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We have an early candidate for best post of 2010.

Post #9 by David J Prokopetz from this thread at RPGnet.

What I want out of game mechanics, whether as a player or as a GM, is to provide a concrete framework for tactical play. By "tactical", I don't necessarily mean "miniature figures on a grid" (though I don't necessarily not mean that, either); rather, I mean a condition of play such that:

1. The game world has a concrete and persistent state, at least within the context of a given scenario. Whether this state is represented by figures on a map, numbers on a page, piles of coloured beads, or a bulletin board with little mug shots and notes pinned on it describing social relationships - yes, I've actually done that one - is immaterial.

2. The state of the game world responds to the decisions of the player in measurable ways, and the players have access to metrics for evaluating those responses.

3. These responses are such that some options that are available to the players are "better" than others in the context of particular goals. Among other things, this means that it shouldn't always be possible and/or optimal to go with "whatever gives the biggest bonus".

4. The breadth of options available to the players is such that it will rarely be the case that there is only a single clearly or trivially optimal choice in any given scenario.

To draw a parallel, to my mind, there's a meaningful difference between playing a game of chess and telling a story about a couple of guys playing a game of chess. Pure free-form and most story-oriented approaches tend to produce the latter, while I'm more after the former.

I know a lot of folks are going to look at that list and say "but isn't that what rules do anyway?" - but you might be surprised at how many games don't address at least one of those facets. Some games don't have any mechanics to address the state of the game world, beyond the barest outlines. Some have no formal mechanism by which player actions can affect the state of the game world - task resolution boils down to "roll the dice and ask the GM what happens"- or don't provide any clear feedback regarding the players' progress toward their narrative goals. Some have no particular criteria for determining which options are applicable to which situations; they might have skills that are never tested during play, or traits that are so nebulously defined that they can apply to absolutely anything. Some don't offer meaningful choices to the players, admitting only one mechanical approach to any given narrative goal.

Interestingly, games whose mechanics do fulfil all of those criteria can render adversarial play viable. GMs who are out to get their players are a bit of a bugbear around here, but I think a lot of that is due to the fact that many popular systems don't support that kind of play. A sufficiently rigorous tactical framework affords the GM the freedom to do his or her level best to defeat the player characters within the parameters defined by a given scenario; there's still an obligation to be fair-minded when actually designing that scenario, but once the parameters are set, the GM can go to town on the players and trust that the mechanics won't fall apart without constant babysitting.