Smooth vs Chunky game design

Sometimes it helps to look at game design through the "Smooth or Chunky" lens. What do these terms mean? Well, they encapsulate certain vibes. They occupy the middle ground between game mechanics and game feel.

🥛🥛🥛 Smooth is

• small numbers changing incrementally
• things being at the same level
• player-facing subsystems with modest game impact (say, situational dice roll modifiers)
• overloaded dice rolls with small results
• rounded probability curves like 4d6
• anything pre-planned
• predictable consequences, with randomness used as a spice

Smooth is like gradient descent and intricate clockwork and elegant flowcharts. Typical Smooth design elements are sensible, explicable, predictable, fine-grained, subtle, simulationist, world-associated, and introduce enough complexity as they need to be internally coherent.

🥜🥜🥜 Chunky is

• one dice that does everything
• flat high-variance probability curves (say, a 1d100 roll)
• one number that represents a bunch of things
• rollercoaster rides of remarkable successes and sudden catastrophes
• randomness underpinning creative direction
• huge sudden changes to big important things
• hefty modifiers 
• random tables

Chunky is like high stakes roulette wheels and staccato noises and refusing to erase anything. Typical Chunky design elements are simple, wide-reaching, experimental, flashy, coarse-grained, gamist, surprising, central, and do as much as possible with one thing.

Now in game design, unlike with peanut butter, neither one is clearly better than the other. It's situational.

Case study 1

I'm working on a RPG called Overzealous. In this game, you're a well-meaning elder god but your cultists are the typical bloodthirsty crazed zealots. This sets up the tension. You need to become manifest in the world before your cult tears itself apart with ridiculous behaviour.

Early conceptualisation had Overzealous revolve around large random tables, with most of the consequences falling out of those. This played fast but felt random. And it meant that I couldn't model persistent problems, like your cultists getting bored and summoning a bunch of monsters that then hung around, or continuous schisms in your cult leading to further attrition and outrage.

I Smoothed out this Chunkiness by expanding two numerically-tracked stats to five, and adding a granular subsystem for acquiring ongoing "problems" which took trade-offs to solve. The gameplay became a lot richer!

Case study 2

After these changes to Overzealous, you have three "bad" stats (Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity) which you want to keep a lid on and two "good" stats (Imminence, Cultists) which you need to get high enough that your cult can perform a ritual to bring you into reality.

In the draft version after the Smooth changes, if a bad stat exceeded 20, it's game over. The bad stats crept up slowly through various mechanisms, all at about the same pace. This increase was slightly faster than you could deal with, which you generally attempted to do by sacrificing positive stats, setting yourself back. That's Smooth design! The intention was that the player needed to find and pursue a good strategy to secure a win before a loss became inevitable.

In practise, though, my introduction of this much Smoothness created two issues. Because the changes were small and fairly predictable,

1. A skilled player could find one obviously optimal strategy, and didn't have to deviate much from that strategy for random events. This reduced gameplay scope.
2. If through poor luck, lack of experience, or exploring other options, the player's negative stats got too high, there was a tipping point where it was obvious that a loss was inevitable... but it took a long time to lose the game.

To deal with this, I eased up on the Smooth pedal and re-introduced some Chunky. I had stats go to 13 instead of 20, took out some of the cases where multiple stats all change by 1, and doubled down on cases where a single stat change by 2 or 3. Also, the ongoing problems that beset your cult (like cannibalism, diabolism, and schisms) only have a chance to come into play each turn, but are more impactful when they do.

And these tweaks got me exactly the gameplay experience I wanted for Overzealous! There's no longer one clear strategy to follow, as the feeling is more one of running around putting out fires. Now the player is tempted to push things, to e.g. just spend one more turn scrambling towards completing the ritual when their Fervour has crested 10, because the end's in sight, knowing that a couple of bad rolls might be their downfall.

New words to use

Was I thinking about Smooth vs Chunky throughout this design process? Not exactly, but I was certainly aware of what was going on with the overall vibes, and now that I've constructed this jargon to talk about it, I suspect I'll be thinking in those terms in the future.

With gameplay pretty much where I want it, I'm ready to get the visual design finished!

Anyway, that is the age-old "Smooth vs Chunky" dichotomy, brought to you by peanut butter on toast.