Let's Talk About Metacurrency


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pemerton said:
When a D&D player looks at their PC's hp, sees that they are getting low, and so has their PC drink a potion of healing, that's pretty meta! I mean, the PC can hardly know that their luck is running out. . .
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Hard disagree. Hit points are an abstraction, but they still represent something real in the fiction that the character can experience, and the potion is a real thing in the fiction too. There might be an argument that spending hit dice on a short rest is a metacurrency, but that's fuzzy.
 


TwoSix said:
It's just meat points, all the way down. Once you get through a PC's meat, it's just more meat.
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How I interpret it to avoid the complete player/character decisions disconnect, is that every hit point has at least a little bit of meat in it. Yes, hit points also measure skills and fate, but it is not that some HP are skill and some are meat, all are a mix of these things. So every time you lose HP, you get at least a little bit hurt, even though the amount of hurt a given amount of HP loss causes is not fixed.
 
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Staffan said:
Ah yes, there's certainly no precedent for non-Force-sensitive characters to trust in the Force in order to pull off some spectacular deeds.
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Why you think Chirrut Îmwe is not force sensitive? To me it seems pretty clear that he is, just not necessarily at a jedi level.

And yes, he invokes force knowingly, but I don't think that is most use of force points looks like. They are just luck points.

​

 

Crimson Longinus said:
How I interpret it to avoid the complete player/character decisions disconnect, is that every hit point has at least a little bit of meat in it. Yes, hit points also measure skills and fate, but it is not that some HP are skill and some are meat, all are a mix of these things. So every time you lose HP, you get at least a little bit hurt, even though though the amount of hurt a given amount of HP loss causes is not fixed.
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For D&D, I’ve gone full LitRPG. Hit points are explicitly supernatural resilience, that people are aware of and talk about. Not the actual numbers, but a general sense of magnitude. No one is surprised to see a 5th level character heal up from multiple stab wounds after some rest.
 

Crimson Longinus said:
What I care about is are the player decisions meta, and if they do not correspond to a decisions the character makes they are.
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The player decisions are always meta to some degree. TTRPGS are not perfect simulations, so at some point the player is going to look to their character sheet, or make a decision based on what they know about the rules, the GM or just TTRPGS in general.
 


pemerton said:
When a D&D player looks at their PC's hp, sees that they are getting low, and so has their PC drink a potion of healing, that's pretty meta! I mean, the PC can hardly know that their luck is running out. . .
Click to expand...
Unless you have it that hit points represent fatigue, nicks, scratches, and suchlike as well as just luck; thus meaning the character can and does know when it is tiring and starting to flag.

In other words, always a mix of luck and meat with the ratio of meat vs luck increasing as the total gets lower.
 

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