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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9768088" data-attributes="member: 4937">For a long time I had considered the WEG D6 Force Point to be one of the more elegant mechanics in gaming.  My positive impression of it was formed very early, from the first time I saw one used in my very first WEG Star Wars game more than 30 years ago.  We were all for the most part playing characters drawn from the movies and so of course someone wanted to play Boba Fett, and so we had this Boba Fett knock off in the group.  And in the climatic scene of the adventure, one of the PCs was knocked off into one of those Star Wars pits with no guard rails that ended a lava pit or some such and the bounty hunter (whose turn it was) said, "Can I spend a force point to fly up and catch him?"  So of course he could and he had to make like four different rolls on his turn, but with the help of his force point and some lucky rolls he dramatically succeeded at the dramatically appropriate time, and everyone in the group was humming the main theme, "bum bum bububabum bum bup a bum bum bupapabum!" and cheering it was blast and is still the most perfect example of what the mechanic is supposed to accomplish that I've encountered in 30 years of play.  And there is the rub.  Most of the time Force Points do not work like that.  Lately instead of being primarily used to make dramatic things happen at the dramatically appropriate time, they are being used as win buttons to overcome challenges with minimal drama, because that's the motivation of players in any TTRPG really.  Characters in stories - in the movies - are always making it by the skin of their teeth, because the author is playing both sides of the story and can always drag his characters out of both frying pan and fire as needed.  But the characters themselves are not motivated to risk their life in stupid ways unless you as the author force them to and the players are trying to keep alive their character and win and not just win by the slenderest of margins on all occasions.  For those with experience with the mechanic or any metacurrency that can be used to dramatic effect - and the Force Point is probably the most powerful metacurrency in any game I know of - how do you deal with force point dumping during the climax?  How do you deal with balance when it becomes a metacurrency fight, where the only way to really survive against metacurrency is to use your own?  And note, I had preemptively implemented as a house rule a 12D6 cap on any skill specifically because I expected and anticipated this would be a problem, but the trouble is the party is soon going to be in a position to spend metacurrency to be on par with virtually any character in the game universe but conversely would get destroyed by characters with inherent 12D6 skills if they had no metacurrency to spend.  We are 72 sessions into the game and I still have no idea how to make a balanced interesting encounter between the randomness of the system, the statistical narrowness of what is an interesting challenge, and the fact that no matter the challenge, if someone wants to spend a force point they can probably get it done.</blockquote>

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