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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7083010" data-attributes="member: 6696971">@<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=6688277" target="_blank">Sadras</a> , I think like pemerton I'm still trying to sort out what the issue at the table was.  Was it:1)  The players at your table don't like resources that grant players Director Stance, period?2)  The players at your table thought this particular deployment of a Director Stance resource was a lame gambit because they prioritize different ways of defeating challenges (that don't entail or rely upon interacting with a metagame economy and deploying earned resources)?3)  The players at your table thought this particular deployment of a Director Stance resource produced lame or genre incoherent fiction?If its something else, I'm not sure what it is.  My thoughts on 1 through 3 are simple though.(1) doesn't tell us anything about the fundamental nature of Director Stance resources (or even more tame versions of player authorship).  It just tells us that your players in particular find them unpalatable.  If such a system says what it does and is designed such that it does what it says (and yields the actual experience/impact upon play that is intended by the designers), then it is objectively good system machinery.  Whether or not the experience is aesthetically or functionally (2) is the most complex of the three because there is lots of context required.  A metagame resource economy that isn't well-integrated into a system (holistically) may feel facile in the way it engages players (emotionally) or in the way it produces fiction (the fiction may not be particularly dynamic, the impact may be superficial, or the players may not feel "hooked into" their role in creating this new fiction because of the disconnectedness of the reward cycle; either the nature of the gaining of the resource, the nature of the resource itself, or the nature/results of the resources expenditure).  (2) can easily be incoherently "bolted-on" design, over-complex design, or flat out poor implementation that is at fault. The other aspect of (2) is having "challenge-based" play priorities competing simultaneously with other priorities.  If the game is supposed to prioritize "skilled play", and the attainment of the metagame resource isn't costly/difficult, then you've got an incoherent/mismatch of play priority and game design (which sounds like what may be happening here).(3) is simple enough.  Don't create lame or genre incoherent fiction through your resource deployment.  Lame is going to be subjective so the table will have to sort that out.  Genre incoherency is more easily ascertained.</blockquote>

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