Let's Talk About Metacurrency

[pemerton]

It's just meat points, all the way down. Once you get through a PC's meat, it's just more meat.

That's why my PC carries around a meat-meter, to measure my depth of meat remaining.

My plan is to have my PC's artificer friend automate it, so as the meter reading drops, a device pumps healing potion into my PC intravenously!

 

[Reynard]

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. . .

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.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But it represents something in the setting, so it can't be meta.

What I care about is are the player decisions meta, and if they do not correspond to a decisions the character makes they are.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It's just meat points, all the way down. Once you get through a PC's meat, it's just more meat.

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.

 

[Staffan]

Their use by non-force-sensitive characters certainly is not diegetic , even though the force itself is diegetic.

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.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

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.

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[TwoSix]

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.

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.

 

[Reynard]

What I care about is are the player decisions meta, and if they do not correspond to a decisions the character makes they are.

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.