hey this is a fantastic post with a lot of really helpful examples. i’m looking forward to digging into each of these next week.
glam and i were having a conversation about whether a system could be satisfyingly setting-agnostic and i don’t know if we came to a real conclusion on that (i think FATE probably comes the closest to this of anything i know, fwiw). i personally don’t think that’s something worth striving for anyway: mechanics are as useful a tool for conveying setting as in vidcons (if not moreso) and i don’t want to emulate the bad old days of jrpg Gameplay and Story dichotomies.
that said, mechanics are a tool, and i don’t think a tool can be used in a lot of ways as long as it’s purposeful: specifically, i don’t think mechanics need to be something that are always player-facing. i think the one-off i watched glam run a couple nights ago are a good example of well-considered subversion. we were “police officers in rural kentucky” and one of the very few things established at character creation was the amount of ammunition we had. it was clearly laid out how many bullets we could carry on us, how many needed to be left in our armored vehicle, etc. the bullets were actually almost entirely useless. but this trick got the intended effect: it made us paranoid. every time something suspicious happened outside of the car, there was a wonderful moment brought out by the mechanics where our party suited up, argued about how we’d distribute equipment, etc. it made us paranoid and distrusting: so basically, the mechanics tied perfectly into the setting even when players didn’t understand enough to effectively metagame.
well, maybe that is exactly the kind of thing you’re talking about? hmm. i need to think about this a little longer, probably.