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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 9842370" data-attributes="member: 7025508">Regarding meta mechanics and stuff. I think it is not clear cut so that something is absolutely meta or it is not. It is about whether the decision making of the player and the character are correlated, and this can be a bit muddy; they can be strongly correlated or weakly correlated or not at all correlated.So whilst for example I can see some force user in a SW game burning force points to power their force abilities corresponding to the character making conscious decision to straining themself, thus limiting their future ability to use force, and thus not being particularly meta, it is hard to argue that when they are used as effectively luck points by non-non-force sensitive characters and even generated by "dramatic moments," this would be any way connected to what the character decides and thus be pretty purely meta.And yeah, whether something is meta, depends on the connection between the fiction and the rules, thus one can make something "non-meta" by making the process it represent diegetic. This of course is far easier to do with magic and other weird stuff that does not need to correspond to our real world intuitions about how stuff works. Like in my D&D games the spells slots and spell levels are indeed just how the metaphysics work, (not necessary referred with such term, but still) thus are diegetic and non meta. Though this of course is a post hoc justification, and it is admittedly metaphysically weird and not something I would come up were I not trying to marry the rules and the fiction. Discussion about meta mechanics often revolves around meta currencies, but they of course are not the only, and probably not even the most common, way mechanics can be meta. In many more narativist games for example, the player might be making decision about things the character is not deciding, which nevertheless impact the mechanical outcomes, (making it pretty fully meta) or they might be making in-character decisions, that affect the outcomes in way that is not actually causally connected to the decision (making them at least partially meta.) For example if the player deciding what the character hopes or fears has significant impact on the odds of the mechanics producing those things, then that is pretty meta. Meta mechanics of course are not bad in themselves at all. They allow us to achieve things we otherwise could not. But they also are a spice many players do not care for, or are even allergic to, so it is good to be aware of roughly what amount of them are present in the game.</blockquote>

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