Let's Talk About Metacurrency

[Micah Sweet]

I certainly wouldn't be adverse to D&D adding those concepts into its gameplay. Off the top of my head, Daggerheart nods to the trauma of the adventuring life with its "scars" system, where being taken out during combat lowers your maximum Hope, and a character at 0 Hope is retired.

And the NSR game His Majesty the Wurm has a very nice section on PC bonds, and how they are invoked to refresh the characters during the Camping and Downtime phases. (And His Majesty the Wurm has a lot of "sim" and "blorb" principles the gameplay is oriented around, for those who crave more prepped world realism.)

Heard good things about that game, but know very little about it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure.

Doesn't answer the question, though.
The question is whether requests to narrate and describe will skew to those things which are easily physically observable, and what impact that has on our views of the mechanic and interpreting rules.

To wit: if we are biased in what we choose to narrate, we should take extra care about how we feed that back into our interpretation of mechanics.

Fair enough. I try to narrate as I've said, where nothing really hits in a visible way (beyond the occasional clearly superficial injury) until you run out of HP, but the way most games describe combat and attacks as published IME really fight against that. It's frustrating.

 

[TwoSix]

Heard good things about that game, but know very little about it.

Knowing your tastes, I'm not sure if you'd like it. It's very focused on doing procedure-heavy exploration of a prepped mythical dungeon, with a lot of rules for procedural generation of that dungeon, and then resting and recuperating and finding new adventures in the near-mythical city that surrounds the dungeon.

It's also very gamist in its procedures of moving between the Crawl (exploration), Challenge (combat), and Camp (downtime/inter-character roleplay) phases, and then the City phase after the Crawl is done.

The race lore is really fun, though; it has a lot of diegetic magic, and the Tarot card resolution system is fast and easy.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Knowing your tastes, I'm not sure if you'd like it. It's very focused on doing procedure-heavy exploration of a prepped mythical dungeon, with a lot of rules for procedural generation of that dungeon, and then resting and recuperating and finding new adventures in the near-mythical city that surrounds the dungeon.

It's also very gamist in its procedures of moving between the Crawl (exploration), Challenge (combat), and Camp (downtime/inter-character roleplay) phases, and then the City phase after the Crawl is done.

The race lore is really fun, though; it has a lot of diegetic magic, and the Tarot card resolution system is fast and easy.

Sounds like Darkest Dungeon the TTRPG. I loved that game!

 

[dbm]

Draw Steel addresses the ‘what are HP’ question head-on by having Stamina as the thing which gets whittled away. It is explicitly described as your energy and ability to get out of the way of serious injury. So, while an attack may cause you to lose Stamina that is more a case of you becoming tired as you dodge out of the way, until finally your fatigue slows you down and the enemy can land a solid blow.

This also provides solid justification for the ability to quickly restore lost energy in a fight and how a relatively short rest (in real-world recovery terms) lets you get your breath and energy back and thereby replenishes your Stamina.

It’s quite an elegant framing IMO.

 

[Umbran]

Just like real life.

Ah. I already play a lot of that game. The GM is a PITA and won't let us do anything cool.

The 1:1 scale map they made of the game world is super-realistic, though. And the details on the terrain pieces are top-notch.

 

[Thomas Shey]

All these things apply to NPCs as well as PCs in the system, so the GM also has both a general pool of bennies plus specific bennies for their NPC wild cards. The bennies are helping smooth out some of the spiky elements of the system. There are other things that bennies can be used for but these three primary ones are so important they tend to dominate use at the table. If you consider hit points to be a combination of luck and ‘meat points’ then bennies are providing a very similar output but in a more differentiated way.

Yeah, honestly, I tend to think that if you want a measured damage model (i.e. one that buffers a sudden death/takeout result) metacurrency is a better way to go that D&D style elevating hit points, because it sets a base-state that tells you what the meaning of weapons and the like actually mean when that metacurrency isn't in play.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I don't see how hard lines help the GM do their job.

Perhaps this would help --

Whether you like them/use them or not, you're familiar with the wandering monster checks in TSR-era A/D&D, right? Now, those aren't very meta (like HP, they represent something in the fiction of the game, even if they are an abstraction of an overall population of wandering threats in a dungeon environment), but they are very much a rules-based structure which 'tells the GM what to do.' So hopefully they are a good explanatory example to this separate topic.

They (the wandering monster rules) dictate that, based on the player/character actions (the PCs staying too long in a hostile environment) rather than GM fiat, something will happen (more monsters potentially appear). A GM is perfectly allowed (and expected) to also include monsters for other reasons (the pre-determined encounters of the dungeon), but these additional (potential) encounters are also included to achieve the specific end of making in-dungeon time spent a scarce resource and provide a sense of danger and risk to the experience.

Now, the GM could do the same process (introduce monsters as the PC spend more time in a hostile environment); but this 1) codifies the process, 2) removes any doubt to the fairness of the implementation, and (most importantly, in my mind) 3) reinforces the framing that it is the excessive time spent in the hostile environment that is causing the encounters.

Does this all make sense as a mechanic, and a reason why it might be used?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right but every time the previous blows landed, there is a very high probability that the fiction was about getting hit: bruises, blood and the whole bit. I have never seen in 40 years, running for literally hundreds of people,a table that did not describe hit point damage as, well, damage 95% of the time.

You can describe a model where, as level advancement goes on and people can "take more damage" that its a strange, kind of backwards way of describing defensive skill where its less people are actually getting more ability to take damage than they're taking less from hits by evasion and the like. The system doesn't help you with this with things like falling damage and the healing conundrum, but within the combat paradigm alone it more-or-less works.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Though to be fair, with the current natural healing rates this is absurd too. How can you have suffered real injuries if you're absolutely fine next day?

Personally I use gritty rests, which still far from realistic, at least make this somewhat more verisimilitudious.

Unless they've seriously changed how healing spells work, it doesn't really work with those, either.

Edit: Gonna leave this here to stay honest, but just realized I misread your point completely.