Game procedures are what I call the various maintenance tasks required in any board game to keep the game going, such as reshuffling decks, sorting the supply, or counting up victory points. They are the sorts of things that would be automated in the computer version of a game. An important part of board game design is streamlining procedures so they are not noticed by the players, since they do not contribute anything positive to the experience of the game.
Sometimes, in the course of improving game procedures, you find a new twist on your mechanics. This happened to me recently in Dungeon Rancher. I had been using six-sided dice to indicate monster levels, and one of my playtesters remarked that in the real world it is inconvenient to have to find a value on a die – in TTS, of course, you can just press the corresponding number.
I had not been intending to use dice in the actual game (the level die was a placeholder), but this got me thinking – how could dice be used to represent levels in a way that didn’t require the onerous procedure of locating a face? As it happens, when players are tending to monsters in Dungeon Rancher (a task that requires assigning a die that equals or exceeds the monster’s level), they tend to place the die on the monster to remind themselves that they have tended that monster. This inspired me to use the number of dice as the level, rather than the maximum die.
Each time your monster levels up you have to assign it a die matching or exceeding its highest die. The die you assign remains on the monster, increasing its level and potentially increasing the required value for the next time you need to tend to it. The required procedures are very smooth because they already match what the players needed to do; no additional steps are required.
This in turn led to some new mechanics revolving around rerolling dice – both dice used to tend monsters and dice already on the monsters from previous rounds. Thematically, this works very well – if you give the monster high-quality food, it becomes spoiled and will want high-quality food in the future, but you can attempt to tame it and reduce its pickiness. The mechanical process ends up feeling very rewarding, as players must balance caring for their monsters now with keeping their monsters as docile as possible for future rounds.
The lesson I take away from this is that sometimes the best source of mechanical inspiration can be coming up with ways to remove mundane chores from the game.