So for those of you who don't know me from other platforms, my big project over the last ten months has been a complete-overhaul-turned-entirely-standalone-project for a certain cyberpunk fantasy tabletop RPG, done in cooperation with @fwankie and @sans-sarif. And I like to talk (rant) about it a lot. And a thing I discovered back on Twitter, but was really bad about doing because text limits, was that talking about it in abstract was very helpful for me to think through problems and motivation bumps, so, guess what, I'm no longer on a site where I have to think too much about character limits, so, I can talk about it all day!
Anyway, as someone who is coming up on spending a year basically rebuilding the bedrock of a certain impenetrable game into an entirely new beast, I've found myself extremely opinionated on the extreme aversion a lot of tabletop games seem to have to the whole concept of, game design, as a whole. I don't mean purely in terms of rules and crunch as it were; I am an unabashed 3.5 apologist and I've only gotten worse as I've aged; but more, I think that too many games are afraid or unwilling to address the entire concept of a 'gameplay loop' in any explicit terms, and I think that's kind of why we have this extreme gulf between clunky, extremely dense games that are difficult to parse, and lighter things that are more intended as frameworks for just directing roleplay rather than providing any mechanical satisfaction.
One of the central conceits of my entire project has been that there is an explicit and fully-mechanical cycle for representing the players running a gang of heisters and mercenaries, and I think importantly, allowing every single part of that to be a springboard for character interactions and dynamics. Now this kind of thing isn't unique; lots of games have implicit cycles of play, rest mechanics, downtime activities, and the like, but I can count on one hand the ones that actually lay these out in ways that cohesively integrate with each other, rather than feeling like they exist in separate worlds, and that's really what I've been trying to put together here.
And now that I'm doing it, I can't stop seeing it how it could be helpful like, everywhere! I've played, and ran, so many games where it feels like the lack of structure between organized content feels like lingering on the edge of death, and meanwhile that actually engaging with the mechanical content of downtime and preparation feels actively damaging to the experience, and how simple this all would be to solve if the writers sat down and actually had a discussion about what their intended play experience actually was, especially when dealing with rather specialized topics (like say, dungeon delving, or superheroics, or being a scruffy nerf herder), rather than trying to create play systems that are mainly for that but suggesting that yyyea maybe you can do other things with it too and that absolves us of explaining our intent.
My pithy summary of this rant is that wargaming and board games have a lot of good ideas that have massive amounts of applicability to tabletops when it comes to creating satisfying mechanical experiences, and that laying out, in your own words, something as simple as an explicit, abstract catharsis cycle for how your game manages the buildup from plot hook to final boss would really help avoid all this shenanigans of 'I've given up on encounter balance because Jack Vance says that resource management is fun, but I have to figure out the details without any help whatsoever'.
it really is wild how many TTRPGs have a combat system and then a list of suggested downtime activities, and the main interaction between the two is that not doing downtime stuff means you heal faster.
Even when a game does tell you the intended gameplay loop it's usually maybe a paragraph in the GM"s section of the book instead of it being used to tie all the elements of the game together and explained to the players as the ebb and flow of action to more sensitive things and back again.