.
Social Conflict
Characters settle a dispute through a structured exchange of argumentative moves that wears down each side's position until one yields, and the losing side is bound by the result, often softened by a compromise.
Socketing
Items or abilities carry a fixed number of slots into which the player inserts separate modules, such as gems, runes or materia, that grant or modify capabilities; linked slots let one module alter another
Status Effects
A named temporary state such as poisoned, stunned, or hasted is attached to a character and alters its capabilities by a fixed rule until it expires, is cured, or is otherwise removed.
Stealth and Detection
The player avoids being noticed by guards or opponents who detect according to sight, sound, and proximity rules, and detection changes the game state, so remaining unseen is itself the objective.
Subclasses
Within one class, a character takes one of a short fixed list of branches at a set level or on completing set content, and the branch grants its own package of features at later levels of that class
Target Numbers
A single roll succeeds if it reaches a fixed threshold set by the task or read from a table, so the chance of success is fixed before the roll by the gap between the threshold and the roller's modifier.
Threat and Aggro
Each hostile picks its target from a running tally of how much every player has provoked it, so a party controls who gets attacked by generating, holding, or shedding that tally rather than by position alone.
Time Track
Each action costs an amount of time that moves the actor's marker along a track shared by all players, and whoever is furthest behind acts next, so the length of an action decides when its taker acts again.
Traitor
In an otherwise cooperative game, one player or possibly none is secretly assigned to oppose the group, so loyal players must pursue the shared goal while judging whether setbacks are bad luck or sabotage.
Upkeep and Attrition
Holdings such as units, workers, or ships impose a recurring cost in food, money, or supply each round, and failing to pay it degrades or removes them, so growth must be matched by income.
Usage Dice
A consumable such as torches, rations, or arrows is tracked as a die rather than a count; after each use the die is rolled, and a low result steps it down one size until a low roll on the smallest die exhausts the supply.
Variable Player Powers
Each player begins with a different rule exception, capability set, or faction that breaks the symmetry of the shared rules, so the same situation offers different options to different players.
Zone of Control
Each piece projects a zone into the cells adjacent to it, and an enemy piece entering the zone must stop, pay extra, or accept an attack, so a piece controls more ground than it occupies.