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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bill Zebub" data-source="post: 9872184" data-attributes="member: 7031982">As I've said many times, I don't like the underlying design premise of so many RPGs, which is that 'smart game play' is about knowing when to spend your metacurrency, and when to save it for a more important event (often a battle).  (Also, "3x/day" kinds of abilities count as metacurrency, even if no metacurrency is named.)So two design constraints that appeal to me:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Limit metacurrency to "meta" applications.  Meaning, don't use it to fuel standard abilities such as spells, instead reserve it for narrative intrusion, where the player is interceding on behalf of their character.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Otherwise try to design abilities around risk or trade-offs (Barbarian Reckless Attack) or with situational requirements (Rogue Sneak Attack).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When metacurrency is spent, it should be applied after the roll, not used as a modifier to the roll, for a bunch of reasons:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People tend to hoard scarce resources, so many players hope a roll will succeed without spending their resource, and eventually end up forgetting they even have it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If they do spend it it's often wasted, either because the roll would have succeeded anyway, or because the initial roll was so bad the modifier couldn't save it.  Which is always a /sadtrombone moment.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When it's spent after the roll it is more likely to turn a failure into a success, which is both more reliably dramatic, and which means less metacurrency can achieve the same overall benefit.*  And that means it can be scarcer and thus feel more special/precious.</li> </ul></li> </ul>*Does that make sense?  A metacurrency that turns a success into a failure 100% of the time, instead of 33% of the time, means that players only need 1/3 as much of the currency.</blockquote>

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