Properties › Complexity
Complexity: high
Several interacting tables, prerequisite graphs, or interacting sub-rules.
15 mechanics are coded this way.
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.
Contract Bidding
Before play, players compete to declare how much they will achieve, such as a number of tricks, the highest declaration becomes a binding contract, and scoring rewards fulfilling it and penalises falling short.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Stock Holding
Players buy fractional shares in entities such as companies or chains, receive dividends or bonuses in proportion to their holding, and may gain control of an entity by owning the largest block.
Coding guideline for complexity
Low: one or two sentences, no exceptions. Medium: a paragraph with one to three sub-rules or timing exceptions; a single lookup table on its own is medium. High: several interacting tables, prerequisite graphs, or multiple interacting sub-rules.