What Baker is getting at is just an internal economy concern, mechanically. Its about what Actions the game makes available to players and how the system responds through feedback. Ideally the economy has to be fun in of itself, but also should be synchronous with the overal aesthetic of the game. Building an arms race economy into a game thats themed around building a co-op farm is going to cause friction, for example, but would be ideally suited for a wargame or RTS video game.
No matter what you do with your Sources, Drains, Converters, or Traders you want to ensure they're synchronous with and support the sort of experience you're looking for. This where the book I recommended really comes in handy, because it gives you the tools to abstract this so that you can directly examine and experiment with the economy's feedback loop(s).
There's the example given of superheroes who nickel and their powers and, depending on what the Sources are, will end up acting counter to what most people understand superheroes to be like.
Most superheroes should have a Source that's inherent to the character and effectively infinite, and to make a pleasant and synchronous economy out of that for superheroes, you'd generally have to externalize the costs. Depending on what kind of superheroes anyway.
If you wanted to do Superman the RPG, you'd focus the economy of the game on something external to him, probably collateral damage, Superman then has to manage through drains (helping Metropolis rebuild, bringing someone back from death, etc), and traders (ie, he destroys a truck, but he also knocks out Luthor in the process. Its a wash). I'm sure with more time I could probably think of a converter for this one too. The player is still able to portray Superman however they like, and its just up to the economy to reinforce the consequences (and thus ideally encourage them to actually act like Superman).
A basic Superman game would probably just try to explore typical Superman vs Evil Superman in terms of consequences, but a Superman game that really wanted to embody the real character would try to exploit the fact that Superman is a fundamentally subversive character. This would be a game where you as a player can't help but be true to Superman as a character, as it basically tricks you into ignoring your own intrusive thoughts to just wreck up the place. What that'd look like and how it'd be achieved, IDK, but that's the core idea that it would have to achieve.
But if we wanted to do Marvel style supers, then we can do a mixture of external and internal costs, as Marvel supers aren't meant to be portrayed as perfect. They can be hurt and worn down in spite of their effectively unlimited superpowers, and some don't even have unlimited powers in the first place. More conventional economies that drain/trade/convert capabilities would make more sense in that context.
The Hulk for example could effectively run out of anger; the economy of the character and the feedback loop it'd generate would be theoretically infinite, but without a consistent source of anger, or an external source keeping the loop going (like Professor Hulk, or a Scarlet Witch spell, the Hulk suppressing Banner etc), he'll eventually revert and just be regular Banner.
But what'd make the Hulk interesting from a gameplay perspective is that you could then gamify how Banner himself works as one of the inherently supergenius type supers, and then the player gets the manage two different internal economies simultaneously depending on what state Banner/Hulk is in.
Aesthetically, this is where you'll find out if you have concerns about whether or not something feels gamey or not. Meta currencies for example can conflict with an otherwise first person experience, even if they're mechanically sound as part of the game's internal economy, simply because they aren't tangibly skinned to be anything that's truly a part of the gameworld. These can be pretty easy to fix depending on what it is you're using the meta currency for and where its supposed to come from, and sometimes you don't have to fix them at all if the game's aesthetics are already gamey to begin with.
I would say that encumbrance tends to cause issues because it isn't properly integrated into the internal economy. If you have too little or too much space, its going to cause frictoon (bean counting vs it basically doesn't matter), and sometimes if your economy is designed in a particular way, you might not be able to do any sort of inventory at all without it feeling abrasive.
The relationship between mechanics and fiction is absolutely central to RPG design
Not really, no more than any other game that doesn't just own being entirely abstracted anyway. But this is also a case where we're probably saying the same thing, or aren't, because we aren't actually speaking the same language. What you believe the "fiction" is is probably very different from mine.
Which is why I recommend that particular book, because it cuts through those concerns and focuses on whats actually producing the experiences we want in an unambiguous way. You may not understand what I mean, and thats fine, but the things Im saying are simpler than what you're taking from Baker, if only because they can't be abstracted any further.
It differs from a wargame or a Diplomacy-esque competitive scenario by combining some key features:
*There is a shared fiction, managed/curated by a referee (ie a non-"player" participant), and that shared fiction matters to action resolution;
*Each of the player participants engages and shapes the shared fiction by declaring actions for a particular character in that fiction, with whom they are identified;
*There is no straightforwardly structured win condition - the fiction is in an important sense open-ended, and player goals are established and resolved within that context.
1. The referee stands in as part of what the system needs to provide adequate challenges to the other players, but are
also a player unto themselves who, in most RPGs, utilize and play the NPCs, who will have a similar (and ideally simpler) internal economic structure to the other player's PCs.
That is their function in a game system and the fiction does not matter to this. The fiction is extraneous data that influences the overall experience, but there's nothing saying it needs to be there other than the conventional wisdom that an entirely abstracted RPG would probably be pretty boring, which if we want to extrapolate to a logical conclusion reveals that probably a lot of RPGs, if not all of them, are fundamentally flawed if they lose all of their fun when abstracted.
Thats something you don't really need to go all that deep to gleam either; the common idea that rolling dice is inherently fun speaks the same overall idea, as engaging the classic RPG mechanic all by itself is fun, and so the fun shouldn't be disappearing entirely.
The fiction is not just flavour text.
I think your issue with what Im saying just relates back to what I said about us not speaking the same language. I'm speaking from a much more abstracted position than you are, and as such I'm not going to be weighting things the same.
The key though is that the actual weighting we're both describing is, in fact, identical.
Well I think that here you demonstrate a failure to understand what distinguishes RPGs from other games,
Game design is game design. RPGs aren't some special ubermensch game that can't be examined like any others.
You are not considering at all the issues of generating a shared imagination via play, nor of maintaining that shared imagination during play, in circumstances where the only limit on player moves is what everyone agrees to imagine a given character can do.
Not at all; these issues are all just things that emerge from a game's mechanics, and its not always possible to design backwards from them.
There's an entire chapter in the book on this subject, fyi. What you're referring to is things that emerge from whatever analogous and/or symbolic simulations the game uses to represent a given reality interacting with how the players communicate between themselves.
For example, if one were to take DND5e and append a slot based inventory mechanic to it, which is an example of an analogous simulation, it wouldn't do anything to resolve how the item economy in 5e works or feels to engage with. It might make tracking items gained more interesting, but the underlying economy hasn't been addressed by the slot system alone.
And thats just assuming you were able to do this simply by just converting weights directly into slots, which one would probably be inclined to do if they tried this. Thats partially going to solve the issue, as it'd be difficult to rub up that closely against the item economy and not start fixing it, but you'd still have to go in and fix the Sources and ensure they're interacting properly with whatever drains/converters/traders and that the slot system is balanced to provide the best feeling constraint, if you want the end experience to be meaningfully better than what its replacing.
Again, this seems obviously false.
Game design isn't that intuitive.
In classic D&D, when I say "I walk down the corridor, and when I get to the end of it I take my hammer and spikes out of my backpack", I am making moves in the game, changing the shared fiction, but no mechanic is invoked
No, you're still engaging a mechanic. Just saying what happens
is a game mechanic.
Incidentally that misunderstanding is actually why there was contention over whether or not improv games are actually games and not just acting.
And its why its important to establish that we're actually speaking the same language.
What you think a mechanic is is probably different from what I think it is, and ultimately we're not describing different things per say, we just don't agree on what names go where.
All I see here is that you seem to be setting out to reinvent Rolemaster, or some of the elements of 3E D&D
Sure, in the sense that my numbers go up that high, but not so much in practice. That high value only corresponds to one specific value (Composure, my games "HP" equivalent) thats only reachable with the right combination of luck in chargen (nat40) and a specific class (Barbarian). And it naturally isn't a static value, so being able to use it is suitably reserved.
The rest of the game meanwhile is balanced around 50ish being the baseline maximum, sans boosts and such.
And meanwhile, where the numbers come from is drastically simpler (than Rollmaster, you'd have to remind me what you're referencing from 3e). You're just taking averages for the base stats and then adding them together for the derived stats. Ezpz.
