Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 9197698" data-attributes="member: 71235">Thanks much. As I mentioned outside of this thread, I wanted to be clear about the technical meaning of these terms, in the same way that in colloquial English, "speed" and "velocity" are nearly synonymous, whereas in physics, the two have very different, albeit related, meanings.And so "resource" in this context, which colloquially we consider personal wherewithal in withstanding hardship, as well as something like spendable wealth (a most concrete form of currency), really just means the former. The technical term "currency" is by contrast reserved for how you exchange position, effectiveness, and resource for each other. That is, if any instance of those three can be traded for any instance of the others, it is being used as a currency, or put another way, any of the three can be a currency, but need not be.And exchanges may well be (and often are) one-way rather than bidirectional—you can apply salt to your cooking, but you generally don't take the resulting dish and extract the salt from it! A counter to that would be systems where you apply magical reagents to enchant an item, and can disenchant item to gain reagents. There's usually some degradation in quality/value going the other way, of course, possibly including destruction of the enchanted item (as in World of Warcraft).I'd like to explore some very specific examples, such as Inspiration in 5e, Fate Points in Fate, and forward & hold in Apocalypse World. And to use another example from 5e, Druid's Wild Shape ability is clearly an example of effectiveness (new capabilities) + resources (added hit points), but with an attached mechanic of uses/long rest. What is uses per time period considered? What if such uses can be regained by mechanisms other than a long rest? For that matter, what is a rest in this conceptual model?Edit: Fixed a typo. I'm confident some remain.</blockquote>

Verification