Quote from: Bren;1077784Yeah I noticed that. It is of even less interest to me as GM than is managing two metacurrency pools. It seems like something that would appeal to players who want at the same time a narrative style of play and a gamist/system mastery style of play. I'd think that would be a very narrow niche of players, but then there is FATE and its ilk.

AND, most importantly, it would also be genre sim style of play if heroes luck was being recreating accurately. Gentle reminder that a mechanic can support more than one type of play - a mechanic deserves to be called gamist/narrativist or simulationist when it prioritizes one mode at the expense of others.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1077798I find the best way to model luck in a game with dice is using the dice.

I don't. You don't have the same amount of luck in your dice rolling that heroes have in fiction. Your rolling isn't as reliable. You could try to mitigate that by elevating your PC's stats but a lot of heroes are just average or just above average (Frodo?) but they have the necessary luck to make it. So, you'd probably make it deviate from fiction even more.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1077798The bulk of my experience with D&D is with becmi and 2e, which at least at the tables I've been at were handled using method 2 and 3 above.  Barrels could be there for the asking if they were plausible and, again, without having to spend or track narrative karmic currency. Unless the pursuit is story over simulation, narrative karma currency is a solution looking for a problem that wasnt really there.  The 'narrative' of those older games was at least partially dealing with the consequences of living in a world ruled by swingy fickle dice.  That's my personal favorite narrative anyway.

Quote from: S'mon;1077817That's my feeling. GM decides if there are barrels, based on what's plausible. Works fine and rewards creative play.

I have to take note that the initial impulse is to defend what is instead of pondering what could be. Yes, as mentioned, #3 can work. #2 is a bit inaccurate.
Why I personally prefer #5 is because it makes heroes luck less dependent on GM's whims. The GM doesn't have to go with gut feeling anymore with regards to if he's helped our band of stalwart heroes enough already. The players don't have to wonder if the GM is going to fudge the dice for a 3rd time in the current battle. They can see the metacurrency lying before them. They know when "their luck streak is stretching the audience's credulity." It provides tension because it means you can't blab the GM into yet another time going lenient on you. It provides transparency and clarity for everyone involved on where we stand.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077834I have to take note that the initial impulse is to defend what is instead of pondering what could be.

It's not as if most of us don't have plenty of experience with luck point metacurrency. I was running OGL Conan in 2003 and WEG Star Wars in the late '80s!

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077834I have to take note that the initial impulse is to defend what is instead of pondering what could be.

One could easily reverse this. You are hidebound and determined to sell Luck Points as the ONLY possible way to model a heroic adventure and instead of pondering the other alternatives and explanations given, you immediately defend luck points as the only viable option.

Frankly, you can also get the effect of "hero's luck" by giving a character sufficiently high skill ranks and a bell curve dice mechanic to make the odds of failure remote. You can also avoid the "create boxes with luck" debate entirely by using something abstract like hit points and saving throws and then allowing the GM to do their job of describing why you're not instantly incinerated by the fireball because you made your save and/or still have plenty of hit points left (ex. you made your save and the GM rolled crap on the damage roll too so clearly there was some feature there to enable you to take almost no damage from the fireball so the DM narrates "You duck behind some crates that take the brunt of the blast.").

Since hit points can be non-physical, I adjusted a lot of my movement based mechanics so that instead of falling or starting to outright drown or missing your jump; you take hit point damage based on the margin of failure for a check and barely succeed (you're hanging from the ledge, barely keeping your head above water, etc.). I've streamlined it a bit, but essentially Hit Points ARE the luck mechanic in D&D. When a dragon breathes fire and you fail your save, but aren't killed by the damage, you didn't actually stand there and bathe in the fire... that would kill or at least cripple you. Instead you just narrowly evaded the dragon's breath, burning a LOT of luck in the process.

This is one case where "Theater of the Mind" is definitely superior to Grid-style play because your relative position can be adjusted based on what the PCs are having to avoid getting hit by. A lightning bolt might just require a slight lateral shift, a fireball might require you to dive forward. That doesn't take anything other than the description in Theater of the Mind, but most grid-rules don't account for such things... pieces remain where they are even as fireballs are going off.

So rather than luck points... how about just adding a rule that, in grid-play, creatures that are in an AoE but aren't killed by it, move to the closest space outside the AoE as part of resolving it. Done. Your heroes evade the fireball a bit singed and down some luck, but otherwise unscathed, without any luck mechanic for magically appearing boxes needed at all.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077842Your heroes evade the fireball a bit singed and down some luck, but otherwise unscathed, without any luck mechanic for magically appearing boxes needed at all.

There are no magically appearing boxes in any of the scenarios described so far. Or, if you would characterize the boxes as magically appearing, they are magically appearing in the scenario without a luck mechanic as well.

1. GM describes the fictional space. That description includes no explicit mention of boxes or lack of boxes.
2. Player inquires as to existence of said boxes.
3. GM determines if requested boxes exist using some mechanism. One of those mechanisms (if the GM isn't 100% yes or no on the question, he makes it dependent upon a luck expenditure) is being characterized as "making boxes magically appear", whereas randomly rolling boxes into existence or the GM making the call using other criteria is characterized as not "making boxes magically appear".

The boxes all appear in a GM approved manner. The boxes are all ideas in the imaginary space that "magically" (the power of imagination...) pop into existence only when they are thought of or asked about and the GM determines they are there by whatever means.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077842One could easily reverse this. You are hidebound and determined to sell Luck Points as the ONLY possible way to model a heroic adventure and instead of pondering the other alternatives and explanations given, you immediately defend luck points as the only viable option.

This thread only exists because we've been debating what player agency means when it is subject to GM approval in another thread. I didn't want to derail that thread, people kept talking about it, so I made a new thread. Naturally it focuses on metacurrency. But I did acknowledge other potential ways to model luck in genre sim in the OP.

We can debate those. I recommend we start with a fundamental question I raised earlier: if(!) heroes' luck in genre sim represents writer's fiat, should luck be individual or group-based? Because I can imagine viewers/readers rolling their eyes if no protagonist alone has unusual amounts of luck but as a group the occurences start to add up...

Quote from: NeonAce;1077850Frankly, you can also get the effect of "hero's luck" by giving a character sufficiently high skill ranks and a bell curve dice mechanic to make the odds of failure remote. .

I would caution against this: it will feel less like heroes with heroes luck but more like what people sometimes erroneously call Mary Sues. People who cannot do wrong; failure mitigated by luck humanizes heroes.

Quote from: NeonAce;1077850The boxes all appear in a GM approved manner. The boxes are all ideas in the imaginary space that "magically" (the power of imagination...) pop into existence only when they are thought of or asked about and the GM determines they are there by whatever means.

I think the difference in viewpoints is feelings based (and that is not a back-handed way of dismissing it; feel matters). I think the traditional way of the GM just deciding in some form after being asked if is present feels less as if the question prompted the thing into existence. It's an illusion but if you don't feel it, who am I to argue against it? For me, however, it's a bit like in Matrix when Neo breaks the Oracle's vase after being told not to worry about it: it's only the remark itself that makes it happen.

Fine. They're not magically appearing boxes... they're Schrodinger's Boxes... they both exist and don't exist until a decision collapses the quantum state and causes them to exist or not.

The point stands that you don't need a separate pool of luck points to insert them into a scene if they haven't yet been described. Hit points and the fact you aren't a crispy critter despite the fireball going off causes events/the environment to create a situation of heroic survival.

It might be boxes, it might be a gap you can squeeze into, it might be diving forward under the blast. But that's mostly down to whoever the GM lets narrate what happens (ours generally lets whoever drops a monster describe the killing blow for example) with the default being the GM coming up with why you're not incinerated.

I've been writing a game system for four years now. I know all about having a pet mechanic and how hard it is to let them go. This one really does feel like a solution in search of a problem. In terms of applying it to D&D it's essentially "I don't like hit points... let's replace them with hit points, but call them something else."

To be fair, I did precisely this because the association of hit points with meat is quite strong and led to several testers thinking of being able to restore hit points through anything other than magic or extended (as in days) rest as immersion breaking, even though the rules established that hit points were entirely non-physical in the game. But when I called it "Edge" and described it as "the resource you spend to avoid serious injury" suddenly they didn't have a problem with it.

The difference is I'm not pretending this is some unique innovation in modeling genre fiction. It's just calling hit points by a different name to avoid all the meat point baggage they've built up (and I'd actually blame video games and their relative inability to include graphics to indicate that hits are actually "near misses" and instead just use copious amounts of blood as the character stands there and soaks it more than I would D&D proper).

So just rename "Hit Points" to "Luck Points" and add "the GM will describe how you avoided otherwise lethal attacks because of your luck" and you're done.

Alternately, take a look at the variant Wounds/Vitality rules in the 3.5e d20 SRD which explictly separates physical and non-physical damage into separate categories.

The solution is already there; people just seem to want to be able to take credit for being the one to solve it.

ETA: To further expand on the point now that I'm not typing from a phone; HOW their PC survives the fireball is not something the Player NEEDS to have agency over so long as the system includes a means of measuring their reserves of luck. The character in the book doesn't choose for their to be boxes present when a fireball goes off... they make a split second decision based on what's actually around them and this luckily allows them to survive.

The GM narrating just how the PC who still has hit points left survived the area being soaked in dragon fire is just as valid a genre emulation of heroic luck as giving the PC the ability to declare how they evade with a GM override option.

Indeed, I'd argue that Hit Points in this case BETTER model heroic luck because so long as you have some remaining the GM HAS to describe how you survived... they can't say, "Sorry, there's nothing to hide behind so you can't spend luck now. You're engulfed in flames and die."

As a GM, there are a lot of details that I don't really care about.  If the PCs are in a tavern, I know there's a barkeep, but I don't know if he's a 5th level retired adventurer or a 1st-level commoner - or at least, sometimes I haven't spent my time detailing that type of information, especially if I didn't really expect a fight to break out.  But players surprise you.  

When you're asked to make a determination on whether there is a longsword hidden behind the bar, 'I don't care' is a valid answer, but clearly the player does.  Riffing off the player is generally a better idea than shutting them down.  But some players are going to have different ideas about how reasonable something is; having an answer like 'it doesn't seem likely, but you can spend a Fate Point' is a pretty good compromise.  

Heroic PCs have to do things that are extremely difficult - if they weren't, it wouldn't be heroic.  Players don't come to the table to play at 9-5 jobs, they're looking for adventure.  Part of the thrill of adventure is finding a way to survive 'the impossible'.  A limited number of ways to do exactly that without deliberately 'tempting fate' is just fine.  

If you're a player and you have these points, you don't have to use them.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857The point stands that you don't need a separate pool of luck points to insert them into a scene if they haven't yet been described. Hit points and the fact you aren't a crispy critter despite the fireball going off causes events/the environment to create a situation of heroic survival.

Sure. There are a million ways to model all of this. You don't need to model it with luck points. You just as much don't need to model it with Hit Points. You decide which way you want to model it based on how the different abstractions feel in play and whether you dig the feel or not.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857The difference is I'm not pretending this is some unique innovation in modeling genre fiction. It's just calling hit points by a different name to avoid all the meat point baggage they've built up (and I'd actually blame video games and their relative inability to include graphics to indicate that hits are actually "near misses" and instead just use copious amounts of blood as the character stands there and soaks it more than I would D&D proper).

So just rename "Hit Points" to "Luck Points" and add "the GM will describe how you avoided otherwise lethal attacks because of your luck" and you're done.

Alternately, take a look at the variant Wounds/Vitality rules in the 3.5e d20 SRD which explictly separates physical and non-physical damage into separate categories.

The solution is already there; people just seem to want to be able to take credit for being the one to solve it.

I can't speak for Alexander, but I'm not talking about pretending to come up with a unique innovation, or needing to take credit, or feel clever, or whatever ulterior motive you're ascribing to whoever you may be ascribing it to. All of my examples have been straight out of DC Heroes, a game that was released 34 years ago. Ghostbusters has luck mechanics as well, and was released 33 years ago. The James Bond RPG by Victory Games (see p.75) is from 1983 and allows it's Hero Points to be spent arguably even more liberally than DC Heroes for purposes of saying your agent happened to have packed this item or that, etc. (though it still requires GM approval). The history of RPGs provides a palette of approaches, good, bad, or just providing a different feeling play experience. It's fun to consider them, try 'em out, find which one(s) work best for how you prefer a game to feel.

All of the alternatives you propose, they are fine, but seem wedded to a D&D paradigm. More specifically they only apply to situations where HP (as their use is defined in D&D rules) would be relevant as regards luck, which is in cases of physical danger. If one wants to stay firmly in D&D-land, but wants to expand the usage of D&D HP as a spendable resource that could be used for other purposes (to raise a stealth roll so as to not be discovered, to earn another reaction roll vs. an NPC that went badly, or whatever)... also fine if people are down with it, though that interestingly gets HP towards acting like Brownie Points in Ghostbusters.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857The GM narrating just how the PC who still has hit points left survived the area being soaked in dragon fire is just as valid a genre emulation of heroic luck as giving the PC the ability to declare how they evade with a GM override option.

I agree. The only quibble I might have is in your characterization of how you'd argue it is better. I think that really comes down to how the mechanic is implemented. On the HP as luck side, saying that a character was shot in the chest by 26 arrows then went unconscious, but after a short 1 hour rest is like nothing happened to them... that would be poorly interpreting the abstraction that HP represent. On the Luck Metacurrency is Luck side, you can also make bad rules and bad abstractions. Every GM can effectively say "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies"

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857The point stands that you don't need a separate pool of luck points to insert them into a scene if they haven't yet been described. Hit points and the fact you aren't a crispy critter despite the fireball going off causes events/the environment to create a situation of heroic survival.

I agree - you don't need to model luck explicitly to arrive genre-typical narration. That is a question of the value of more detailed dice-generated proceedings versus more abstract mechanics requiring more arbitrary GM interpretations. Let me try to demonstrate it by making it one step more abstract even: suppose you had a system in which an entire conflict was resolved with a single roll. Or even yet one more step: each act in a 3-act-story was resolved with a single die roll. You still can narrate a genre-conforming story of heroic survival out of it.

The question is: which level of abstraction works best for you? For me, personally, I want the dice and the rules to generate as much information as possible without slowing down the game too much for me or making playing it too difficult otherwise. Some kind of luck resource (could be an attribute as in CoC) separate from "health" gives me more information in gameplay about what happened. It constraints the GM in what he can narrate - if I lose health I've been hurt and if I lose luck instead I escape injury, for now. It doesn't add much burden, so it's a net plus for me.

Personally, I don't think anyone would consider mixing health and luck in one resource if it wasn't an established D&D tradition.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857It might be boxes, it might be a gap you can squeeze into, it might be diving forward under the blast. But that's mostly down to whoever the GM lets narrate what happens (ours generally lets whoever drops a monster describe the killing blow for example) with the default being the GM coming up with why you're not incinerated.

Yes. Or an alternative that has been suggested might be to give the PC some kind of saving throw and if he passes and takes no damage, then maybe there was a crate to dive behind. But the basic approach again is abstract enough that the avoidance of damage might be due to luck or skill in dodging the attack - it leaves things to GM interpretation.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857This one really does feel like a solution in search of a problem.

Hold on. There's some clarification needed here: primarily we're debating making our games work more like some kind of genre through emulating heroes luck. We look at how things are in genre fiction, we look at how things commonly(!!!) are in games and try to fix any discrepancies. That's where considerations of writer's fiat, etc. comes in.

I would like to separate this general and system-independent observations from a few hints I have dropped regarding specifically my own game after I was asked why even bother with metacurrency (not sure it's all that botherosme but alright!). And in response to that I have pointed out that you can take stock of luck consumed to gauge player performance and shape events at the end of the adventure according to that. This is not about fixing a problem. Not all fiddling with mechanics is about fixing broken things. It's about trying to do fun things instead here; which is a matter of taste, yes.

Now, taking stock of what the player have accomplished before the climax of the story and then have it impact it is by no means new. But using systematically luck metacurrency to do that hasn't, as far as I am aware of it at least, been done before. In general, metacurrency is not the same as every other metacurrency - if you look at what 2d20 does in its games or at Genesys, then we're seeing developments in the usage of metacurrency, probably inspired by FATE, in more traditonal games beyond straight karma or hero points of the past. But basically all of this is more of an aside to the question of why even bother with luck metacurrency and I wouldn't want to dip into it any further if it distracts us from genre sim.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857So just rename "Hit Points" to "Luck Points" and add "the GM will describe how you avoided otherwise lethal attacks because of your luck" and you're done.

But how do I model then health, characters getting seriously wounded and heroically battering down their opposition nonetheless?

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857Alternately, take a look at the variant Wounds/Vitality rules in the 3.5e d20 SRD which explictly separates physical and non-physical damage into separate categories.

Well, yes, if we have two different resources for luck and health that gives more information, as mentioned. That's the abstraction level I personally prefer. If D&D people are happy with mixing things, who am I to judge? But it's not my cup of coffee.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857ETA: To further expand on the point now that I'm not typing from a phone; HOW their PC survives the fireball is not something the Player NEEDS to have agency over so long as the system includes a means of measuring their reserves of luck. The character in the book doesn't choose for their to be boxes present when a fireball goes off... they make a split second decision based on what's actually around them and this luckily allows them to survive.

That's true. But I like tapping into player creativity for this - compare the example of games in which spending a Fate Point to escape certain death REQUIRES the player in question to come up with a narration of how they cheated certain death. If that is considered too immersion-breaking, alright. But that immersion would seem kinda brittle to me, if it can be shaken that easily. Or by the mere suggestion of nearby crates, btw.

Quote from: Chris24601;1077857Indeed, I'd argue that Hit Points in this case BETTER model heroic luck because so long as you have some remaining the GM HAS to describe how you survived... they can't say, "Sorry, there's nothing to hide behind so you can't spend luck now. You're engulfed in flames and die."

It leaves the open question of how to model injury since now hitpoints seem to model luck exclusively.

Quote from: NeonAce;1077864Sure. There are a million ways to model all of this. You don't need to model it with luck points. You just as much don't need to model it with Hit Points. You decide which way you want to model it based on how the different abstractions feel in play and whether you dig the feel or not.

Agreed.

Quote from: NeonAce;1077864I can't speak for Alexander, but I'm not talking about pretending to come up with a unique innovation, or needing to take credit, or feel clever, or whatever ulterior motive you're ascribing to whoever you may be ascribing it to.

I hope I clarified a few things further above in this post.

Quote from: NeonAce;1077864All of my examples have been straight out of DC Heroes, a game that was released 34 years ago. Ghostbusters has luck mechanics as well, and was released 33 years ago. The James Bond RPG by Victory Games (see p.75) is from 1983 and allows it's Hero Points to be spent arguably even more liberally than DC Heroes for purposes of saying your agent happened to have packed this item or that, etc. (though it still requires GM approval). The history of RPGs provides a palette of approaches, good, bad, or just providing a different feeling play experience. It's fun to consider them, try 'em out, find which one(s) work best for how you prefer a game to feel.

Yeah and I think we're seeing a new generation of metacurrency incoming. I think FATE's Fate Points are already a different beast. A beast I'd like to see tamed a bit and made to work in service of more accurate genre sim play.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077894It leaves the open question of how to model injury since now hitpoints seem to model luck exclusively.

For heroic fantasy, why would you need to?

How often does Conan suffer any wound that actually debilitates him in any meaningful way. Heroes in fantasy tend to exist in three basic states; no/cosmetic wounds*, down and out of the fight entirely (until they get their second wind which restores them to cosmetic wounds) or dead.

They don't need a condition track. If they're at positive hit points they're cosmetically wounded. If they're at 0 through -X they're down and out. If they're dead they're dead. Simple and pretty much models heroic fantasy exactly.

* Cosmetic wounds mean they've got bruises and minor bleeding. They may limp a bit, but can always keep up when time matters. They may grimace and scream in pain a bit as they lift a heavy load, yet still manage or even exceed their normal limits when it's crunch time. In short, they only act injured when the injury doesn't matter. When it does matter any impairment disappears until it no longer matters again.

I have always enjoyed WFRP 1e's solution. Your hero has a unknown and random number of Fate points. You can't spend them, they only trigger when FUBAR happens and you never know when you run out of them...until its too late.

But D&D doesn't need that. D&D has cheap Raise Dead spells. If crapola hits the fan, you drag the bodies to the local temple, pay some gold and off you go back down the road of adventure. It's been there since OD&D. And if you didn't want to raise dead, there was always 3D6 down the line and five minutes of scribbling out a new character.

Also, many DMs used "Save vs. Death" to keep PCs alive when 0 HP happened. That added plenty of cinematic luck. I've certainly used it and players enjoy that "ohmygodwillIsurvive!" moment as the D20 clatters.

Quote from: S'mon;1077694Those are not dissociated mechanics in the way luck points are - they connect to in-world features. Luck Points are dissociated unless characters have luck in-universe (like WEG d6 Force Points), and know they have it. For that to be true, I think they can't allow for the creation of in-world elements like boxes - they are not box-summoning magic. So you need to restrict them to a more general lucky break/not die yet function, like WHRFP Fate Points or OGL Conan Fate Points, to name a couple. Or the Fighting Fantasy Luck attribute.

I'm with you.

ACKS doesn't have luck in its Core Rules, but in the Heroic Fantasy Handbook, we introduced a Fate Point system to make up for the fact that we removed Raise Dead. A Fate Point lets you re-roll a 1d20 UNLESS you rolled a natural 1. You can never use a Fate Point to re-roll a natural 1. You *cannot* use them for creating in-world elements for the reasons S'mon states. The most common use of Fate Points is to re-roll results on the Mortal Wounds table so that "both legs severed" becomes "heavily scarred". The other common use is to re-roll saving throws. But, again, if you roll a natural 1, there's no re-roll, so there's always risk.  

Incidentally, in Heroic Fantasy Handbook, the Farseeing proficiency and the Fate spell allow you to tell how many Fate Points another character has, so it *IS* represented in the game's fiction. One character class, The Chosen, gains special abilities to manipulate Fate Points in his behalf in ways the other characters cannot.

So for me quality of the idea of luck metaccurrency in the context you're willing to discuss (genre sim) is exactly the same as the quality of the idea of luck metacurrency out of that context.

Specifically what I'm saying is that no matter what genre I'm trying to emulate, the idea that a game is a never ending ebb and flow of challenges and solutions needs to be handled in a way that is

• genre appropriate (satisfying to  the players as feeling appropriate for the genre)
• also and more importantly satisfying to the players in the context of their experience of the resolution mechanic as specifically that. A mechanic that produces a, for the sake of argument, 'narratively appropriate' result.

(the result being the resolution of a confilict or challenge, which is to say both numerical gamist challenges like hit points, but also challenges to skills, saves, terrain, weather, the color of the barmaids toenails, or the number of boxes in the alley.)

At a bare minimum I have experience with being allowed to spend narrative points to pull off amazing stunts both offensive and defensive, and while I can't deny in the moment feeling the sense of satisfaction of doing something amazing and entertaining during the session, over time, these experiences were fundamentally what made the game a joke. A parody of itself.  No longer a crapsack world in which the lucky survived against all odds, but instead a world where it never really felt like the odds were ever out of my favor in the first place.

The challenges were smoke and mirrors, and if anything ever became too rough, just a spoonful of sugar and snap, the job's a game.

Not to say that the swings from good fortune to near death  weren't happening all the time, successfully emulating the constant crapsackiness and in turns constantly emulating the amazing ability of our group to overcome a neverending deluge of sacks of crap, but in doing so it became a comedy in a way that, out of character, none of  the players didn't immediately see past.  We'd even occationally get to the point where character lethality (normally a big deal narratively) became silly.  I'm probably going to die ludicrously, in fact its the only kind of death I'd find enjoyable at this point, and bringing in a new character would very likely result in the exact same behavior.

Now thats me personally but the point is this epidemic was table wide and specific to narrative luck currency but irrespective of both system and genre.

When you talk about creating a currency or reducing a currency so that mechanics get out of the way of play, you are talking about the 'granularity' of mechanics within a system.  Do we have something like amber diceless or do we have something like red steel.  How much dicing do we feel is appropriate?

But no matter how many or how few dice your system uses, if there is ALSO a mechanic in place that allows the player to unsituation themselves (either by overcoming  deadly gamist mechanics or overcoming an environment with colorful scene setting)

• you can call it luck,
• and you're selling the elation of a player having a hand in overcoming a situation in an amazing way,
• but you're taking away the players ability to experience fate itself allowing him to overcome a situation WITHOUT pulling the aces  out of his sleeve.

Over time any moments of  tension that happen at the table become entirely about the exchange of that most powerful currency and are no longer about not just the in game situation the players are trying to overcome, but also the very genre itself.

In diehard 1 we're rooting for a regular joe in a bad situation because at any moment, and at many moments, the genre is making things hard on him but the tension of the genre is that any one of those could be the one he doesnt luck his way out of.  He just tries his best and of course he's gonna survive because he's Jingo and this isn't braveheart.

By the last diehard movie we're not even talking about the same guy.  He's launching cars at helecopters.  At no time do we feel like he's not gonna come out of this without even messing up his hair.  Its spectacle, but its not tension.

So for me, narrative luck currency isn't just a mechanic that trumps all other mechanics, but its a mechanic that kills genre as well both in terms of all genres for their own sake, and also the players experience of those genres as a whole.  It feels good in the moment, and the players will feel the intended genuine joy of being able to contribute narratively to the situation as intended. The side effect is that the tension becomes artificial and thus the drama becomes artificial, and the resulting game/narrative/drama becomes a campy parody of the game it's trying to be.

It's no longer an epic story of overcoming the odds. Its a heady fevered fanfic.

TLDR: Imagine every character in the game is a mary sue gmpc, perfectly built to fulfill its narrative purpose.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1077943Now that's me personally but the point is this epidemic was table wide and specific to narrative luck currency but irrespective of both system and genre.

Just out of curiosity, what genres and systems are being referenced? The whole situation you are describing does sound like a perfect encapsulation of everything I would not like about a luck currency in a game. A lot of my enjoyment of a game comes out of legitimate feeling my character might not be able to pull something off and I'm having to struggle for it. Also, when you say "narrative luck currency", does this narrowly mean something like "a currency that can be spent by players to directly change the fictional situation" or would it mean something broader that might include, say, "I spend 5 Luck points to add +5 to my next roll"?

I've gone on a bit about how I dig Hero Points in DC Heroes. They aren't exactly "Luck Points", but I'd say more a combination of Luck, Stubborn Determination & Experience Points. If my character was punching someone and I have Strength of 3, Dexterity 5, if I'm desperate I can spend up to 3 HP to raise my Strength to 6 and/or up to 5 HP to raise my Dexterity up to 10 for just the particular action of trying to punch someone that round. My announcing an intention to spend Hero Points gives the GM or opposing player the opportunity to also spending their Hero Points (probably to either Dexterity to avoid being hit or Body to soak the hit). This all must happen before the roll happens. Dice in DC Heroes can explode. So, the expenditure of these points is at the expense of character advancement and is a gamble, because regardless of the roll you could still roll poorly and fail, your points lost for no effect.  When hit for damage, you can also spend Hero Points to soak an amount of it up to your Resistance attribute (Body, for physical things). You can be hit for so much damage that even spending Hero Points can't soak it all up. Should you be knocked out cold, you can even spend Hero Points for a "Desperation Recovery", which might allow you to regain consciousness after being KO'd (but you can only do this once before needing to use a "Resting Recovery" which takes a minimum of 1 hour).

So, all of that I described about could be thought of as similar to "Willpower" in White Wolf Storyteller games, or even kinda, but not exactly like "Endurance" in old Champions and not trigger any of the opposition some folks might have to Luck mechanics. It does get kinda meta/genre-emulating story-ish though even at the level described. If you are sure you'll just get your ass kicked again if you get back up with a Desperation Recovery, or your chances aren't high enough even if you max spend to push yourself to clobber Dr. Superbad... you might decide to save those points until after you're captured so you have something in the bank to help you on the way out. If you're under heavy questioning from Baron Hypnos to reveal the location of the Mutagen Cube... the rules let you spend any number of Hero Points to resist social manipulation, but can you afford to let Baron Hypnos drain away all of your HP, wrecking your chance to finish that super gadget you're working on between sessions and leaving nothing in the tank for later?

In DC Heroes, not just the "good guys" have Hero Points, and so the gamist part of the game can be thought of as this combination of dice/base level competency/HP Resource Spend kind of tactical-ish conflict. The Hero Points are so valuable that a GM offering to let you have some feature in the fictional scene, while not desirable to some, really just strikes me as a chance for the GM to ratchet up the pressure even more. Now, if the GM just says "Sure, 5 Hero Points and there is some Kryptonite in this guy's locker", well, that's taking all of the fun out of it. It's like stocking a dungeon your 1st level characters go into with a treasure chest containing 20,000 gp. The ideal way for a GM to deal with Hero Points if he's letting them be used to request something in the fictional space (still with his approval!), is to deny requests that are simply meant to unrealistically or unsatisfyingly hand wins to the PC/shortcut the scenario, and to price the fulfillment of those request he's OK with appropriately to the feature's verisimilitude and utility. One way to help judge this is to look at what the Hero Points could buy when used as Experience.

I do have one example of using a point currency within the system to boost combat attributes that I havent had a problem with. In palladiums ninjas and superspies, certain martial artists cultivate chi, which given the right choices in chi techniques can result in an ability to, round by round, spend chi points to increase their attribute score.  You can run out of it pretty quick, and only chi practitioners with that specific chi skill can use it though.  Its not something everyone in the system has access to.  Its not harnessing karma or luck though. Its harnessing meditative spiritual life energy that the specific martial artist has cultivated through training and while it can be used to enhance several different kinds of rolls, its still pretty specific to the character itself.  Generally though I have no trouble with systems where you can boost bonuses to a roll.  

I am specifically speaking to metacurrencies that are capable of being applied too broadly, are expected to be exchanged to set narrative balance, or establish a narrative rythm, or remove dangerous situations or cause automatic exceptional success wholesale.  Something as trivial as a bonus to a die roll is pretty small scale unless the effect of that single roll dramatically changes the tide of an event. By contrast in most dice pool systems, a tiny modifier to the roll can make nearly impossible situations a coin toss, and make difficult situations succeed almost automatically. In my experience fate points and the like are never used in a way that is NOT intended to create the very intense narrative or genre event.  It is freuqently in fact their only purpose.

Combine fate points AND dice pools and wow. Training wheels.  How does anyone ever fail at anything.

If everyone in the system had these generic points they could put into 'momentary oomph' though, and using them created a feedback or harmonic that overrides the underlying mechanics, they rob the mechanics of their ability to create drama of any kind other than the conveniently crafted.

A luck that only works for you or against you at the moments you expect in the way you expect is no kind of luck at all.  As I say, it parodies genre, but removes its bite.  It gives you freedom to create interesting situations, but neuters the situations ability to cause the characters and players any legitimate genuine difficulty. The result of course is that all of the moments that are supposed to be the most powerful and gripping, and usually the moments that most intensely create the genre, are all controlled by this exchange of luck tokens, rendering any other remaining system mechanics pretty much irrelevant, and making the resolution of the most dramatic and genre defining moments in the game less evocative and potent.  The wizard of oz was just a little bastard behind the curtain pulling some strings the whole time.

'Fate' accelerated indeed.

As you point out in your example above, the most palpable moments with Doctor Superbad and Baron Hypnos arent so much the situations themselves, but how you decide to spend or preserve the willpower or endurance or luck points to take away or resolve those dangers.  The metacurrency has taken over the most powerful moments in the game.  And the game is designed for you to do exactly that. What saves it in your example is that the effect is minor and the remaining mechanics of the game are still far more substantial than what the expendeture of hit points provides.

The biggest trouble with luck currency is that while effort might be spent trying to paint a narratively or genre appropriate mask on how those situations panned out, the underlying mechanic itself is 'I used a luck point to solve the biggest problem I had... and I always do... until I run out of luck bucks... Thats when my life seems the most dramatic.  When I'm out earning them luckbucks back.'

For an absolute fact any time we've played in a system that used fate points, nothing we ever did in the game mattered.  The only thing we celebrated was getting those fate points back. Genre took a distant back seat.  Now that I think about it, our staunchest narrativist violated genre conventions more fervently than the rest of us.  He'd badgered us about the lore of the world, then did a 180 on how he played it.  Very unnerving.