The problem with RPG metacurrencies
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In my experience, I feel like "meta-currencies" like luck/inspiration/hero points more often protect the fiction of the characters being competent when the swinginess of the dice makes them look like idiots. This isn't an inherently bad thing. It helps smooth the expectation gaps b/t what the players think they should be (e.g. powerful warrior of the light) and what the mechanics make them feel ("I'm a whiffing chump who can't hold onto his sword").
That is definitely the stated intention of hero points in PF2e.
100% agree, in some systems players get points they can spend for this purpose OR to enrich the story by adding stuff to the campaign. Really cool stuff, if used correctly.
A miss doesn't say that you're a whiffing chump, that's the DM saying that. If you play a miss as a competent swing that was met with competent steel, armor, or dodging, then you don't get this situation where characters feel like they are less competent than they should be.
@@bergieberg That's the common counter to what I claimed, but I don't think it maps to reality. Failing repeatedly because you roll crappy feels terrible regardless of the narrative description of your bad luck. Another way to look at it is that dice rolls themselves are a meta-mechanic, so having meta-currencies to interact with them makes total sense.
hmm I feel dice rolls are less meta and more an embodiment of uncertainty. Even Tony Hawk bails, even Messi yeets a ball over the goal, even Da Vinci ruined paper. There are good reasons for that, it happens rarely, and its okay to feel bad once in a while.
This whole discussion seems bogged down in slippery definitions, and depending on how the "metacurrency" is defined or implemented, I could see it being at any number of places along a spectrum of "gaming" and "roleplaying".
I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that a 1/day/combat/rest martial or physical ability is a metacurrency though. You can say that it's an abstraction of exhaustion, but the concept that you could disarm someone once until the next sunrise is pretty narratively flimsy.
I'm also exclusively a GM though, so I don't have as varied a perspective on the "experience" of the game from different angles or stances
I'd say those abilities are metacurrencies if the players (and the GM) treat them as such.
When tou say things like "ok, I have une healing use left, so I'm gonna use it before going to sleep so it doesn't go to waste" as opposed to "I try to tend to my companions aches and injuries before the night" and then the results are decided
As an edge of the Empire player, I am used to the idea that some abilities can only be used once per session for no greater reason then a balance measure. If only because there isn't a good way to balance out "rerolling an entire check" that would make sense. There are also some abilities that interact directly with the dice, including signature abilities that allow an adjacent face to be chosen on up to 2 dice at once (a typical roll is can be between 6-10 symbolled dice, broadly half positive and negative respectfully.) but as a consequence encounter design is very simple. You can either do an action (which is typically a roll of whatever check is appropriate) move, and maybe throw any one of your talents into the pool. There just isn't as many hard coded abilities, they are all additive to what the dice do.
Then again, that comes from it being star wars and playing as the actors playing the characters. Kind of like a movie. I think there comes a point where having rules for everything takes the tension out of the shoulders. Mothership for example *does not* have a stealth mechanic as rolling that would trivialise the act of hiding from a monster into a mathematical roll.
I agree the definition is slippery. In most definitions of hp for d&d, they use some combination of "luck and stamina" which makes it meta currency by Ben's definition as hp = luck points. Even in Knave 2e, he puts a distinction between hp and meat points because the hp is so abstract and makes a better game to be able to get into fights and not die the first time a goblin stabs you.
You also have high hp character surviving things that would kill a normal person (ie, a naked, unaware, and unprepared 20th level barbarian cannot physically be killed by a Kobold surprising them with a bow shot that would kill a normal peasant). I do not see a difference between that and calling it Luck Points and letting their spending be optional and more fluid. Sounds like the same thing, just from a different point of view as in reality the same shooter that can kill a janator can kill a navy seal if he sees both standing out in a field without armor with the same degree of difficulty; the seal just has better training, equipment, and back up to deal with the shooter better once they know about them.
Narrative power and level of abstraction should be in these discussion as immersion is not the only important outcome here. Having someone walk around the forest trails for two days to simulate travel time is more immersion, but that does not sound like a fun game.
I agree that martial abilities that are limited in this way feel much more game'y than a representation of the real thing. The only possible exception I would have is barbarian's rage, since you are pretty explicitly exhausted afterwards. In earlier editions casters were separated from everyone else by having a very limited pool of powerful abilities they had to use sparingly, while the martials could use their weaker attacks every round pretty much the whole day.
@@drillerdev4624 I would push back on the hp as not meta currency. A person in a melee fight cannot count the number of hit he took, get a damage range of his opponate, and get a reasonable guess when he needs to take a healing potion.
You also have players wanting to rest to recover to a certain point, knowing how long they need to rest to achieve health recovery goals, and having a reasonable expectation for hp ranges based on monster types. Heck, knowing who to use the healing spell on for optimal recovery in the group based on the number on their sheet that they did not have to role play a physical examination of injuries or do a skill chec to do (in reality injuries might not be as obvious and you might give the healing to the guy with a nick on his brow who is bleeding very visibly with a superficial wound instead of the dwarf with internal bleeding. Even hospitals today make mistakes with better conditions, better training, and better equipment.
I recently had a PC death in my PF2e game and so had a player introducing a new PC. The new character is a Ranger and is meant to be this sort of master huntress type character. During the session where the new PC was introduced, one of the other PCs suggested in RP that the two of them go hunting together for dinner that night. I could have made the Ranger player do a survival roll and then a combat with an animal, but instead I just asked the player to describe what his character was doing and basically sit in the GM chair for a couple of minutes. He described in vivid detail his character searching the woods, finding some hoof prints, and then how his character set a trap and ambushed a wild boar. I would wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that this player was somehow less immersed in his character simply because he was in "Director Stance". I think the opportunity to be temporarily the storyteller actually allowed him to feel far more immersed in his character. I think assigning value judgments to these stances misses that all of them are different forms of roleplaying.
The most obvious form of meta currency in most RPGs is hit points. They *absolutely are not* in any way meant to track the human experience of getting injured. It's not even an abstraction of injury or stamina, it's a pure game balancing mechanic because Arneson's characters died too fast.
You can easily interpret them as an in-the-game-world thing.
@@consonaadversapars you really cannot without breaking immersion
@@consonaadversapars You can choose to create a world where one of the fantastic departures is that injuries and stamina work differently such that hp do simulate them, but they weren't constructed to simulate real life, and they don't simulate the workings of real human bodies.
@@consonaadversaparsnot if I want to assume characters are human, most rpgs give far too many hit points to ever even remotely simulate the amount of punishment a human can take and keep standing.
I see hit points as entirely being an abstraction of stamina, luck and the ability to defend oneself. You are burning hit points to stay in the fight, dodging and parrying potentially harmful attacks. Once they're gone, you are winded, exhausted, unable to protect yourself and vulnerable to being dealt a serious injury. Hit points aren't generally treated like a currency that is spent, but a resource that is taxed by the fiction.
I was playing Fallout 2d20. My character is useless in combat but he has a Super Mutant companion. I spent a Luck point to add a detail to the scene (with the GM's permisson of course): that there is a heavy metal shelf in the garage that can be toppled on the enemies, which wasn't immersion-breaking for me really. Then I told the Super Mutant to drop the shelf on the enemies but then both he and another PC rolled a complication each. So the Super Mutant dropped the shelf on the other PC and then he himself slipped and hit his head on the fallen shelf. That was honestly more fun and more memorable than "I move and then I attack." In my opinion, there is no correlation between "metacurrencies" and "immersion". I think it depends mostly on the system and also on the group.
Adding to your point, and then there are many people who say "you don't need metacurrencies you can always ask the GM what exists in the environment". But that is not the point, the point is that currency can sparks the imagination of a player to be more proactive in trying to do something in the fiction. No GM is always the same and awesome in descriptions, and also, sometimes people visualize things differently, so that currency in your game session helped create a interesting story adding more to the story.
@@jexsnake Exactly. As a GM, I love it when a player takes the initiative and adds some cool detail to the story. Sometimes, a metacurrency is just a reminder that "Hey, there's this cool thing you can do. Just don't overuse it."
I played two sessions of fallout 2d20 and by the end of it I was like "man I love the setting but I wish I was playing a regular d20 dnd type ruleset homebrewed in the fallout universe" 😂 I just could not get behind it at all
@@L3monsta Yeah I'm not a fan of the system either honestly. I only play it 'cause I like the group.
"Hit Points" _are_ meta-currency in original D&D and basically all versions & variants (OSR included) since. They represent "skill, luck, divine favor, fate" and so on. They don't really represent "health" in anything but the most abstract (and unrealistic) way. While you don't get to "spend" them directly to change other outcomes, they allow you to do things intentionally that should kill you but knowing you have enough hit points to "soak up the damage", like running through fire or a pool of acid.
The real issue is whether the mechanic "feels real" vs "arbitrary".
It's the nature of TTRPGs to go on adventures where, in the real world, odds of dying would be anywhere from 10% to 90% in many encounters, or on a daily or weekly basis. With those odds, nobody will last very long. Thus all RPGs have some mechanism that allows player characters to unrealistically defy the long term odds of survival. In D&D hit points serve this function as you go up in levels. At level 1 and maybe up to 2 or 3, you have so few hit points and may lose a couple characters before one survives to higher levels, which does help to make it feel less arbitrary and more dangerous. But any game with a "meta currency" can do this by giving little or none of it to starting characters.
metacurrencies are no more immersion breaking than the act of rolling a dice itself
I'll give you an example, not that I have a strong opinion either way, just to test your point.
You have a magic weapon in dnd, I can look one up but there are hundreds that work this way. It lets you once per day heal HP when you hit someone. Now sometimes, there is some in-fiction reason why it works once a day. But often, especially if you look at Pathfinder stuff by example, where the once a day model became the balancing tool, there is no real explanation for why this thing would only work once a day. This is a soul-siphoning, vampiric that once every 24 hours lets you heal. I can list you countless magical items that work only a certain number of times within a certain time frame (in video games you'd call this having a "cooldown") for no reason other than, the designers had an idea for a really cool effect but it would be way too powerful if it just always worked that way.
I can see how all your abilities having non-diegetic cooldowns can become hard to buy into, without an in-fiction explanation. You could for example explain that the sword has some magic gem that recharges when the moon is out, and that'd be good enough.
I do not see a single correlation between "there is no reason this sword should work like that outside of game balance" and rolling dice, which is the tool used to simulate difficulty and variability of outcomes.
I think metacurrencies are neither "immersion-breaking", or "immersion-creating". Any mechanism or a rule can break immersion if it stops the game. For example, Luck Points from Shadowdark RPG are super easy to use, expecially if you are giving them out as tokens. Player just throws a token to the DM and rerolls the die. Does not take much time and it can create dramatic moment, for example, when player fails dramatically and uses it ro reroll. Whole table is watching and hoping that this time the dice will be with them.
While I agree that many of the OSR philosophies mentioned in your videos like "fiction first", "engaging with the game world", "creative problem-solving", etc. are great and (from my observations) are big part of immersion in my games, I feel like in OSR community discussions about mechanisms breaking immersion are getting out of hand sometimes. To the point where anything that feels like a game is considered "immersion-breaking". Meta mechanisms can enhance immersion, depending on the player, group, game, mechanism itself, how it was implemented and many other factors, as immersion is very personal. Coming back to Shadowdark example, I would not say that using Luck feels like "being outside of the game-world". Never saw anybody suddenly losing interest because of that. In my experience it was the opposite. Players happy that they succeeded, narrate they success, sometimes describe what their character feels, or what made them unexpectedly succeed. Other examples of metacurrencies I saw enhancing immersion are momentum in Ironsworn or glitches in CY_BORG.
I think roleplaying and gaming are not mutually exclusive, and mechanisms, no matter how meta, can enhance immersion, if they are well-implemented. The hobby is called Roleplaying Games, not Roleplaying after all.
"You don't really spend [xp]." Going to disagree with you there, Ben. I don't personally accept that just because (in some or "many" games, as you put it) the advancement options are limited this means that you aren't spending a metacurrency on them. If I went to a restaurant that had only one thing on the menu, it wouldn't much change the fact that I was expending a resource (I.E. money, in this case) on that hotdog. I think, in my opinion, we'll have to allow that there's simply no getting around experience points as a metacurrency. They do abstract something tangible in the real world--this gradual improvement of someone in what they're doing--but they fail your second criteria, which is that the character cannot be aware of them. Sure, they're aware of the improvement, that's the advancement itself, but the points along the way? Harder to argue, I think.
I don't get that line of thought. Real world experience is abstract already so putting it into game rules is rather impossible. Making it a numeric value that increases makes intuitive sense as a rough approximation, even if it glosses over how learning and improving actually works. It's not meta at all in my mind, it's the closest approach to a real world thing that both Player and character know, understand and utilise. There is no conflict here between character and player knowledge
@@ruolbuthat’s what makes it metacurrency though. If you’ve ever played Sims, your character has a little skill bar to show their next breakthrough in their painting, cooking, writing, etc. in real life we have no idea how close we are to the next time we will make marked progress in any skill (some specific exceptions do exist). I don’t think it’s necessarily the same as something like a hero point but it is an abstraction that the player knows but the character doesnt
@@idrisabdullah3492 "it is an abstraction that the player knows but the character doesnt." Sure, but the way metacurrency is defined in this video, an abstraction is not a metacurrency. It's an abstraction of something real in the game world. The character isn't aware of the abstraction, but is aware of what is being abstracted (their gradual gaining of experience and skill.) You can define metacurrency to include that, but then it also includes things like hit points and I think largely loses value as a concept, because it becomes roughly synonymous with the concept of a game mechanic.
It's in the same bucket as HP, movement rates, action economy, etc. Characters aren't aware of how many HP they have, exactly how many feet they can move before the enemy's next shot, what a single action is, or anything of that nature. But they're aware of their finite ability to take physical punishment, that they move at a certain speed, and that they can't do infinite things in six seconds. Characters are never aware of the abstraction of a game mechanic, but if they're aware of the thing the abstraction represents, then it's not a metacurrency as the term is applied in this video.
If metacurrencies are used to make *choices* maybe we could say that allowing multiclassing in a class-based system with multiclassing is more metacurrency-y.
But Cypher system, where XP is literally used to have player intrusions and improve individual abilities until you're able to go up in tier, I'd say is an actual good implementation of metacurrency.
Xp in cypher, imho, works as an abstraction of learning from failure, because the main way to get it is by the gm saying "okay something bad happens but you get some xp for you and a friend."
I will say, too, that cypher isn't trying to be D&D with the tactics and the grid combat. Maybe that's why it works better.
@@alexanderdovelempke4503 that’s super valid. I think metacurrencies are still really cool in a “lucky” sort of way. Like when you drop a glass bottle out the fridge with your hands full and still manage to catch it. I think a lot of those metacurrencies are just “deus ex machina” but for the player which is fine.
BUT in Cypher System you can spend 1 XP to reroll any check and I do have a player who is constantly rerolling and therefore is a bit behind the rest of the party because of that. Forcing players to make the most out of a situation is a good skill that some metacurrencies might hinder.
On the other hand, Edge of the Empire allows you to spend light side or dark side points to have little bouts of luck that might help in a lot of ways, such as if you’re looking to steal and land speeder and the first one you go to has its keys still in or something. But then spending light side points gives those same points to the GM who then gets to push back with the dark side.
All in all I think, as with everything else in this hobby, it really varies by player to player and table to table
I think the meta currencies that I’m attracted to, player wise, are the ones designed to mitigate bad luck, like the luck stat in Cyberpunk 2020 and Red. I recognize that obviously players should be doing everything they can to reduce the need for rolling, so they can stay immersed, but I also recognize that there are times when rolls are absolutely required, such as in combat. I think that a meta currency that exists to mitigate Player luck (I.E. terrible rolls on the dice) can be used to make PCs feel more competent and good at the things they’re supposed to be good at.
100% on that. Willpower in nWoD/CoD is like this, and represents pushing especially hard.
I love the luck stat in 2020. To encourage people to use it more (and also somewhat mitigate the lethality of the game) I allow players to use a single luck point to reroll where they got hit, or use 2 points to choose the location. Another rule I implemented was that if you say a one-liner that the party determines to be cool or funny, you gain a point.
I think that the other issue that a lot of the discussion focuses on what is meant by "metacurrencies" but not necessarily meant by "immersion." For example, I don't mind metacurrencies so long as I am immersed in the gameplay and playing the game as my character. There are games that lack metacurrencies, but that doesn't mean that I am immersed in the gameplay of those games. There may be long turns, decision paralysis, or play processes that have nothing to do with metacurrencies which will take me out of character play immersion.
excactly that, many people say that OSR is more immersive than, let's say Fate or Cortex, but most of the time I'm not immersed when I play any OSR games instead of Fate, Cortex, Blades in the Dark, etc. Why? because most OSR systems feel like a boardgame with the mechanics only pushing the player for GM fiat and combat. When playing Monster of the Week, for example, the mechanics push the player to do things in the fiction that the character would do using the mechanics.
@@jexsnakeYes this! Great game mechanics including metacurrencies can bring my character to life in an amazing way. They drag me into my character which drags me into the world. I’ve had a lot of experiences with OSR games where I sort of realize by necessity I’m just kinda playing me and hoping the GM rules the way I’d like.
@@qarsiseer yes, I agree. And I see it too much in OSR and similar RPGs. I'm currently playing Warhammer 40k, and also seeing this happening. I think some RPGs with the idea of "easy to be killed" can easily make any character become the "me playing myself trying to avoid anything because the GM can use GM fiat to create a situation where the character dies". It can also turn a tension into "I don't care about the character anymore because it dies easily".
Yes, is immersion solely character based? Or is it integrity of the game world as well? While yes meta-currency introduces contrivances, sometimes it makes sense to make that sacrifice to improve immersion through a better story, or maintaining genre.
I’m confused and intrigued. By the given definition, hit points (HP) are a meta currency. I understand that they connect to the in-fiction world, but nothing in the world accounts for why a person with 10hp is more affected by a 5 damage sacred flame than a person with 150hp. And for those that say “HP isn’t a currency” I say players make different decisions when they have single digit HP versus double digit HP. It’s a currency and people risk it rather than spend it outright. And that also varies depending on how much damage (another abstraction) they expect to receive for the risk.
Honestly depends on how you look at HP. D&D doesn't give any great guidance here. On one hand, HP is a critical existence failure threshold, where you go from being at 100% to 0% once you go to 0 HP. On the other, you use healing spells to restore HP, implying there's some kind of injury there. Similarly you can poisoned even when you HP left, indicating that whatever bite or stinger "hit" you actually hit you. But if it's an orc with a greataxe, we generally don't think you took a full on hit with greataxe and have a giant gaping wound on your chest that'd kill any normal human from an 18 damage critical hit. Instead it's generally assumed that the greataxe grazed you. But D&D really never gave us a consistent flavor of if HP is just plot armor or if it's actual resilience.
@@robotgh0st the 1e PHB said something similar, but I don't think 2-4 gave anything beyond "HP is how much damage you can take".
@@robotgh0st Yeah it says that but that's basically the most ultimately vague definition possible. It's pretty much equivalent to "it is whatever you want it to be, don't think about it too hard." That's exactly what I mean by the book not giving any kind of real guidance. There's no consistent narrative translation for what happens when you get hit by an arrow for 12 damage. The arrow might have just grazed you, or it could be sticking out of you causing you no effective damage.
Gary took pains to explain it in the DMG @@taragnor
@@jarrettperdue3328 He did try to explain it, but it just wasn't very concrete explanation. It just equated to a handwavy "HP is everything and nothing at the same time."
The fact is there's no clear explanation of how hit points translate in the narrative. Let me give you an example. I throw my +3 dagger at some enemy. Is the dagger stuck in it? Did the dagger glance off it? If the dragon I hit with the dagger flies away, did it take my dagger with it? Is the target bleeding? How much blood did the wound create? How visibly wounded would the creature be? Can I tell? We know the creature isn't limping or moving slower than usual because the rules don't state a change in movement or fighting capability, but how visible is it?
If I get hit by 6 arrows, do I look like Boromir in LotR with a bunch of arrows sticking out of him? Or maybe just a grazing wound on my cheek? Or maybe my character is just fatigued.
And do those answers change by how much HP it has left? Or How much damage I do? Or by what percentage of its health I do for damage? Does size matter, like if it's a dragon with 40 hp or a snake with 40 hp?
Why can I cut off the eyestalks off a beholder or a hydra's heads without bypassing its hp, but I can't cut a hand off a human?
Love your content but this video was kind of a miss for me. I also disagree with most of the points in the Reddit post, but I really don't think metacurrencies (or story points) are as serious of a problem as you make them out to be.
It seems a bit restrictive to push towards the idea that immersion comes necessarily from eliminating the "out of the world" mentality. Immersion can come from actually simulating a character ("playing a role", as you put it) and also from making decisions from within the game system that influence your character in the game world. We are talking about immersion in a role playing game, not in a simulation exercise after all.
Also when you say that that the actor and author stance are actually separate from the director stance because the latter is not focusing on the character, that just seems... Wrong? You can easily have games where players are playing different characters and the game system allows each player to assume a director stance, but they will be using said stance to play the role of their character. Blades in the Dark flashbacks come to mind as an example (which are also tied to the stress metacurrency, funnily enough).
I feel like, even though you do mention in the video that this is your opinion and how you like to play, the general message that gets put out there is "meta-currencies vs real unproblematic roleplaying" - which is kind of instigating like the original post, just in the other direction. It just struck me in a bit of weird way.
The stuff with The Alexandrian at the end was wild to me; we only accept Vancian spell slots in D&D as "being of the world" because the rules of the game inform the fiction we create at the table when we play - the "once per football game" ability is fundamentally the same constraint and opportunity for player decision making at the game-rules level, it's just written differently. We backfill the spell slot into the fiction; if "once per day/football game" was re-written as "as a 1st level wide receiver you get time and opportunity in each game for one epic play slot" and we select "one hand catch" for that epic play slot it is functionally the same as a spell... but the one hand catch isn't roleplaying and D&D magic is?
@@deviden13Agreed. I think what this comes down to is that many people recognize that a game's mechanics thematically matching its setting is neat, and they mistakenly believe that makes them more correct somehow.
@@deviden13 In the actual article (or one of them at least) Jason Alexander points out that because the overwhelming majority of Anglophone gamers subscribe to belief systems in which magic is just not real, our media diet is towards magic having very unclear or unknown in universe rules. It's actually a pretty serious immersion problem for people who do have or grow up in magical backgrounds that D&D magic doesn't match any kind of real world belief system in any way.
@@deviden13
The one-handed catch thing is still different from spell slots, because in a TTRPG where the setting is "real life" football, or something very similar, the real life "lore"/rules of the setting don't restrict a person's ability to make an "epic play" on the basis of time (once per game or day), but rather on skill and chance. The lore rules of real life football (physics, skill) don't say that such things can only happen once per game. Even if statistics say that is most likely, those statistics don't prevent it from happening more often or less often
So it would be more closely emulated by a skill roll, with maybe an epic play happening on a result of 20 or above on a d20, to emulate both sheer luck and increased likelihood of it as skill increases.
By contrast, the lore/setting rules of vancian spell casting say that there really is something in the spellcaster's brain or mind that corresponds to a spell slots. They can only memorize/"hold" so many spells in their mind, as if it's a bullet magazine, and need to rest before they put a spell in their mind again, because of a lore-specific kind of mental exhaustion, where they don't have the mental capacity to store another spell in their mind.
The "physics" of the lore literally parallel spell slots almost exactly.
If the lore said spellcasting was simply a skill thing, maybe a skill roll would emulate it better.
Both can be "roleplaying", but the spell slots are roleplaying specifically from the stance of the spellcaster character, who knows and experiences the lore physics/rules, while the "one epic play per game" is a rule that diverges from the "setting lore/rules" that the football athlete character is aware of and experiences, and thus removes one type of opportunity for the player to act from the "actor" stance, and also often urges the player to make decisions about when to use that ability that are made from the "author" stance.
The player of a vancian spellcaster doesn't have to move from "actor" stance roleplaying to "author" stance roleplaying in order to make decisions about when to use a spell slot and when to keep it in reserve.
@@emrysmccright3753 I think that's the mindset of veteran D&D players trained in making the roleplayed fiction at the table fit and flow from the rules of D&D, to the point that the gamey-ness of "Vancian magic" and player character levels is forgotten and it all feels more naturalistic and lore-based than it is.
I can just as easily make the case that a "level 1 receiver" in the NFL would do well to get 5 targets in a single game and only one (if any) of those targets would be a noteworthy catch. When I roleplay the WR I am able to think "this is my big moment!" and attempt [epic play] just as I as a wizard can think "this is my time, it's a desperate situation, I cast X".
And thus the lore has worked backward to fit the rules text, just as the fiction in play flows from the rules.
And then a higher level receiver would get more targets, more opportunities to make big plays. And so on.
Alternatively, if we choose to say that in a D&D fantasy world, a barbarian Rage per-day ability is actually powered by the innate magics of people with powerful souls, suddenly the "this is actor stance because of lore" distinction disappears because we have allowed ourselves to backfill the lore and make fiction flow from the rules constraints.
Fundamentally, both "X of Y per day" and spell slots (or even mana points) are gamey abstractions to constrain power and force the same kind of choices, the only distinction is how they are written.
The stances theory only becomes clean when you apply it to games where the GM-player role divide is distinct from the traditional RPG and a player might be controlling aspects of the world beyond their character's scope. Otherwise, in the case of the "what is and isn't roleplaying imo" per-day vs slots example from the Alexandrian it's a (messy) descriptive theory of the player experience endpoint applied prescriptively to a rules text start-point.
I've got a bunch of thoughts here. The first one is this: every rpg ability that says it can only be done once a day, or X number of times per rest, that isn't a supernatural ability, is a kind of special meta currency where it doesn't make sense for your character to know what the limit is, but most people probably collapse that into character knowledge with a hand wave.
Metacurrencies. Gamists love them, simulationists hate them, dramatists debate them endlessly.
that's a good summary
I feel like it shouldn't take much imagination to abstract "disassociated" mechanics or "metacurrencies" into something that makes perfect sense to your characters. It's not activating a once per day reroll ability for the character, but instead pushing their limits and paying a cost of some kind to do so. Dragonbane seems to integrate this well with their push mechanic, but I don't think you need the permission of the game system to apply the same kind of logic. Inspiration in 5e can be abstracted to a character drawing on some emotional strength such as a loved family member or a desire for vengeance. Bennies in Savage Worlds can represent an abstract level of grit or toughness that more important characters can draw on to push their limits and survive when others perish. IDK, maybe that's just me. I also don't have an issue with abstracting hitpoints, and I appear to be in the minority on that.
This applies for things where you can just "put in more effort", but not necessarily for metacurrencies that enable you to change or add something about the game world (like spending a plot point to add a shelf with heavy stuff to drop on an enemy). The key difference is whether you have to move from actor to author stance. If you can "add" the shelf by asking the DM if there is a shelf there, and the DM says Yes because even if they didn't plan that, they judge it likely that there would be a shelf there, then the player has remained in actor stance. The appeal of this is that even if you "add" the shelf by asking, you can "add" things like this as much as you want, as long as they are likely things that corresponds well with the fiction, and you have a DM attempting to be reasonably impartial about it. You are working with the fictional scenario of the world in a way similar to what your character is doing: looking for advantages. And crucially, you can do this any time, just like your character can. If you can spend a plot point to add a shelf, but can only do that a certain number of times, then even if you can only spend the points when it is likely within the fiction, you are limited in how often you can "look for" such advantages - limited by something external to the game's fiction.
I think "heroic" is another term that has a very fuzzy definition. Heroic as courageous is a valid definition, but it is not what people are referring to when they talk about "heroic characters." They are talking about larger than life characters, made from tougher stuff than most people. You can feel a player character that isn't inherently more powerful than any commoner creates more meaningful stories, but that style is not what they are talking about. They want the power fantasy.
I don't even know that it's inherently power fantasy. For instance, Star Wars is an inherently pulpy world which means that the heroes are definitively Heroes in the larger than life use of the word, but they aren't actually more powerful than the npcs. Just luckier, etc.
You could argue that Stormtroopers aren't actually terrible shots, but it is Han and Leia's heroic abilities that are protecting them from mooks while they have to actively avoid and be afraid of danger. To me they aren't "power fantasy" because that would mean they would steamroll Vader too. Instead, they are just playing at a higher level than, say, the characters in Alien.
D&D has this concept baked in with its zero to hero framework. Sure, some versions start off more powerful, but so are their enemies. The actual dynamic is much the same because of the escalation happening on both sides of the screen.
Power fantasy is insecure.
So, Journey to the Wast was not a very meaningful story because that Wukong fellow was overpowered from the start?
Every story where a character accomplishes something is a power fantasy.
A scenario where a commoner obtains something by outsmarting everything (the ideal OSR outcome) is a power fantasy, because that commoner turned out to be smarter than everyone else. In terms of meaningfulness, it's not necessarily that different from a character that can punch their way through problems.
Well, it *is* different, simply because outsmarting something is a more interesting solution than "I punch it really really hard", but that also depends on the context, and on a lot of elements that have nothing to do with power levels. There are a lot of ways you can make a straight up fistfight interesting, or make "how can I punch that guy really really hard" an interesting problem... just watch almost any JoJo.
Personally? I like characters that are larger then life, but that also face larger than life problems. So they are relatively powerful people with unique set of abilities, but there are many others like them in their world, and they must find creative ways to use their strength to overcome challenges.
That way, you get the best of both worlds: you get your power fantasy and the interesting story.
@@rubinelli7404 in a story, the hero has plot armor to get to where they can do the dramatically relevant thing to do the heroism. Whatever flavor of hero you want, the hero does not die of infection from eating bad clams before they get to the dragon; no one remembers that guy and it is generally considered bad story telling to focus on a side character with no plot relevance.
Even base line BX d&d has characters that are, on average, better than the level 0 npcs that make up the world; no one is interested in Conan the conqueror being thumped in the head by a toothless, fat turnip vendor because he was caught stealing. The game mechanics, at a base level try to give the PC a better than average status. In od&d, even a vanilla fighter was a "super human" and even a theif had abilities that made them better than a common man.
Star Wars FFG uses Story Points which represent the light side and dark side points. The players rolls force dice at the beginning of a session and this establishes the point pool. Then when a player uses one it turns into a darkside point and when a GM uses one it turns into a light side point.
I like it because it plays into the force in the star wars universe, especially mechanically with the light side and dark side. It also brings balance to the force and it allows the players to have a heroic underpinning of luck.
FFG Star Wars is a collective story telling system though. That is the authority of story telling is in the hands of everyone.
I think the most illuminating part conversation around metacurrency is the attitude around what being "heroic" is. For Ben, as he said, it's about making bold risks in the face of peril; for the poster, it's about being able to do larger than life actions with a certain amount of certainty, thereby playing a "heroic" character. I don't think either of these approaches are necessarily wrong, either.
I think that one of the of the main purposes for having metacurrencies is to mitigate the risk of a character suffering an ignoble demise. If you're wanting to play a mostly ordinary person, then yeah, metacurrencies run counter to that idea because the risk is part of the excitement. However, if a player wants to play something more akin to Conan the Barbarian, Indiana Jones or other kinds of heroic characters, then having that character at risk of dying due to something inconsequential or circumstantial doesn't fit into that idea. The feeling of greater agency, for these players, is a GOOD thing as long as there is still some more minor risk or cost associated.
One game that has a metacurrency that I like is Monster of the Week, specifically for its "Luck" mechanic. In that game, each PC has seven Luck points that don't get replenished at any point, basically acting as a secondary, long term health bar, and they can be "spent" to either get a success or escape a mortal blow. However, once the are all spent and the character is "Out of luck", the game master has carte blanche to cause harm to that character from that point on, encouraging them to go into retirement or else likely perish. I like it because it gives the life of danger and adventure an expiration date those characters, as well as also evoking the mental wear that that kind of life can give most characters. That said, it's only good for campaigns and is terrible for one-shots, which the game book acknowledges and encourages the game master to remove it for those scenarios.
" However, if a player wants to play something more akin to Conan the Barbarian, Indiana Jones or other kinds of heroic characters, then having that character at risk of dying due to something inconsequential or circumstantial doesn't fit into that idea." -- I think this has very little to do with the idea of metacurrencies and everything to do with how you run a game. Most popular "NSR" and even lots of "OSR" stuff push the idea that you really should only be rolling the dice if the situation is in fact consequential and not circumstantial.
The ideas and opinions expressed in this video were fine and reasonable right up until 11:30
Pretty much when anyone tries to define what a roleplaying game is or isn’t, the argument being made is likely to lose a lot of credibility in my book.
The Alexandrian has very rigidly defined RPGs by hinging an argument on the idea that “playing a role is making choices as if you were the character”. This completely nullifies the Pawn and Author Stances that Ben had explained earlier.
A game that gives players more creative license (whether through metacurrency, shared worldbuilding mechanics, or something else) is no more or less of an RPG than a game world that is 100% controlled by the GM.
Every element of an RPG, from its rules to its character options to its equipment lists to its metacurrencies to its art to the GM’s fictional world…they are all just creativity prompts in equal parts.
XP may not be a currency, but in Knave 2e XP has all the qualities Ben says he doesn't like.
You get XP from treasure, and then when you level up your abilities get better. So if you get more gold, your abilities increase faster. If you succeed in all ways, but fail to get that gold, your abilities don't increase at all.
This doesn't make any sense in the game world at all.
Also, when you level up you are granted three points which you apply to three different abilities. It's a stretch to say this is not a meta-currency. But even if it's not a currency, it's completely meta. This mechanic is completely *dissociated*, to use Jason Alexander's terminology.
It's interesting to me that Ben wrote the game this way, since he seems to dislike games with dissociated mechanics. He could have mitigated the dissociation in a simple way, by saying that leveling up can only happen at the end of a session.
And maybe he could've found a good way to eliminate it entirely by connecting the ability increases to in-game actions. e.g. increase your intelligence when you do a lot of intelligence checks.
XP is an abstraction of how good you are as a treasure hunter, and I think abstractions are great. If you are very successful as a treasure hunter, you get better. Characters in the game world would be aware that they are becoming more experienced (although they wouldn't have a specific number for it). Metacurrencies are things that have no connection to the game world itself.
I don't think this follows, if you never grab a single coin in Knave 2e you cannot gain xp so it doesn't follow the fiction. You can have a disconnected situation of a VERY seasoned adventurer in the fiction that cannot improve in the mechanics.
the fiction has a setup and methods that reinforce that setup. You play as a treasure seeker, not so much a monster slayer. Gameplay methods make you come in contact with treasures. If you chose to ignore them then the setup is invalidated by the player and all issues that follow from that, like lack of character growth is the result of the player declining the fiction. Yes this breaks the game but I think its still coherent.
@@ruolbu Yes but imagine finding the treasure, picking it up, getting to one step outside the village gate, putting it back down on the ground, leaving, and getting no xp because you didn't successfully return the treasure to town. Then I take one single step outside, pickup the treasure, and get all of the xp.
The thing that makes meta currency meta isn't that it's inconsistent, it's that we're suborning pure simulation to the narrative arc and/or gameplay loop.
@@nicholascarter9158 "it's that we're suborning pure simulation to the narrative arc and/or gameplay loop." I don't understand that sentence, could say it differently?
I think that scenario you described is intentionally breaking the game, like Monopoly and never buying anything, or asking your GM to let you play a specific published adventure, then reading the book yourself before you play it. It defeats the purpose.
"Brindlewood Bay" pops up as an immediate example of meta currencies being used to facilitate roleplay. If your characters puts on a crown to influence something, you must roleplay to a specific prompt. Engagement with that system creates more roleplay.
It is wholly possible to do the same in D&D. If your characters uses inspiration, you must roleplay a "Kung Fu" style flashback explaining some event in the past that the PC calls back so as to dodge a dragon's breath.
Take it a step further, and you have those sort of uses also influence the world in a manner PCs are aware. Each use adds another doom die and all the PCs feel a shiver as though someone stepped on their graves. They know the end has been hastened.
I really like Luck, particularly as used in DCC. It gives you a degree of "meta" control, but has in world ramifications, and is a sort of magic system in its self.
FATE stands as a nice counter-example to "metacurrencies pull you away from the roleplaying": its metacurrencies (FATE points) draw you closer and deeper into the role you are playing, because they can only be invoked on your character's written down aspects ("sucker for a pretty face"), or the situation's pre-stated aspects ("house on fire!"). In that way, FATE uses metacurrencies to direct players away from the stats on their sheets (another form of disassociation, in my books) and towards what is currently, actually happening in the game world.
100% this. Every mechanic in Fate is there to help the narrative.
Yes! The whole video doesn't sit right to me beacause my players love metacurrencies and that they make the game feel more immersive. Leaving me to play crunchier dungeoncrawler solo.
I think narrative is the key word here indeed. Some people play for narrative, some people play for simulation (for lack of a better term). One is top down the other is bottom up.
One starts at the conclusion "I declare that I will have escaped unscathed" and is looking for a plausible explanation "my guy makes Matrix moves and all the bullets miss"
The other starts at the available actions "I move behind cover, raise my AC with an item and take the dodge action, then I pray" in order to hopefully coax fate into the desired direction "I don't want to die here"
Well not exactly. It's more complicated than that. The real statement made was "metacurrencies reduce immersion", not necessarily that they reduce roleplaying. Often the two tend to be linked, but not always. Immersion is largely feeling like you're there and thinking in the moment.
RP is essentially thinking in terms of "I'm some other character, not myself, what would they do?"
The difference with metacurrencies comes is that when you're spending them, you're spending them on a storyteller level, not on a character level. Your character isn't necessarily aware they can only invoke the magic wand to help them a limited number of times based on how many fate points they have, or that when they give in to their anger flaw they get a bonus fate point they can use later. So when you start thinking that way, you're thinking on a meta level as a story author not on an immersive character level. So you actually get more RP but at the possible cost of immersion.
@@taragnor Weird how many people in this comment section don't get this. The point of this video isn't that X is good and Y is bad, but that X is X and Y is Y.
From an analytical standpoint I understand why you might think that director stance isn't on the same spectrum as actor stance and pawn stance, but my (admittedly limited) experience with games like Blades in the Dark seems to suggest otherwise. Sure, hypothetically these frames are very different, but in practice I notice my players settling in to actor stance until I call for a roll, at which point they might dip into director stance to suggest a devil's bargain (something bad happens in exchange for an extra die to their die pool, for those unaware), then into pawn stance when deciding whether to spend stress, then back into actor stance to deal with the consequences.
Of course, this isn't a metacurrency that players can just choose to spend any time, it's a very particular way they're allowed to engage with the game world and only when a roll has been called for, which I think helps them put it aside when it's not directly relevant. Still, I really like this flexibility between stances, this collaboration in storytelling, because I think it tells weirder and more engaging stories, and I haven't found that it impedes my player's abilities to act at all. Plus, even as a GM, I get to put on my actor hat when decided what NPCs and factions and such do in response to player actions. This is just a preference, but I don't think it's a weakness for a game to let everyone at the table try on all the different hats that go along with a TTRPG.
Blades in the Dark is actually interesting, in that I feel that it's the one rare case where I'd say the "director stance" so to speak actually adds to the immersion. Namely in the flashbacks, because they let you actually feel like you're playing a mastermind by letting you plan in advance and set up contingency plans you had thought of before. So I actually feel a lot more like a mastermind because of it, despite the fact that the mechanic itself is non-immersive.
Potential counter example... In Paranoia your clone has 6...clones that allow you to die and reset with the same character.
6 lives kind of acts as a meta currently to encourage role-playing as you have a limited number of do-overs...
...which was intended, I think, to get people into the mode of being willing to Die Spectacularly for the entertainment of the other players...less so their avatars.. But to get people to not "play" their character as some permanent asset.
This is just not a meta-currency. There is nothing meta-textual about it. It's a straight real thing in Alpha Complex. There really are 6 clones in storage! (Or so the Computer says). This is no different than having six bullets, six grenades, or six arms
Yeah, this wouldn't be an example of a meta-currency since that is being defined specifically as a resource with no equivalent in the fiction.
But this is a good example of how setting lore can give opportunities to act either from "actor" stance or "author" stance. Each clone may not view itself as any more disposable than a normal person, so actor stance would probably involve the player making more cautious decisions like the clone would, unless that clone is reckless. While author stance would make the decision to be reckless based on the meta-knowlegde of other clones and meta-perspective of them being disposable, and either make reckless decisions and justify them with explanations like "this clone is reckless" or "this clone sees itself as disposable" (author stance) or Just make reckless decisions without justifying them in-fiction (the third stance, I don't remember the word for it)
I feel like the Deathbringer Dice in Professor DM’s “Deathbringer” can bridge the gap between associated and dissociated resources depending on how you use them. They come off as meta- “badass points”, sort of like those action movie points mentioned in the post, that you can spend on literally anything. However, if the GM rules that the DB dice can only be used for things that your character would be skilled in, then they become “skill points” that can be applied whenever you, the player, wants them to. In this way, the resource is still sort of known to the CHARACTER (they know they can dig deep and put out more ‘oomph’ in their area of expertise), while also being an external resource activated by the PLAYER.
Ironsworn "Momentum" vs. 5e "Inspiration"
"Heroic", in popular lexicon, applies more to the "super" part of "Super Hero" vs. Heroes of myth and legend that overcome great challenges with courage, wits, and moral character.
Hell the Heroes of myth and legend are guys like Roland, Lancelot, John Wick, and Beowulf, who are absolutely superhuman by the standards of real life, but exist in a setting where their less cinematically obvious superpowers are just considered being very good at things.
Fate is amazing my dude. OSR style gaming is also super rad. I just think metacurrencies is a thing you can enjoy with the correct mindset.
When I play something like FATE my table and I are here to create a movie. I want super big drama. I want building falling in top of me and for the bad guy to be my fathers killer. I want to leap between building and fall in love.
When I play DND I want to build a character, interact with the game system. Live an epic. Be cool as hell. And design rad fighting encounters for my players.
When i play OSR stuff i want to be inmersed. I want to imagine every little detail in the room. I want to see what happens. I will never let go of my 10 foot pole.
It's like the movies. I don't like Romantic Comedies. That doesn't mean i need to hold a conversation on whether they are good or not. I generally prefer not to watch them.
Though, every once in a while i do partake. And some times i am pleasantly surprised.
Enjoy gaming my dudes, in any form you like best. And try things out! You never know how different the next thing you are going to love is.
If players don't want to have control over the narrative that exists outside of their character's control, that's fine. As long as that's not an excuse to offload the entire burden of maintaining the fiction onto me as the GM and treat the game like a carnival ride. One asks me if there's a bucket in the room. Another wants to give me a point to find a bucket in the room. These players engage with the fiction in fundamentally different ways but are equally engaged and I'm cool with both.
Personally, I run with meta-currencies. My players usually don't engage with the fiction directorially. The result is they spend their points on influencing their actions that matter to their character and for which they'd reasonably go above and beyond to accomplish, and I encourage it. It's not that different from the abstraction found in hit points. They're effectively a meta-currency spent to say "actually, that dagger didn't just disembowel me, as daggers are wont to do". They don't simulate anything remotely close to what's found in reality, and we accept that because they make for a fair game mechanic.
What would you say is the appeal to a player of using a plot point to find a bucket in a room vs asking if there is one?
I ask because, when I am a player, if I have to spend a plot point to find a bucket in the room, I have one of two experiences:
If it was likely there would be a bucket in the room (e.g. in a janitor's closet), I'm annoyed that I am limited by a meta currency in how much I can engage with the fiction of the game and use it for creative solutions. If there is likely a bucket, why do I have to spend a point to find one?
Or, if a bucket isn't likely, it feels like I solved the problem by just "getting lucky" which breaks the immersion of playing a character that solves things by their wits or skill. If the character is supposed to be a kind of comical "just gets ridiculously lucky" character, then that wouldn't break the immersion of course. Or if they have some kind of "supernatural luck" ability, a la comic book Domino or Matt from Wheel of Time, then it wouldn't break the immersion. But if the immersion is about solving problems with creativity and cleverness, then the plot point removes the need to "use the fiction" by, for example, looking for the bucket where you are likely to find it. Which is a simplistic example, but it illustrates the point of using the fiction within constraints that require cleverness or creativity or planning, vs creating the fiction without constraints that require those things. Obviously the "using a bucket in the plan" creativity is the same in both. But the "finding the resources we need" isn't.
So I don't really understand the appeal of having to use a plot point instead of just asking? Is it just the appeal of resource management? Like "I got a satisfying result by saving my plot point until an important moment?" Is it simply a happy feeling that something good happened, created by the sort of "false scarcity" created by having plot points, and therefore makes the good outcome feel more exciting because it is rare? Like winning at gambling?
@@emrysmccright3753 I suppose my example is a bit simple, because realistically a player is always going to ask before they break out the currencies. Never pay for what you can get for free. But let me reframe how I see the roles happening in a game I'm running. As the GM, I'm running "the world". I am telling the most interesting story I can about that world. If it's really interesting for a bucket to be there, I'm going to mention a bucket. If I hadn't thought about a bucket but someone asks and it seems extremely likely, then poof: there's Schrödinger's bucket.
But buckets appear lots of places they aren't likely. They're wily like that. Maybe there was a mess in this hallway and it was recently mopped up. Maybe it's the result of a horrific paint store robbery. The possibilities are as endless as their unlikeliness. But we're telling an interesting story and unlikely is interesting. But I'm also not going to poof an unlikely bucket into every hallway someone asks for one. Someone has to keep the bucketpocolypse in check and that's my unfortunate burden to bear.
Meanwhile, the players are also telling a story about their character. But their characters don't stop at the tip of their fingers. They have connections, needs, and desires, and it's more interesting if things about them happen around them. The importance of a bucket to the world's narrative in my head isn't necessarily going to align with its narrative significance to the character in the player's mind. They could pause the game and tell me that. Or they could spend five minutes convincing me of the likelihood of a bucket in this unlikely place. Or we could roll periodic bucket checks. But this is a collaborative experience and I trust my player when they tell me a bucket is significant to them in this moment. And a meta-resource is a simple social contract means of saying it without saying it (and keeping those requests focused).
It's then my job as the runner of the world to make that bucket significant. The player just Chekhov's Gunned it. The camera is on it. We just made a big deal about it. I'm now responsible for figuring out why this unlikely bucket is now likely. Butterfly effects form in the story. Why did they need to clean up a mess in this hall? Why did it get left out? Maybe an employee was violently ill. Maybe it was the start of a rapidly spreading disease in the facility. Or maybe the janitor's just lazy or got fired on the job and those simple facts could matter later. Whatever the case, Plot Buckets can't be allowed to exist in a vacuum. They're too important and their stories too interesting to ignore.
@@ClockworkBard
Lol, thank you for the roles explaination, it was delightful and really funny.
And thank you so much for this reply. I was initially confused cuz "then why would you ever pay for it if you could always get it for free?" but I hadn't considered the mismatch in how important the bucket would be to DM vs Player for creating interesting stories, nor the interruption, time, and possible immersion break that would be required to explain that importance. So the "meta currency as quick communication social contract" idea makes a lot of sense and I have never heard it explained like that before.
@@emrysmccright3753 I'm glad you enjoyed it. That makes me happy. Thank you very much for being curious about different ideas and indulging my lengthy opinions!
@@ClockworkBard
Gladly, your perspective is fascinating.
Personally, I still prefer to use the "ask if there is a bucket" method instead of story points that enable you to add something to the world, because I have noticed that when I use the ask method, the players I have played with tend to stick closer to the established lore of the shared fiction, whereas when I have used things like story points there is always at least one player who always want to add things like "a T-Rex bursts out of the ground". Now, sometimes that kind of thing is great! But a lot of the times I've seen it in games, it ends up pulling the entire focus of the session away from whatever the original scenario was and redirecting it towards this new crazy thing that just happened. Which is sometimes fun. I love a sandbox, and I don't try to keep the story or scenario on rails in a narrative sense. But sometimes it kind of sucks when the original premise of the game gets mostly ignored or altered so drastically that things like themes, moral dilemmas, puzzle encounters or even just narrative premise don't even get engaged with because "now the game is about a T-Rex". Plus, for me, a lot of the fun as a DM is creating a complex world, getting to "show" it to my friends, and see what they do with it. If what they do with it is ignore it and substitute "this session is just Jurassic park now, lol" then that does mess with my own enjoyment of the game as a DM.
And I get tired of having to say "no" to such requests because they are often not so obviously clashing with the original lore or premise of the scenario. I've had players who seem to have a knack for coming up with story points requests that seem reasonable, but that I know as the DM will likely majorly clash with the scenario we are engaging with together. Then that player can get discouraged that so many of their ideas are getting declined.
Now, this could just be viewed as incompatible preferences/expectations, or as a need for better communication.
But I have noticed when they don't have story points, the same kind of player doesn't usually come in with the assumption that they can change major things about the scenario or setting, and they usually still have a good time and don't feel deprived of using that power. Because without a story point mechanic they never assumed they had it in the first place.
Meanwhile, I've found that players don't often ask for a bucket-pocalypse, lol. And if they do, they seem more willing to accept a no without feeling disappointed. When I use the "just ask if it is there" method, I also don't usually get those kind of huge, scenario-breaking requests, and even if I do, the player doesn't usually feel like I denied them the opportunity to use a resource/power of story points by saying no.
And I tend to talk a lot with my players about the things that are important to their characters, so during the game it's usually pretty easy for them to quickly either ask or text me about something being there because it would be cool for their character. And I usually just find it fine to say "yes there was a bucket" anytime such a thing is requested anyway.
tldr: With the ask method, it seems like players tend to ask for buckets. With story points, somebody tries to summon a T-Rex and gets annoyed if I have to say no, because apparently story points = explicit right to change the world/scenario.
While I basically agree that I find meta-mechanics off-putting, I think it is worth pointing out that it IS true that players even in OSR games meta-game all the time and do *not* in any way limit their decision-making to things their character. knows or "would do in this situation". In fact, meta-game based decisions in all RPGs are so common and endemic that the game could barely exist without them. For example, a "good" player knows what *genre* of game they are playing in. And if it's High Fantasy vs Arthurian Fantasy vs Sword and Sorcery vs Modern Survival Horror, they will have their character behave in *different ways*. A "good" player also understands that TTRPGs are generally not about PvP, so attacking your fellow players is not cool. The reason we don't think of these "meta-game" factors that heavily determine how we play our characters is that they are so widely understood as to have become invisible. In the same vein, I would argue that while you and I may find story points or hero points, etc, off-putting - it's entirely possible that a different kind of player who has absorbed different kinds of assumptions about how the game is played could use them *without at all breaking immersion*, because, much like genre expectations and not attacking/stealing from your fellow players, they are so used to story points that they forget that they are even metagaming. In other words, the resistance to story points is mostly just a matter of habit and what you are used to.
I agree with this guy
Came here to say essentially the same thing (and to criticize the Alexandrian article).
@@chadwick196 My recollection is that in (maybe a different?) the article, it's specifically mentioned that magic gets to be disassociated because statistically your players don't believe in magic, meaning they don't have any assumptions for the system to violate, which is a tacit concession to this point.
But things like genre seem like they can still be engaged with from an Actor or at most an Author stance (e.g. the lore of the setting creates Sword and Sorcery tropes, or we don't attack each other because in-fiction we are close friends and it would take a lot for us to turn on each other). If story points let you add something to the game world, don't they always shift you into a Director stance?
Ben seemed to be saying that, when being a player instead of a DM, he prefers a kind of immersion that mostly keeps you out of Director stance.
Is there a way that plot points can be used without moving you into Director stance?
@@emrysmccright3753 I don't agree. When you are thinking in genre terms you are by definition thinking in director stance. Players are often *not* friends, especially in the early stages of a campaign - but they *still* don't constantly betray each other (even if that's exactly what their characters would do, given what we know about their personalities), precisely because they know that it's not okay at the meta-game level. That is director stance. The whole point I'm making is that there is nothing intrinsic to director stance that is "immersion breaking". All players in all styles of play (OSR, PbtA, 5e, etc) in fact shift between these stances all the time already. And they are, in fact, required to do so in order to be "good" players in a basic way. And genre expectations and PvP are just a couple of examples. If you look at the history of the hobby, you can see countless examples of the way players have historically "not played nice" - in other words, did not obey Director Stance implicit rules. For example, don't expect the game to have realistic physics when it comes to casting fireball. If you insist on verisimilitude where magic or economics or sewer construction or disease is concerned you will just bog the table down and frustrate the GM. It's just that the mechanics don't always acknowledge it explicitly. There are even many modern conflicts over this. For example, what if in the OSR I suddenly started treating orcs and kobolds as I would other sentient humanoids, and assume that they are not intrinsically evil but capable of a range of moral behaviors. I would BREAK THE OSR. For five decades we have been conditioning players to accept Director Stance-driven patterns of behavior CONSTANTLY. But we don't call it that today. We call it "being a good player". In other words, a cooperative player who accepts the assumptions the GM and the other players agree to make about how the game is played. There are in fact whole TH-cam channels dedicated to the comedy of what happens if you question the assumptions baked into traditional role-playing worlds - from bikini chain mail to low-IQ orcs to the historical non-existence of the traditional RPG "tavern" to the siliness of mega-dungeons. RPGs are one big director stance fudge and they always have been.
The first part feels like someone re-defining what a most people consider a meta-currency is to win a dumb argument.
By Ben's definition , hp, damage dice, and exp are meta currency in d&d. The player interacts with this element; ie taking a health potion when their hp is down to 10 because they are fighting a goblin with a d4 damage die. A person in reality cannot do the math in their head and see that they are going to be able to take one more punch before they have to worry about being knocked out. Most d&d players just internalize this, bit it is the same thing as spending luck points to avoid death in a game with that defined.
I would also characterize games where things like luck points or hero points are used as being as part of the world build as spell slots in d&d. We have superstitions about luck in the real world, if that was actually a force the world, the characters in that world should have some context for it in game. They might not be able to count luck points in game, but a character in d&d cannot count the onces of blood lost in a fight to know how many hits they can take up.
As far as the analogy of catching the ball one handed, there is a finite number of times an athlete could reliably catch the ball one handed before they get too tired to do it and need a rest. Real people do not have stat blocks, so most people do not know what that number is, but the mechanic is trying to account for that in an abstract way with the "once a day" restriction. I feel most people can relate to going to the gym and knowing about the number of exercises you can do based on your routine and feeling when you know you are running out of gas here. Separating it as an unrelated ability that is "once a day" is just setting the restrictions simple and abstract, because it is a game. You could also modle it with Stamina points if you want to get more granular about fatigue and less granular about sore muscles being a factor (you can move faster after doing an arm day than a leg day at the gym on foot).
I agree that HP and XP are metacurrencies, but they do simulate something in-game (however flimsily), i.e. the character's ability to keep going and the growing skills of the character. It does neither particularly well (especially HP is far-fetched), but there is a connection there. Contrast this to story points, where the player can decide to spend a point to get advantage on their next skill roll or whatever (I've seen this in a TTRPG, although I'm not sure if this is what's generally meant by "story points"), where there's no connection between the in-game world and the player. There's a gradation, it seems.
@@WhiteOwlet hp has no in world definition and people in the world do not use it concously. What is more, a lot of versions define it as "luck" which is not the same as plot armor or hero points. In reality, the same Kobold shooting an arrow into an unaware, unarmed peasant is as difficult to make and as deadly as it doing it to a 20th level barbarian, but the hp garentees the barbarian will survive. This is for no reason other than game meta mechanics because it suck to lose a high level character to a bad die roll; there is no in world explanation to why the barbarian can take an ax to the face and keep trucking.
Levels too; specifically leveling up, also means soothing in real world. Can your rougue loan 5 exp to the wizard to make a level? If you are doing gold for exp, that would mean the richest person is a maxed out level and people get stronger as they approach retirement when their savings is at its most. If you do exp for creatures killed, the local butcher should be max level and able to take out a battalion single handed.
A meta mechanic does not break imersion; most people do not even see it if they are integrated into the system. You just have to buy that these mechanics exist and move on; just like a god in d&d does not break immersion for an atheist or saying, "you walk there in two hours" does not require you to get the pc's to walk around nature trails for two hours to keep immersion. This is trying to justify a preference.
exactly, that's the reason the idea of "metacurrencies" are bs. If RPG are games, then they will always "break immersion" because they need to have abstractions for the game portion to work.
@@jexsnake I think it is an axis; granular versus abstract. A game without meta currencies is more of a larp.
@@rynowatcher yeah I agree
I think there is something to be argued that meta-currencies (when used well) aren't just "i win" buttons. FATE is a good example of this. FATE points can let you pull off some huge stunts and create facts in the game world that hadn't previously been established, BUT you had to earn that Fate Point previous. Typically by accepting story complications. So in that sense you are trading a potential complication now, for a potential advantage later.
The other example is Inspiration in D&D, you don't just have inspiration. You have to "give to get" and by doing so get to nudge the odds in your favour at a potentially pivotal moment. Ultimately though, we use dice and rules to tell stories, the Characters we play don't actually have sentience but rather it is us, the players that create the story based on the results of those dice rolls. To me meta-currencies are no more disruptive to the storytelling as measuring the game world in 5 foot squares.
I'll bastardize the quote "Heroes dont run from a problems (or change the problem in the fiction using meta currencies) they confront the problem using their own ingenuity and what they have at hand."
I feel this discussion happened back in old time cons, zines and bulletin boards in a slightly different format: skill vs non-skill systems (I know for a fact it did I was there).
The existence of games that use a meta currency is a sub-set//sub-genre of roleplaying games. No one is urged to use that type of engine to power a game. If you dont find it increases the "run-time" experience of all at the table then yes dont use it. Its a group decision for a specific type of emulation.
Ultimately you go with whatever supports your run-time play culture. I remember reading the skill use description in GURPS 1st ed and was shocked at the containing way they viewed skill usage. If you play in an open OSR style everything from skills to feats to magic to personal emotional context can and does impact game play YMMV based on GM (which has always been the case). If you cant do a double twist pike back-stab over the monster in-front of you in your OSR game thats a rulling not a rule. No currency required just a fun focused GM. I think thats great. Again it depends on the play culture too. If your all there for grounded medieval gritty realism you probably wouldn't even think to do the acrobatic assault in the first place. What I know I dislike are rules engines that say "acrobatic assault" is a skill, feat or meta-spend. Thats not the engine I want to use for our games with my current players in our current game. It might be what we all want in our next gaming campaign. Horses for courses is the adage.
I think meta-spend is a fine line - if the meta currency represents your connection to part of your "in-game-persona" then a meta currency can work well. For example if it represents your "elan" in a swashbuckling game or your connection to the innate magic of the high fantasy world you r PC lives in or your PC's inner Super-Heroness... then it _can_ work. The core issue is just how much rewriting of the narrative does it involve and is it disruptive in your specific game.
Meta-currency can give the GM the feeling of having to react to story beats in a way similar to players essentially unleashing the totally unexpected on the GM as well.
However the problems often far out weigh the benefits derived from meta-currency existence.
For example the tendency to "kludge" a stat or skill use for a benefit derived from the meta currency; this seems ubiquitous in most for the designs unfortunately, Some hand-wave it others say its a feature not a bug. i still dont like it it doesn't sit well with me. I its a feature why not have no attributes or stats at all or a single number or some other core design that makes use of this "elegance"
Player intrusion becomes disruptive, game-breaking or a problematic again seen as a feature and not a bug. It gives players agency. How is subverting problem solving in a game about problem solving a feature?
Looking for story writing opportunities instead of character driven confrontation. This one is a matter of scale and I think this is the issue where meta-currency driven games are significantly different from trad-rpg's. If this is what your going for then fine. Blades in the Dark does this in spades and its a fun good game fro the right table and play culture. Put grognards Players in that game and its a non-stater it just doesn't work.
Meta-spends are not good or bad, its a rules engine subsystem that can either support your run-time play culture or subvert it. Be sure you know that going in and everyone is open to the experiment or experience and set a three game test run period after which you reassess if its something you want to commit to for a numbered number of additional sittings or if you try something else (new or old).
I found that Alexandrian article gate-keep-y. If I have my players describe the room their characters are in, I still get to say that the activity we’re engaged in is “playing a role playing game”. I even invented a term for when someone’s provocative just to make the discourse worse. I call it: “Xandering the conversation”.
I think the main point of the article is just that when a player is describing the room that they are in, they are not in that moment role-playing.
Yeah that main point is complicated when using exclusive language like, "not a roleplaying game", despite the fact that we have games that are absolutely roleplaying games that don't confirm to this definition.
@@QuestingBeastI think the point the commenter is making is that defining roleplaying in a theoretical way divorced from the reality of how many rpgs are played is a bit navel gaze-y. Treating navel gazing contemplations of the hobby as a stone from The God Alexandrian is kinda the problem, but I'm glad you enjoy his work I guess. This feels like The Alexandrian recycling John Harpers crossing the line post but without being specifically applied to Pbta/Fitd games. Its almost like everything Alexandrian writes was lifted from someone else and made worse in the process.
@@QuestingBeast At first he does say "in the moment", but the article pushes further, and from the 2020 addendum:
> If we can move beyond arguing that vanilla ice cream is actually chocolate ice cream, we have the opportunity to step back and recognize that these are both different types of ice cream. I propose that both roleplaying games and storytelling games are tabletop narrative games.
From the "WHAT IS A ROLEPLAYING GAME?" section, he uses a definitional retreat: "Roleplaying games are defined by mechanics which are associated with the game world."
If we're going to be super inflexible with language, couldn't a case be made that only when you're in Actor stance are you truly ever playing a "role-playing" game? The discussion about associated/non-associated mechanics are interesting; the "otherwise you're not playing an rpg" undertones aren't.
Maybe this isn't the right forum to litigate his blog post. I really appreciate your critical insights, but this article always bugged me. I feel like the video would have made a stronger case without sourcing it.
Lol. I think I got a different vibe than you. Definitely seemed more of a this style/that style and the spectrum between them vibe, myself
Power by The Apocalypse, or as it stands in many of its implementations, is an interesting case. It's "fiction oriented" from the player's perceptive but "meta" or "story" from the game master's prespective. The player make a decision from the player's point of view, but the result of the move is "story" based.
Sometimes moves allow players to choose outcome in a way that's outside PC's control.
So it's "Director Stance".
@@ElektronikArzt Varies by game. There's a whole tangled thing here about whether it's meta to give me control of my own past actions when the game is set in my hometown. For example, I don't remember any of the basic moves in Dungeon World having options outside the character's direct actions in the Basic Moves, and the Playbook Moves always seemed more supernatural to me personally.
@@nicholascarter9158 Yeah it varies by game. Ot's not in the rules of DW, but can happen in game, not because of rules, but because of play culture.
"Fellowship" has such things explicit in the rules and moves.
I think HP as presented in dnd is a meta currency, except for your last hit point, as nothing happens narratively until you lose that last one. Games that implement things like bloodied at half, or suffer a wound if a quarter hp is lost change it from a level 3 currency y to a level 2.
Even if there are metacurrencies in an RPG, their existence doesn't mean there must be an impact to immersion. You can be very immersed in an Author or Director stance, and while using metacurrencies.
This isn't a serious problem, this is just different preferred playstyles.
On the topic of immersion, I feel like HP, particularly high HP, breaks immersion. For example in 3e, if you have 30+ HP you can be fairly confident that you can't die in one round of hand to hand combat. It's not a deal breaker, but it's in my head when I play.
An interesting take is looking at HP as a combo of adrenaline, exhaustion, bleeding and physical trauma--and the more nebulous physical toughness we know.
@@Zappbrannigan83that always struck me as more of a cop out, a reaching explanation to explain the ridiculous nature of taking hits and operating at 100% capacity until you finally drop. One that falls apart when you hear how players and GM's describe hits. Especially if damage types factor in.
Honestly, I love meta currencies, don't think any of my players felt less immersed in a Savage Worlds game than a 3.5 or earlier D&D game.
@@twistedturns65 It's more accurate to how the body actually functions in a fight. I worked at a psych hospital for 6 years. And putting people in restraints really depended on how much adrenaline was in their system and how they would crash out after physical exhaustion. Or like if ur a boxer, and you get punched in the kidneys, doesn't matter how tough or strong you are, you'll go down. It's how the nervous system responds during stress. And what weak points are there. Sustained phusical exertion plus a drop in blood pressure usually results in someone dropping.
If have major bleeding, that'll drop your blood pressure and make you pass out. But Physical injuries in the moment are nearly as impacful as raw exertion. That fighter grappling a monster for 1-2 rounds would wear him out more than taking an arrow to the thigh.
Hit Points are a dissociative meta currency. I’ve never asked myself how many hit points I have left or made decisions based on hit points (I certainly don’t go home and sleep for 8 hours because my hit points might be too low for a challenge).
I'm curious if hit points would be considered a "meta currency"? Your character may be aware of injury, but does not know how much more they can take, so the end result is unknown to the character (,but not the player)
And in almost all games, we don't even know if they're injured. It's handled on an attack by attack basis as it comes up.
I think this would be an abstraction (something that removes or generalizes details), rather than a meta-currency. Ben seems to be defining meta-currency as a mechanic that requires you to shift into Director stance.
Your character might not know exactly how many more hits they can take, but neither do you as a player (damage roll variation) and the character may have a general idea of how badly injured they are. But either way, you as a player can still choose to roleplay hit points from any of the stances:
Actor: my character knows they are injured, but not how badly, so they will be cautious. Or they dont realize how badly they are injured, so they will be reckless.
Author: I want to be cautious, so I will justify that with the fact that my character would have a general idea of how badly injured they are
Pawn: I want to be cautious. No in-fiction explanation needed.
Director: this would be a cool story moment for my character to die, so I will charge in even though I have 1 hit point, and probably do an author-style explanation of why they are charging in.
With a meta-currency like story points that change the plot or add things to the world, you pretty much HAVE to shift into Director stance to use them. Which is what Ben is saying breaks his preferred form of immersion as a player.
The stuff about player stances was very interesting. I think I tend to stick in Author mode.
Which might also explain why meta-currencies don't bother me - i like to use them to steer my character's journey.
Blades in the Dark is a great example of a game that uses meta-currencies to great effect i think. The Stress mechanic works to actually build the stress of the players, as you start off every session practically invincible and then slowly get more and more vulnerable over time
Modiphius’s 2D20 relies entirely on dissociated metacurrencies. And while it is fun to earn “momentum” in these games, when it comes to actually spending it (or “luck”), I have found that it almost always pulls players from the immediacy of the dramatic situation that requires the roll. And as a GM, no matter how positive your relationship is to your players, it always feels punitive to spend “threat.” But many other people do seem to genuinely enjoy these linear, narrative games.
This was my issue with the game system. As much as the tit-for-tat was there it created ended in a creative player vs creative GM situation.
The game I feel did meta-currency the best is D6. In D6 the character points and force points affect only your rolls. Your odds may be better (or much better) but you still have a chance to fail. And if the Dice Gawds said, "No son, your done." then that's it.
When metacurrency rules allow you to change 'the narrative' then that's when problems really start to grow. That's my issue with Savage Worlds; the rules for them are luck based until you get to the influence the story part. The dice should tell you the story, whether they are in your favor or the antagonist.
I believe it IS possible to have a metacurrency that is not dissociative in your game as long as
1) it is called something your character is aware of (like focus, stamina, effort...)
2) it can only be used before the action and not change the outcome after the fact and
3) its effect doesn't go beyond anything the character could reasonably do in the world.
Wanna spend some 'effort' to do the incredible whirlwind attack with your two-handed axe? Go right ahead, but you know that your body will need some rest before you can pull off this feat again.
Fortune in the Middle is the search keyword for an obvious consideration, that there's no actual reason to think that a die roll comes before, after, or during an action: it's different for every kind of skill check and for every game.
I'd say Hope points in The One Ring 2E are a bit like that. They almost only serve to add dice to the roll, or to have a magical success with Elves for example. And Hope and Despair is almost a tangible thing in Tolkien's world, and the Fellowship and their bonds permits to find Hope again.
I feel like luck in particular is something experienced by the characters. At my DCC table, the players often refuse to use luck, unless they are thieves (who get it back). Because of the way luck is related to death (recovering the body is a chance based on luck to survive against the odds), the idea that "testing your luck" leads to it "running out" literally, is an interesting mechanic. That and how it often plays into how other ways the character interacts with the game world. If a meta currency is also influenced by the character's decisions (ie gaining luck by doing in character things, or losing it by angering powerful forces), I think it's pretty cool.
Wrap it up in lore and game world interactivity. Make using it have an effect on how the character feels about the current situation and how the world interacts with them. With something like luck, the character is desperately needing something to go in their favor, hoping their luck holds. But then again, DCC is gonzo, and probably not for everyone.
Really interesting. This probably explains why so many people are surprised at their characters surviving famous Call of Cthulhu meatgrinders - using the optional luck mechanic prevents a lot of deaths and deadly situations.
Call of Cthulhu's Luck system works quite well. If you've ever needed to pick which PC to target with something when there isn't an obvious answer, or needed to decide if a board gives way under a PC when you have _no_ idea if it should hold or not, PC luck scores are a good way to do that. Player can also burn luck to influence rolls, but doing so makes them more likely to be targeted and less likely to survive stupid stunts, so it tends to be used only sparingly. This offsets dice not being very good sources of random numbers, and gives the keeper another hint for narrating what happens.
I really like the definition of a role-playing game as one where you not only play a role but the mechanics give you decisions to make AS the character. As a designer of gamebooks, I've always struggled whether I can call my games RPGs because they didn't fit my definition, which was that an RPG needed to give the player some level of control over the story. But gamebooks offer only the illusion of control since you can't go "off script". But the idea that any in-character decision offered by the game's mechanics is enough to qualify a game as an RPG feels open enough for the broader spectrum of games while still having a clear line between RPG and any game in which you happen to control a character. It even acknowledges that a player can choose to role-play in a game where the mechanics don't offer in-character decisions-it's just the player role-playing for fun. I used to do that as a kid playing Doom or Civilization. They're not RPGs, and I didn't know it at the time, but I was immersing myself in the characters and playing as if I were them.
I think a good distinction can be made if the name "Metacurrency" is expanded to "Meta-narrative-currency". If a metacurrency is any abstraction of the PCs inherent properties (XP, HP), a meta-narrative-currency is anything that allows the player to act as GM for a moment. Obviously those are unimersive since you can't be an immersed player and the GM at the same time
You mean like knowing the name of my character's father?
Great video as usual! Always happy to see a QB upload!
I’m finding this very interesting reading. The only thing I can really contribute is this: the first time I ever encountered anything like modern metacurrency was when I played the James Bond 007 game back in the 1980s, and they incorporated hero points to simulate The larger than life things bond did in the movies, particularly the Roger Moore era. As a kid, I loved this. And I still do as an adult. If I’m playing a Pulp game, I want to be able to be pulpy when I want to, and not leave it up to the random control of the Dice all the time. it doesn’t break my immersion; on the contrary, I feel more empowered in the genre in which I am choosing to play.
I find the Luck mechanics in Call of Cthulhu are an excellent meta currency, because they border the space between an associative and dissociative mechanic. It is within our daily experience that we might "test our luck" or have a stroke of luck so it almost feels like the character would have a sense of how their luck is, and while either testing or spending luck to succeed at things is clearly a player decision they almost feel in-world since, like sanity, the loss of luck is a good measure of the character's time running out.
I like metacurrencies that allow players to bring their weird narrative ideas into the game world, like the "strings" in PBTA system games, or the "keys" in Lady Blackbird. I think I'm pretty creative, but my players always manage to surprise me with their ideas, and i think it's awesome when they have mechanisms that empower them to take the wheel.
Not all dissociative decisions made by players break immersion. A notable exception is when a game is designed to be led by a game master, but delegates to the players the job and authority to describe and add flavour and colour to NPCs, rooms and locations that the PCs interact with/in. I think that making such decisions helps the players engage more with the game world and doesn't let them auto-solve any of the problems posed by the GM. I used this approach when designing Fatebenders RPG and it worked well with my players.
I completely agree there’s a very clear distinction between gameplay where you influence the story only from within via your character, and where you can influence it directly from outside the game world.
I don’t think I agree that mixing these two styles is a bad idea. I’ve had a lot of fun with PbtA games, and although a lot of fans of those games advocate a very strong “writers’ room” approach, my preferred style is for players to be in actor stance most of the time, but with an understanding that here and there they can exercise some narrative authority, often promoted by the GM. You do give up the pure pleasure of being a character in a pre-existing world that you are discovering - but you still get some of that ime. And in addition, the mixture of different people’s ideas at the table gives a certain narrative liveliness and unpredictability that I find harder to achieve in the fully pre-existing world style.
That said, I’m talking about shared narrative authority or a mixture of stances - I’m not really talking about meta currencies per se, as the PbtA games I’ve played don’t have them. So maybe I’m ok with mixing the two styles, but I’m not so keen on actual mechanics for players manipulating the story from the outside. Not sure why that would be, I just know I like PbtA but I don’t like FATE.
Very interesting anyway, thanks for the video. I really appreciate your level headed discussion discussion of these sorts of topics, where you’re very clear about your own preferences while still respecting the validity of other styles.
Funny I have a similar hang up with character classes, basically if a class has a clear, well defined explanation for why it's distinct from another class then I have no problem, but if a class is more nebulous in origin then I'm going to to start having questions.
Example- The magic classes in DnD, Warlocks made a pact, Sorcerers inherited their power, Wizards studied for it, and so on. Each one has a clearly distinct origin which explains why its power set is different from the other magic classes. The characters in question went through different circumstances and training for their powers, of course they're going to be different from each other.
The martial classes on the other hand aren't as clearly defined, the Fighter is good at fighting and the Rogue is sneaky but why they are so different from the other isn't properly explained. You can make 2 characters of either class have the EXACT same origin story and yet the two play radically apart. Why can't the Fighter have a couple of Rogue-like tricks from his days as an orphan in the slums. I just find that some of these classes exist more in the game than in the setting and I have problems with that.
When you started your example, I thought you were going to go completely the other direction. To me, the magician classes all SAY they have different origins, but then play out in exactly the same ways, forgetting that distinction over time.
@@matthewheimbecker9055 I find D&D magic immersion-breaking in general. This character has access to cosmic, arcane, eldritch powers beyond mortal comprehension, and uses them in finely metered out portions of damage so as to maintain the game's balance. Magic doesn't feel at all mystical, it feels like a video game power up.
As part of a medieval-fantasy tactical combat game it's fine as long as the combat puzzle is fun. But it doesn't immerse me in a magical and mysterious world.
I see no point in rewarding my players for being heroic or otherwise. The fact that they accomplished it is normally plenty reward as is, praise from NPCs or extra treasure is a bonus.
Part of the problem is that the further you go into liking your RPG to be a game, the more 'rewarding actions' is just you accurately accounting what things in the game are worth points.
@@nicholascarter9158 No, assigning a currency for heroism makes it more of a "game". Sometimes good deeds have rewards, sometimes they don't. If they're truly roleplaying a good-aligned character it shouldn't matter to them.
@@asepsisaficionado7376 Yes that's what I said. So in a worker placement game, I place workers, I get points. That's how actually playing the game goes. In a trick taking game I take tricks, I get points. That's how actually playing the game goes. In a roleplaying game I *role play* , I *get points*
@@nicholascarter9158 Okay, weird phrasing aside I understand what you're saying. But by the time they lose investment in everything but counting points I'd rather my table just play a co-op video game instead.
Wow, I was not prepared for the heady rush of nostalgia I got seeing that Forge logo. Put me back in college, discussing GNS with anyone who’d listen.
I’m happy to be an ambidextrous gamer who enjoys both storytelling and roleplaying games. The approaches are hard to blend in a satisfying way.
When it’s done well, the director “stance” is never meant to be in service of the character. You give a player a chance to claim narrative authority over the types of trees. They want to set the story in a pine barrens because that has a creepy appeal, not because they’ll get some tactical advantage by having access to pine cones and sandy soil.
As far as currency goes, it’s more interesting for me when diegetic elements can be spent. I love that OSR uses time as a currency. My players love the choice: search a room narratively for free, or “spend a turn” to see every hidden thing. The second option causes a little dissonance. It not just the risk of losing a turn that makes them want to take the narrative option. They also don’t want to step that far from their roles. The choice is a challenge.
The Riddle of Steel/Blade of the Iron Throne "passion points" I think work well and actually contribute to immersion. The biggest problem I have had with meta-currency is that players often times struggle on how best to use it. It reminds of the party that always keeps their single use magic items for some future event that never occurs (also very meta). Whether we care to admit or not, the game rests upon meta-knowledge and meta-exchanges. The decision to "do what my character would do based on what they know" is necessarily a meta decision. The GM offering an obvious plot hook but what might seem mundane is also very meta and to some degree currency. The Players can reject it as their characters (why would we do this?) or accept it as players because that's what the GM offered knowing that it will lead to XP (also meta currency). Players will always oscillate between immersive and meta decision making and in fact the former depends on the latter. I think meta-currency just formalizes an exchange that takes place between the players and the GM anyway. Call it meta-currency, call it just recognizing we are playing a game with a narrative structure and baked in incentives, I don't see the difference. And the notion that in OSR games GMs completely retain narrative control? Where is coming from? Been playing DnD long before the OSR was a thing or even a glimmer (I am just "old"--no renaissance here) and that is not a universal thing
I think the issue is more one of the context for these mechanics rather than the mechanics themselves. You could easily call your Plot Points "Motivation" or something along those lines and make them something that the characters would be aware of.
In the One-handed catch example, the player doesn't know they can do their big catch a limited amount of times, but they know as the match goes on they become more and more tired and less likely to succeed at the catch if they were to try it. Likewise, Indy crawling into a fridge to survive a nuclear blast isn't something that could happen more than once, in-universe or out of it.
One of the DM's most important tools is the ability to contextualize mechanics in the world, and it's one that can solve a lot of problems if used sensibly.
I think Metacurrency tends to be best when it's tied to the game and its presentation/expectation in some way. As well as when it's not intrusive to what it can affect and how it affects elements of the game.
I've come to enjoy metacurrency that is a measure of luck being on your side and allowing a reroll or limited success here and there. Or something tied to a character trait you can draw on to better allow for success.
Something to help facilitate the minds eye vision of a character from those times the dice really go against the grain of reasonable expectation or would make competent characters seem like buffoons through a freakish roll of the dice.
If they're too common to use, or allow a greater meausre of alteration to the circumstance than is reasonable or used in a manner that would be flippant in their execution. It can be a problem to include them. Caution and care with their inclusion is paramount, but i dont think their inclusion is bad when handled well.
I love meta currency. We know it from so many games. Video games, story games - all my players know what to do with them. I use "Skillpoints", skillpoints are re-flavored Deathbringer-dice-Plus. They can use it to resist consequences or conditions or to give their or other characters an extra die. But they can also use it to alternate the narrative: "I already know that guy", "I have already done that" or "I think that detail about the world is like this..." (with GM approval). They work very well for my group.
~~ Thank you for the video.
I think part of this is differing definitions of hero/heroic, too. You are using a very real world definition, while they are meaning the mythical meaning of a person capable of feats beyond those of normal people. Both are valid, but are totally opposite, and hero points, etc, DO work to represent those folks that have a little something extra. Not saying you have to WANT that, but they DO create that feeling.
Also, hero points in Eberron, Willpower in Chronicles of Darkness, etc, are framed in game as extra effort or determination. You could easily see this as a heroic ability like spells, etc (it's just a spell that only gives you a +3 to a roll or whatever) which the character would know about. FATE points and Bennies in Savage Worlds are a bit different (although when it's defined like Inspiration in D&D 5e it's a little harder to pin down) because it doesn't have a direct correlation in universe, just like you are talking about.
I would generally consider anything a metacurrency that is something that the characters wouldn't think in terms of and exists purely for the player. So spell slots would be something your character is aware of, they would have knowledge of how many spells they can cast and know if they cast a fireball now, they'll be out of fireballs. Same with charges from a wand.
Actions and movement per round are different though. They're almost certainly metacurrency. Simply because rounds themselves are meta.
While your character would be aware roughly how fast they are, once you start getting into dividing this into rounds, it leads to purely metagame decisions. For instance, I double move forward on my turn, and the orc single moves and attacks me. In the narrative we're just charging each other, but due to how turn order is structured, I'm incentivized to make decisions based on "how far can I move and attack", so I get the first strike, as opposed to the narrative "I charge him" where you ultimately would meet in the middle and trade blows. Once I start worrying about my movement per round, I'm going into the territory of metagame tactical thinking. Sometimes this can be a huge impact like wanting to peek around a corner, shoot an arrow then duck behind cover again. Even if narratively your character is doing the same thing, if you run out of movement currency right as you round the corner, it's a very different scenario mechanically where you're exposed the entire round, where as if you had 5 ft more of movement, suddenly you become unhittable and behind total cover .
That's not metacurrency because the characters can still understand "I can't catch them before they get around the corner". It's abstract and looks different than reality, but they still understand what they can and can't do.
With these definitions, Srarcraft is very much a roleplaying game: every decision you make is as a commander of a force pitched in a battle against someone else. It's completely "in world." It even uses the same kinds of mechanical abstractions that RPGs use (unit statistics, tactical movement etc.)
It's always a bit tiresome to hear people run down game mechanics and game playing as not a part of RPGs. Maybe community theater would be a better hobby. You won't have any annoying resources to track, rules to follow, and you can just happily stay on character and plot the whole time.
I think these games need to ditch bad mechanics. Classes are a rather bad mechanic. So is balancing skills out. There is only what a man can do, what a man can try to do, and what a man cannot do. So lets get bad mechanics out of games, those mechanics that encourage metagaming, and keep those that let players feel like they can try to make the knowledge check, even if another character has a better bonus.
@@matthewdancz9152 if every game ditched those mechanics there would be only one type of rpg. That's why we have options. Nobody is making you play the games that have the mechanics you don't like. Don't play it and leave them for the ones who like. Isn't that much easier to do?
I think connecting metacurrency to the different stances is a really insightful thing to do, because it highlights the difference between OSR and story games. OSRs are built around trying to minimize the gap between player and character. Metacurrencies would only harm that goal, since it is a thing the player knows about and interacts with, but not the character. With story games though, metacurrencies fill a very important role because separating the player from the character is vital to creating the kind of game they intended. Story games are meant to be played entirely in the director stance because they're really about telling an engaging story together, not facing adversity and overcoming it. Metacurrency are a tool for a particular kind of game, and I'm a little sad some games use them even when they don't fit.
Your definition near the beginning of the video that a metacurrency is something the player can use that the character can't, is helpful to me.
I also like the idea of a successful knowledge check allowing the player to director stance what it is they know
Hi Ben, haven't watched YT in a while, glad to be back.
Great topic and video! I get what you are saying, I think metacurrency (like hero points, hero/DB dice, devil's luck, etc.) works better with pulp kinda games, even old school pulp games.
I however tend to prefer "stress" as a "metacurrency" for OSR. In which you push your roll or action, at a coast of your character's physical or mental resources (decreasing his grit, hp or something else), which provides more verisimilitude, in my opinion.
Mouse Guard tries to do both with its GM turns and player turns. Meta currency is earned by playing as your character in the GM turn and then spent to give authority over the story in the player turn.
I like games that give the players some amount of narrative control, and I say that as someone who prefers to GM. Meta currencies are an effective way of providing this narrative control but also constraining it to points in the narrative where the rules of the game deem it appropriate. This lets the players have enough power to keep games from feeling like a GM dictatorship while also still sectioning large chunks of the narrative off as the GM's sole domain. In my experience, the best meta currencies are something the GM can easily plan around. Another thing that seems to make a good metacurrency is when the system doesn't force a certain approach to using them. One thing I think DnD 5e actually did a decent job at was making classes and subclasses that allowed players to modulate how much contact they had with metacurrencies. Players who don't even want to use regular inspiration have options, as do the players who want to never fail a roll because they have so many inspiration points, luck points, and whatever other things let them reroll failed saves. Both play styles and several levels between them have several class/subclass/multiclass options open to them. By that same token, the GM in a 5e game can modulate how much metacurrency players have access to by being judicious with which options they allow players to pick. GMs don't even need to go through and write a ban list, they can just tell players to have their options vetted by the GM before picking them, which is a norm in many groups. In conclusion, I think it's valid not to want any metacurrencies at all in your games, but I enjoy giving my players some narrative power and I think metacurrencies are an excellent tool for this when the rules around them are clear and easy to plan around.
Side note: metacurrency can add a different level of drama to the game when a player is debating using their last luck point on something seemingly important but the session isn't even half over. As a GM, I find it hard to make my players that anxious without a lot of set-up in the narrative, and it's nice to see that look on their faces for less effort every so often. Maybe I'm just sadistic, but whatever.
For me two best examples is Warhammer Fantasy where you can avoid death in a very deadly system, to make the game enjoyable even if "Accident" happen and best game with meta-currency is Fabula Ultima with fabula points that let you change the world, use abilities or just reroll your dice, all using GM approval and connection to the story and hero background
@8:55 is probably a an explanation why attempts to have the players participate in the world building frequently (ime) fall flat.
DCC Luck- its a metacurrency that directly relates to Sword and Sorcery world building- that you are part of some great game between beings of unimaginable power, and its up to you to either surf the wave of destiny or take your fate into your own hands. Never felt like spending luck in DCC broke immersion especially because earning Luck is so difficult and tied to In-world quests (or you play a thief/halfling and your a quirk in the great game)
@QuestingBeast you often cite The Forge in your videos, and it’s always interesting and profound. I would absolutely love to see a discussion/interview between you and Ron Edwards. Is it something you have considered before?
Excellent Post. Thank you.
The last part about "Disassociate Mechanics" not being role playing has helped me pin one of my major dislikes about 5e - its so full of em!
As many things this is coming down to taste. My experience is that many players want to play a game. And part of the "game experience" is engaging with mechanics, roll dice and use the game mechanics to beat the obstacle in front of them. I had run sessions where hardly a single die roll occured and I got from some players the feedback, that while they overall enjoyed the session they would like to engage with the game more. This is where metacurrencies shine (I'm thinking for example of the Karma Points in EZD6). They allow a tactical "board gamey" level of game happening while playing and this to some players is more engaging than running a more escape room style game with no metacurrencies (thinking of Cairn here). There is not one superior way. It's just flavor and I'm happy to adjust to what my table enjoys
I hope that the reddit discussion didn't get too heated! To me, this reads as different subcultures within the RPG community interacting with each other. It looks like various people are trying to yuck each other's yum and vice versa. As long as we all keep level heads there's nothing wrong with discussing our different tastes. But internet forums don't have a reputation for nuanced and calm discussion.
For my part, I don't mind giving a medium-small amount of "GM authority" to the players, or allowing them to use Director stance on occasion. I think many GMs will do this during character creation, letting players define backstories and declare NPC relationships. A player might say, "My father died defending our home from bandits, and I go adventuring so I can send gold home to my mom and siblings." And also during play, the GM might say "You rolled a crit and slayed the ogre! What does your finishing blow look like?" Some games use metacurrencies as tools to codify when the GM should cede authority to a player, while games without those mechanics allow the group to negotiate the balance for themselves. I think every GM has a line, and if too much control is given to the players, the GM feels like they've lost control of the setting. And I bet that every GM changes the position of that line on a moment-to-moment basis, because I sure do feel that way.
Anyway, cheers all, and thanks for the thought-provoking video. :)
Genuine question: wouldn't hit points at specific numerical values be a meta currency? If the system was more like: you feel fine- you feel injured- you feel like you can barely carry on- you are unable to carry on, then that seems fairly close to how people actually asses their own health, but numerical values seem a bit too abstracted, to my mind, not to view it as a currency of sorts, especially given how risk assessment works. Low HP, party should consider fleeing. Ofc they would realistically still know if they were severely injured, but knowing the number combined with know the sorts of numbers various ill effects will roll up as far as damage does make it seem a bit like fate points.
I belive nearly all games use meta currency cuz, by the definition given in the video itself, hp is a meta currency, even in games without a way to directly spend hp you can "spend" them to pass a trap witout dolving it for example, just rolling the dice and tanking the consequences.
In this sense we can prove meta currency csn help with immersion, for example spellcasting in white hack is an expence in meta currency but it helps to visualize the physical and mental cost magic has on the user. You could pull similar wording tricks on other mechanics like story points to integrate thrm in fiction, like cslling them "favor points" and saying the gods in this world daily give little blassing to adventurers devoted to them like the heroes of the Greek mythos, so story points in fiction are blessings of gods
World of Darkness 2E had Willpower points, which you could use to enhance your rolls or take special actions. Its framed as something in-world governing your character, but I doubt these characters know they have a limited resource of willpower. Feels like a mid-step to fate points and the like.
I also recall one of the core books portraying “problem-solving” style roleplaying as something of the past, with their game focused on storyteling, hell it was marketed as a storytelling game, even though there’s no real mechanics for players to take over the narrative.
The whole series is probably an interesting study on the emergence of mainstream story-focused gaming and how at the time it still leaned rather heavily on traditional roleplaying mechanics and conventions. You could draw some paralells to people who use 5E in a similar way. I don’t think a game pulling in both directions has to be a disaster.
World of Darkness willpower does sorta seem like an awkward bridge in some ways. I think this only *seems* meta-currency-ish because it's not clear that real willpower really works like this, like, some people just keep trucking stubbornly. It implies that when you're not spending willpower on rolls you're like... I mean what does it imply, that you're not really trying that hard ? This just seems weird because we don't seem to really work quite this way.
But I allege it's definitely not a metacurrency, just a particular view of human psychology, or more rather, a particular vision of psychology seen in kinda gothic urban horror-fantasy stories. In the World of Darkness people really do have a finite willpower reserve and they really do gain it back over time or by indulging in their vices.
Just like stamina in some other game, an undeniably real thing, but it never quite works in a roleplaying game the way the stamina of real people does because the game is only interested in stamina in a certain scenario or only a certain aspect of stamina. World of Darkness is interested in people resisting temptations to be morally depraved and part of how it represents that is with Willpower and Humanity and so on
@@Dewwyyyy Part of the problem is that in real life "trying really intensely" isn't how we spend willpower or something that improves your chances of success normally. You can't fail to understand the writing in a book, then read the book really hard. In real life you spend willpower to keep doing something without giving up or getting distracted by outside noise.
Burning Wheel’s entire engine is the meta currency of Artha. You earn Artha for acting on things that fulfill your PCs goals, traits and instincts. You can spend these points when making a roll to add some d6s to your dice pool, or to allow you to reroll 6s after you’ve made a roll. Ben is right that when you are playing the game your looking at your character and making decisions that would earn you points, so you are in author stance I think. But it’s this doesn’t mean, as Ben suggests, that it’s less immersive. My experience of playing BW and OD&D is that BW is strongly immersive. The link between character personality traits and ambitions to the currency create an immersive atmosphere like no other game I’ve ever played before.
Alien RPG stress mechanic is perfect (other games also have pushed rolls) overall I love the pushed roll mechanic as a way to balance things.
Even hero points, granting a reroll, are good.
I think this discussion has some real value. This intrinsic vs extrinsic analysis of mechanics from the characters’ point of view is one I’ve been subconsciously making for years. When things didn’t sit quite right, this may have been a factor. I do think that as much as possible, mechanics ought to be modeling something that the character is aware of. So I don’t care for mechanics that are limited to once per day arbitrarily. In the case of magic, that is covered in how things work in the world. I also suppose you could have martial abilities like a berserker who is exhausted after berserking and needs to sleep before they can summon that kind of frenetic energy or rage again. But a maneuver you can only do once a day? Often kind of a stretch. The rules should model things happening in a world, striking a balance between verisimilitude (with the logic of there being magic and such) and being easy to play and fun. It should not feel “gamey”. This is a good metric to use during game design to keep things from spinning off into board-game land: are the characters aware of this mechanic, either implicitly or intuitively? If not, then maybe think about doing what you are trying to do (such as balance) a different way. Wanna overcome swingy outcomes due to how the dice rolls are set up? Maybe change your combat mechanics to be less swingy, less volatile, in the first place, if that is the problem. Think outside the box, like MCDM is doing with the dice rolls in their new game.
I think there are two types of game designers who fall into this trap: those who love games and not necessarily role-playing games, and want to nerd out on creative rules. And those who aren’t great at designing mechanics, or are bad at math or balancing the game, and use these added layers to tweak things instead of fixing the problem, adding tweak after tweak over time, until it becomes a crumbling edifice. Kinda like Congress and the immense and ever-growing Federal Code.
If people are serious about out immersion, have the Gm be the only one who tracks HP. Works wonders in Unknown Armies.
Nice discussion with great points. Where I find I disagree is in the framing that a GM should have a personal style or preference on the issue. I love Knave, Shadowdark, B/X, etc. but also love Cortex and other games. I might play them with certain players more often, but there’s room in the repertoire for both styles, depending on the group’s mood. We don’t have to commit to a thing as the One True Way.
love this topic. When I watched Me, Myself and Die Season 1 I fell in love with Savage Worlds. Looking into it I often read that the game is very swingy and can easily overwhelm players. So much that Bennys, the nuh-uh meta currency, is apparently essential for a fun experience. I couldn't explain it but I feel out of love upon hearing that again and again. Your video allowed me to better explain this to myself.
Savage Worlds' chapter of DM advice is very specific that SW worlds are worlds in which the PCs are metaphysically different from normal humans whether any single character knows that specifically or not. It's not a game for representing the Trojan War, it's a game for representing the Odyssey.
That's nice fluff, certainly. Its also just not what my head was into.
The Luck system we use! It usually makes a cinematic style event!
Luck Values: (-7) - 24
-Expenditure 1d4 Luck (Must have at least 1 positive Luck Point): You may use Luck to affect one event brought about by an action you take or one that directly affects you. (Examples: Hjalmar using Luck to make Admiral Blood fail a save against a spell HE cast. Timbo using Luck to disarm Admiral Blood. Slayn using luck to make a save vs Zone of Truth which he was affected by. Combat Rewind a la Rick vs. Pixies)
-Expenditure (1d4) x2 Luck (Must have at least 1 positive Luck Point): You may use luck to affect one event brought about by someone else's action which has no direct impact on you. (Examples: Bob using luck to rewind Slayn's fireball thus saving 3/4s of the party, but having no effect on him because of evasion. Using luck to make the Shin ship's guns misfire. They were targeting the ship not one individual.)
-Every time you advance a level, roll luck as per the table below. ADD this to your previous total up to the maximum defined below. Hopefully this will prevent Luck dump battles right before you advance.
Only work for the last 10 rounds
Player Luck
Player Level Luck Roll Max Luck
1 1d4 4
2-3 1d6 10
4-7 2d4 16
8-15 3d6 20
16-20 4d6 24
Love your work and you've inspired a great deal of my own work. I have 2 counter points - for what it's worth. You say, "this I think is just flat out false, depending of course on how you define metacurrencies".. so how can it be flat out false? If I define metacurrencies in a way different than you do, am I flat out false? I digress.
You say that you've designed Knave to have no metacurrencies, affecting the world only from inside the world. Don't you roll dice? Do you roll dice IN THE WORLD to affect whether your character defeats the ogre or jump the chasm? That's an outside influence, only used by you as the player, that your character is not aware of, yet it absolutely defines how you interact with the world. Point is, EVERYTHING is metacurrency.
A metacurrency is a resource you spend, and you don't spend dice in Knave. Also, rolling dice is a mechanic that abstracts something real inside the game world (the odds of you succeeding at a difficult task). I don't consider abstractions to be the same thing as metacurrencies.
@@QuestingBeast appreciate the discussion.
Always love your thoughtful analysis!
The author of that post perhaps conflated the idea of abstracted mechanics with the concept of meta-currency. "Discourse is a constant negotiation of terms." -Umberto Eco
For me most of the immersion breaking stuff comes from people at the table trying to look up rules mid-game or talking about something random or whatever. I find that the act of spending metacurrencies can invest players more deeply into the narrative. I typically keep to lighter crunch games so gameplay stays as focused on the narrative as possible but even saying that, I don't think folks should ever forget that TTRPGs will always be ultimately a game - it's right there in the name.
Honestly though, at the end of the day, we shouldn't give people crap for enjoying their own particular style of gaming - so long at it isn't damaging in any way.
Feels like yet another discussion to have at your table in session zero. There are so many potential points of contention in the way a group of people can enjoy the ttrpg experience; it's really quite impressive so many tables make this thing work.
I always kinda like meta currency or meta currency-like things to be implemented on a more character currency level. instead of high abstraction "hero points", you get medium abstraction "willpower" that would burn the limited resource of a characters focus or such.
CoC push mechanics also sort of fall into this idea for me.
Not all game currencies are heroic; they just enforce the genre, which could be decidedly non-heroic: reputation points you lose and gain, stress (Mothership), corruption (Legend of the Five Rings), sanity (Call of the Cthulhu), karma (Tenra Bansho Zero).
Story gamers have also realised that unlimited "director stance" could be detrimental.
Czege principle: When a player controls both adversity and it's resolution, it's not fun.
John Harper's concept of "Crossing the line": players shouldn't establish things that their character could not possibly have known.
Notice how GMless story games often make it so, that different player makes adversity and different makes resolution (Fiasco) or it's generated through a oracle (Ironsworn).
Modiphius 2d20 rpgs tend to have meta currencies as a great example of meta currencies. Savage Worlds rpg is another that has meta currencies with its bennies.
All rpgs are ultimately variations on the game of "let's pretend". Some kids like to add things on the fly when they're playing, others get mad at the kids who do that because they're upsetting the established order that they had been enjoying. The first kind of kid grows up to love metacurrencies, the second kind grows up to hate them.