How do you feel about meta-mechanics like this, Preparedness in GUMSHOE, Aspects in FATE, and the like?

How do you feel about meta-mechanics like this, Preparedness in GUMSHOE, Aspects in FATE, and the like?

I'm a big fan of the Aspects in Fate. Mostly because they're more the core mechanic of the system- everything or anything can be modeled as an Aspect of some kind. If you're in a trial or debate, each and every piece of evidence you find for your own innocence is another Aspect you can tag while defending yourself.

Then again, I'm more just a big fan of Fate in general, not specifically the meta-mechanics.

D&D spell slots and shadowrun Edge are both metamechanics too, prove me wrong

>How do you feel about meta-mechanics like this

Very gay and homosexual.

>tfw crunchy grognards don't realize that Edge in Shadowrun and Fate Points in Dark Heresy are the dame as shit in storygames

This is actually what I don't like about uses per day systems. They feel weirdly forced, I prefer systems that don't have a limit on the number of times a character can, say, try to use a power or something, but just have it get harder with each successive time or have a chance to take feedback damage or something. Something to make the decision to stop using the ability for that day a player choice, and not a mechanical law.

Edge absolutely is.
You're an idiot if you think spellslots are.

Very much my opinion

In 3.5 there's actually two systems that do that.

The first system is the Truespeech. You've got a skill- a truespeech check- that takes a malus every time you want to re-speak a certain incantation. There's a lot of problems with truespeech, but that system isn't one.

Then the other system is actually third-party- made by Mongoose, the folks who redid Traveler- called Chaos Magic. The long and short of it is that casting spells deals nonlethal/subdual damage to you. Meaning that the more spells you cast, the more exhausted you are and the less effective hitpoints you have until you're out of the fight.

I could see combining subdual damage with, say, the power costs from psionics. Take 1 subdual damage to cast a 0th or 1st level spell, 3 to cast a 2nd level, 5 to cast a 3rd, and so on. Since you only heal 1 point of subdual damage an hour, and a 9th-level spell sucks up 17 subdual damage, that means that a single 9th-level spell takes 17 hours in order to recover completely from it. And maybe something about how subdual can't be healed through magic or something.

Spell slots are bullshit because of the whole 'lol you magically forgot your spell after casting', but spells per day are not.

About the same as I do about hit points.

The hell is The Gauntlet?

A playbook/class in The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power, a PbtA dark fantasy/politics game.

I don't necessarily mind "per day" abilities, but frankly I think more of them should go full meta and have them just be "per session" abilities. Your players will usually have a far better idea of how much longer your game session is rather than when the GM is going to fade to "the next day", which will prevent them from stockpiling all their best shit until the "last battle of day". This way, they can better pace themselves over the course of the gaming session.

I quite like Tome of Magic, actually! Truespeech does a lot of things that I like, but I've literally never in my life encountered a player with any interest in it whatsoever.

This approach to design philosophy is what's been giving me trouble trying to balance a player race I'm working on, though. I think I'm getting there, but balancing racial special powers can be damn hard when you're not just reskinning something already established as "balanced".

They have a place and are very fun in the right kind of game. They can be done wrong, and they aren't for everyone, but there are enough examples of them being done right that I think they're a worthwhile design space to explore.

I was lucky enough to have a player who wanted to be a bard/truespeaker in a gestalt game.

So instead I gave them a homebrewed variant bard that uses truespeech instead of arcane magic, but could use perform for their truespeech checks.

And I also fixed a lot of the bullshit, like the incredibly badly scaled check DCs. Also gave them the meta-speech powers for 'free', in that they can take a huge -5 to a check in order to empower truespeech or whatever.

I did not understand any of that, but I can take metamechanics or leave them.

I'm okay with them, but per day abilities are always very much a narrative conceit. Even things like Barbarian rages in D&D, even if people defend the system as if it's simulationist.

I'd be far more inclined to ever play Barbarians if there was a different mechanic governing how long they can rage. Even something like a DC 10 Fort save to keep raging, +1 per rounds raged consecutively, would be a better start though obviously that's a half-formed wisp of an idea

I don't like them, because it forces a sort of pace on the game.

I.e. 5e's 6 expected combats/ day with 2 short rests.

I guess the problem is things like that are kinda half arsed. Either they should go your way or just make it an obvious once per session/story whatever purely narrative effect.

>I've literally never in my life encountered a player with any interest in it whatsoever.

It's broken on a base mechanical level and requires munchkinning or houserules to bring up to a functional level, and at that point you might as play one of the other 3.5 fun classes like Totemist or Swordsage that actually work.

Love em. I steal the idea of aspects from FATE and use it to replace "situational boost" type effects in everything now.

Only gotcha is that a DM coming from a crunch heavy system really needs to do some work to get a handle on them before you get any real mileage.

>This is actually what I don't like about uses per day systems.
Off on a tangent much?

>I don't like them, because it forces a sort of pace on the game.
>I.e. 5e's 6 expected combats/ day with 2 short rests.
That's only really an issue if your players are in a position to dictate when they get into combats. Unless they've done something to set up a big advantage for themselves, that usually shouldn't be the case.

Well, it's also a style thing. Some games make that sort of resource management an implicit assumption of the system. If you don't enjoy that kind of thing, you're not going to like the system as much. It's about being aware of system traits and your own preferences and how to balance things.

>people confusing metamechanics with abstractions

That's written in a rather obscure way.