What Do You Think Of As "Modern TTRPG Mechanics"?

[zakael19]

A group I'm currently playing with, awesome folks, were positively shocked after a year when relative ages came up and they realized I was like 20 years older than everyone else.

Yeah, I’m a mid-millennial and the oldest in all but one of my groups by a good bit. My Tuesday group is all <30, and we met by me running a game written by a young lady who designed a FITD game starting around 18 (21 when published).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Does Obi-Wan ever say, "Use your Force Points, Luke" ?

Force points don't exist in the setting itself. Indeed, it is explicitly described as something outside of the practitioner, rather than banked within them, that they could run out of. Nowhere in the fiction do they describe the acquisition of speding of Force Points.

In the game, people who were not Force sensitive, and could not use the Force, still had Force Points, and double the number of dice they were rolling - a purely metagame mechanic.

Be as cute with your phrasing as you like, but the mechanics of how the Force is used is irrelevant to whether or not the mechanic is meta-currency. What matters IMO is whether or not it represents a real thing in the world.

And the Force is present in all living things, not just explicit Force-users, so Force points being available to folks who weren't sensitive again makes sense in the setting.

 

[Fenris-77]

Can you extrapolate how you feel I'm wrong? My metric is that "meta" means outside the setting, so anything that exists inside the setting, like the Force, can't be meta. What makes me wrong here?

The fact that you can spin a diegetic reason for it doesn't mean it's not meta. The force doesn't work in points and cinema jedi aren't limited by uses per day or anything like it. Force points are just a convenient meta currency to help make the jedi classes work as designed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The fact that you can spin a diegetic reason for it doesn't mean it's not meta. The force doesn't work in points and cinema jedi aren't limited by uses per day or anything like it. Force points are just a convenient meta currency to help make the jedi classes work as designed.

I disagree. It's not meta if it represents a real thing in the fiction. It's just a mechanic, like spellcasting.

 

[TwoSix]

I disagree. It's not meta if it represents a real thing in the fiction. It's just a mechanic, like spellcasting.

But it doesn't represent an explicit action that could be taken (and be aware of being taken) by the character, which from my recollection is a necessary component of "I'm in the world play".

It might be diegetic, but it's also that magic word: disassociated.

 

[Fenris-77]

I disagree. It's not meta if it represents a real thing in the fiction. It's just a mechanic, like spellcasting.

Sigh. Ok, sure. Just because a mechanic directly indexes class mechanics and per day usage and also has no direct or useful connection to the fiction it must be non-meta. Moving on...

 

[Deset Gled]

From SW WEG:

"Being Heroic at the Dramatically Appropriate Moment.
When a character spends a Force Point in a heroic way at the dramatically appropriate moment, the character receives the Force Point back at the end of the adventure and gets another one as well. Dramatically appropriate moments are any time when success is vital to the story. It's the climactic moment of an adventure, where the characters confront the main villain or when they're in dire straits. The characters' success or failure will decide the outcome of the whole story.

Examples of being heroic at the dramatically appropriate moment include:
• Conquering a more powerful and evil foe
• Saving a city from destruction.
• Preventing the deaths of millions of innocent people.

In most cases, a dramatically appropriate moment for a character may happen during the climax of an adventure or, at most, one other time during an adventure.

In Star Wars, Luke's destruction of the Death Star was a dramatically appropriate moment. In Return of the Jedi, a dramatically appropriate moment was when Luke confronted the Emperor and refused to become evil — not when he fought the rancor in Jabba's palace."

Force Points say "I'm so meta, even this acronym." It's a perfect example of both a meta currency and a narrative mechanic, decades before the jargon existed.

 

[Mournblade94]

Does Obi-Wan ever say, "Use your Force Points, Luke" ?

Force points don't exist in the setting itself. Indeed, the Force is explicitly described as something outside of the practitioner, rather than banked within them, that they could run out of. Nowhere in the fiction do they describe the acquisition or spending of Force Points.

In the game, people who were not Force sensitive, and could not use the Force, still had Force Points, and could spend one to double the number of dice they were rolling - a purely metagame mechanic.

But didn't the Force aid people that weren't sensitive. Han Solo could definitely have been helped by the force.

Blind Han activating Fetts jet pack causing him to crash seems like a definite force point situation and Fetts player rolling REALLY bad as well. It is Meta but kind of not.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But it doesn't represent an explicit action that could be taken (and be aware of being taken) by the character, which from my recollection is a necessary component of "I'm in the world play".

It might be diegetic, but it's also that magic word: disassociated.

I can see the grey area for the reasons you state, but ultimately it still represents a real thing in the fiction, so I can't see it as meta-currency personally. That doesn't mean there aren't alternative and valid other points of view. I would never simply state you're wrong, for example, since that seems rude to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sigh. Ok, sure. Just because a mechanic directly indexes class mechanics and per day usage and also has no direct or useful connection to the fiction it must be non-meta. Moving on...

What more direct and useful connection do you need? The Force is real in Star Wars. That is a fact not in dispute.