Forgive a bit of rambling as I talk about an interesting TTRPG technology that surprised me by its breadth.
First off, two of the game designers I have paid the most attention to in the last couple decades, just in terms of looking at the mechanics they use, are Jenna Moran and Robin D. Laws. Jenna has written such games as Nobilis, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine, and Glitch; Robin has designed such games as Feng Shui, Hillfolk, and various games like Esoterrorists, Ashen Stars, and the Yellow King RPG that use his Gumshoe system (which has also been used by others, including by Ken Hite to design Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents).
So I was re-reading Jenna's Glitch, and considering its Spotlight system, which can require players to pay active, explicit attention and pay a resource cost to find out facts about the world — including in combat! — and then rewards them for doing so. And I was struck by how that's, at first glance, the opposite of the way Gumshoe's investigation system works, where you just have to have a skill on your character sheet to get core clues; where in some more traditional games you might have to roll against a skill to find a clue and then have your game master have to come up with some other way to get you the information if you fail that roll.
But then again, it's not either. Glitch Spotlights and Gumshoe Investigative skills are more properly both expressions of a deeper concept — using player-level attention and game-level resources to resolve and even create facts in the game world.
In Gumshoe games, you still have to ask about the core clues, and you can spend points from your skills' pools to get non-core clues. That is to say, when, at a crime scene, you ask the GM, "What can I discover with Forensic Entomology?", you're using your attention to get clues that will move you forward in the mystery; when you ask, "What if I spend a point?", the GM is supposed to consider what sorts of things — previously in the scenario or not — you could learn from present insect life that would add color to the world or make the final confrontation of the adventure easier for you. (It might not be there, to be clear; the GM can refund your point.)
In Glitch, in much the same way, where there's a moment a player feels deserves more attention — something cool they want more description of, or a mystery or blank spot in the narrative, you spend a Spotlight to prompt the GM (or another player, which is an interesting twist) to elaborate, to dwell on the moment or facet of the world. You only get two Spotlights per chapter, so there's a minor resource cost, but the game compensates by building its pacing partially from the expenditure of them, and if a threshold of sufficient Spotlights get used, everyone in the group gets experience points from it.
Other examples of this pattern from Gumshoe are in the handling of certain special non-investigative skills. Most of the games have Preparedness, which is the ability to have planned ahead for whatever problem you're currently facing, and having a solution for it (usually in the form of gear, but sometimes in the form of having events happen when you need them). If, in your Night's Black Agents spy thriller, you're suddenly faced with a wall that needs scaling, you pay points from your Preparedness pool to help your die roll, and if you succeed, you did pack that grapple gun after all. Similarly, NBA's Network ability lets you define people into the world who can help you out — the prison guard you roomed with at college, or the customs agent who owes you a favor. Again, you pay attention and spend points to define the world.
When you break it down to that level, it turns out as a pretty pervasive pattern, of course; on some level, it's a codification of the old improv rule to "Yes, and". Even your ability in Feng Shui to, in a fight scene, have whatever interesting props you need, e.g., a chandelier to swing from, is an example. But I find it interesting how two mechanics that seem so dissimilar at first can both be doing the same thing on a fundamental level.
