Meta Currency

Where did it go wrong?

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Or differently put: why do so many people here have a problem with it?

hurdur metagaming muh immersion grrr plot armor

Because people who spend hours poring over every sourcebook that they can find to pick the best broken options and little-used rules to create unstoppable overpowered characters don't want their "immersion" ruined.

I think this is more a problem with exceedingly complex character creation minigames and misguided attempts to 'reward system mastery' than about meta-resources themselves.

Resources like bennies/fate points/inspiration/etc can be effective tools for encouraging desired behaviors in players. It helps when their effects are temporary and players aren't allowed to stockpile them.

Experience however, at least in the way it's typically implemented, is quite flawed. It only works for very specific kinds of hero's journey type stories involving self-discovery and defeating ever-greater opponents. In most cases I would much rather decide on one power-level for the players in advance, keep them there, and let them get more effective by playing smarter instead of autoattacking their way to godhood.

Well, yeah. A lot of games are about playing heroes and if you want to simulate heroic sagas, just giving PCs goood stat and skill values isn't going to cut it.

When it was applied without full understanding of why it works and how to best make use of it.

Just like every other mechanic under the sun.

Meta currencies are fine. They work well in some games, not so well in others, and are completely unsuitable for some styles of play. Some people love them, some people are ambivalent, some people hate them.

A certain vocal and petulantly angry group likes to bitch and moan about them as a microcosm of everything that is wrong with new RPGs, but it's just them throwing a temper tantrum that their preferred way of playing is no longer the only way to do things. It's pretty pathetic really. The RPG space is larger now than it ever has been before, with a greater variety of games and players than might have been considered possible. No matter what your playstyle, the sheer growth of the hobby will give you more things to play and more people to play with. Why is it such a bad thing that there are people out there who enjoy things differently to you?

Heh thought I was browsing Veeky Forums for a sec

You can basically explain them as the "dumb luck" of your character. Like its been said here in the thread, players shouldn't be able to stockpile them and I'd add they should be somewhat limited in what you can do with them. They shouldn't be flat get out of jail free cards, but rather something to keep their momentum going in a fight or survive a drop from a tall building a la mattress cart or something.

You spent way too many words saying absolutely nothing.
Not surprising from some guy reddit-spacing.

Whenever a Good Boy Point is used it very often feels like when you are reading a book/comics/whatever and the author wrote himself in a corner and just bullshit it's way out. It's always so unsatisfying like a guy praising himself, even happenstance born out the random roll of the dice generate more memorable moments.
There is also this kind of subtle hypocrisy to the whole thing, like "Hey guys, so during the last session of RPG I was roleplaying a janitor and beat this crew of ninjas that were attacking the building, isn't that AWESOME? (ignore the fact I also had reality-bending metapowers)".

dumb memespouter

It didn't. The only times I've seen problems with them are when they're overwhelmingly powerful, like in Mutants & Masterminds, and even then their income is limited by the GM.

>overwhelmingly powerful, like in Mutants & Masterminds,
like what?

Only time I used something like this was during a retrospective campaign, with the party being retired adventurers telling stories about the "old days" to a crowd.

For that game, I allowed each player to basically make some change or cause something to happen, occasionally putting me on the spot. Was a great way to improve my ability to improvise.

I only had caveats for this.

1. It had to be within reason. No tripping over +6 super items every session and they like. The party was alright with that.

2. You had to phrase it retrospectively, How I Met Your Mother style.

Was a pretty great campaign, and the backdrop kept it fairly lighthearted.

Basically this.

Honestly, it's a bit weird how people playing D&D maintain their desires to maintain immersion when everything about the game feels as though you get immersed in spite of the system, rather than because of it.

That has nothing to do with it.

The problem with metacurrency is putting it in games like GURPS that really don't need it. Also it hurts the entire point of an RPG (the possibility of failure) by giving the characters bullshit points they can use to not take responsibility for their mistakes.

How well they work, how incongruous to the system or gameplay they may or may not feel in use, is dependent both on the system and how a GM leverages or frames them.

There are two components to metacurrency: how they interact with the narrative, and how they interact with mechanics.
Metacurrency is meant to reinforce the elements of plot and drama that exist in even the simplest stories. They function much better if used with those in mind, and if they're in a system that lends itself to more structured stories or adventures. For instance, Marvel Heroic's "Act" structure.
And mechanically, metacurrency is a way to partially supplement or even sometimes supplant dice rolls: minimizing random chance and giving more explicit influence on the direction or weight of certain decisions. They're not strictly necessary to do this, but if nothing else it helps mitigate the trap of the GM calling for too many dice rolls.

It's best leveraged when they're just another tool in the toolbox, rather than being the axis around which everything else revolves, and when there are interesting trappings baked into it that vary between characters.
This is why vanilla Fate Core isn't well loved on Veeky Forums but the different sourcebook flavors and configurations, like Atomic Robo, are regarded much better: they introduce more elements that exist parallel to the fate point mechanics.

Whichever stupid fucking cunt came up with the Bennies in Savage Worlds honestly needs to get cancer of the ass. I mean there's a lot of shitty mechanics in that game, and really I think there are only one or two good things about Savage Worlds, but it would be a fine game if they took out of some of the retarded shit. For example Wild Dice which are meant to prevent PCs from failing because muh special plot armor. However, where the game really shits the bed, is with the bennies.

You get three bennies each session, so right away this is stupid shit. What if you run very short sessions, or sessions that are heavy on the roleplay? They suggest a four hour session but the bennies aren't per hour, they are based on out-of-game shit. So your best strategy is to get into the game, avoid rolling for anything, then do one combat and suddenly be fucking invincible because you have a shitload of bennies. Oh and you can take feats for more of them, you can have up to seven as a child halfling, and that's WITHOUT the gamemaster handing them out like candy, which he is supposed to.

Between bennies and wild die it is nearly impossible for the characters to fail at anything. They can use them to soak damage or even reroll damage in some games. Basically they are a win button for the PCs. And the worst part? Once you play Savage Worlds, the cancer of bennies will spread into your other games. Playing GURPS, or Dungeon World? Characters will fail a roll and literally ask "can I have a bennie?" No, go fucking kill yourself. The day I heard that was the last day I owned an intact Savage Worlds core book. It went in the trash, along with the rest of this fucking awful system.

Hero points. The reroll mechanic by itself is strong as fuck since it's a reroll but you add 10 if the dice rolled 9 or below in a game that only uses d20s, but there's a huge variety of effects they can be used for.

I didn't mind bennies themselves, but as you mention, you get way too fucking many of them for how gamebreaking they are if you give them out like the game assumes you will.

M&M is pretty broken anyway, given that it's about superheroes.

>Using paragraphs, therefore reddit.

I agree with two points here about metacurrency being temporal and not being withheld in bulk.

I've been trying to make a rather brutal setting using Fate as something of a backend.
The hope is that the points are used more to survive than to instakill

>reddit-spacing

FATE's core mechanics and skills system are cool. The FATE points are not, however.

It's what it's called when you hit enter after quoting a post.

Are there any decent generic systems lighter than GURPS that don't use this sort of thing?

Have you considered not being a shit savage worlds player/game master?

BRP, the Call of Cthulhu system

Dumb phoneposter.

People not getting on board with the metaeconomy.

Kind of a serious concern there, but relatable

>It's what it's called when you hit enter after quoting a post.

I had no idea this triggered people.

I am doing it all the time now.

Thanks.

I've been doing it since 2007 and have only now heard of it allegedly being 'reddit'

this

and this too

is that what it actually is? from the sounds and looks of it i thought it was just putting yuge gaps between every single line, just like how reddit formats every fucking carriage return.
i guess those two might go hand-in-hand though.

i don't have too much of a problem with them, but they're kind of hit-and-miss
we had a swd20 campaign where we got about one force point every session (or, every level up) and they were used for some interesting things - we even had multiple moments where people willingly took the dark side point and the lower dice bonus because they felt their character was drawing on the force in anger.
the only issue with them was that by the last session a couple of us had saved up a ton - one dude like, 15 of them, but to be honest it just meant we did all the most ridiculous shit in the finale of the campaign.

contrasted against this would be our FATE supers campaign, where fate points were just kind of.. there. it felt like we all just used like two fate points a session each, and every time it was 'look at character sheet, apply vaguely relevant thing to stack another +2'
they had absolutely no weight to them and therefore no relevancy to anything.

a semi-metacurrency would also be mekton zeta's luck system, where luck is a stat you can invest in just as any other stat. from the sounds of it (because the rulebook is shite) luck can be added to any skill roll, but it's basically 1 point added for 1 point of luck, and the limit is 10 luck if you spend a good chunk of character points on it.
this is in a d10 system where your skill bonuses and the 10% chance of critting are both vastly more useful to you than that piddly little bonus. additionally, our DM was a shit for that campaign and ruled that you'd start having Bad Things happen if you used up your luck.

ultimately, not too great experiences but i've seen them work well regardless, so it just kind of depends. making them slow or hard to get and have a good 'kick' seems to be the way to go, personally.

quit blowing hot air and actually answer the question
like pray tell, how in your opinion do you think it's best used, and where does it not work?

youtube.com/watch?v=na_YQyKHpAQ
No idea dude.

shit vag worlds

The most interesting use I've seen of meta currency was in a WW2 game where you could have NPC soldiers killed in place of the PC's, so you could have all the artillery and snipers and things without having random TPK's.

>Why is it such a bad thing that there are people out there who enjoy things differently to you?
Because my kind of fun is the right kind of fun, and now companies that used to devote all their resources to my kind of fun are devoting resources to the wrong kinds of fun.

Hero points work fine. You get one per session, so typically you use it for that really important roll, or whatever. The issue as far as I can see is in gaining more. All too often I've seen a GM give a hero point for too little a drawback.

Value Chain

Because its easy for players to never be pushed out of their comfort zones

Depends on the system. I like it in Shadowrun, but I think that Fate (The entire system along with its metacurrency) is cancer.