Quote from: amacris;1077911ACKS 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.

For my new Primeval Thule 5e D&D game, I removed Raise Dead magic. In the past I've used Fate Points, in OGL Conan and in a 3e Lost City of Barakus campaign (I hate how 3e PCs, especially warrior types, will suddenly drop dead with no warning). For this game though I just gave the PCs more hit points - at 1st level they get max hd + full CON score - and otherwise let matters take their course. This has worked very very well in practice; the game feels visceral and gritty, yet after 6 sessions or so we've not lost a PC yet, despite wildly unbalanced encounters. And there is zero issue with dissociated mechanics hurting immersion.

I agree with VincentTakeda's points above about strong luck point systems. I find fate points that are only used to avoid death (the de facto situation in OGL Conan and my 3e Barakus campaign) not so immersion breaking, but there is still a negative effect. Well designed games find better ways, like the 4e D&D Action Points or 5e Inspiration, that map at least somewhat to in-world character resources like grit and chi. If characters in world do have Fate/Weird/Doom then IME that's a lot better than something like Unisystem Buffy's Drama Points, which basically say "We're Playing A TV Show!"

Quote from: Chris24601;1077906How 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.

[video=youtube;d72s4Ts59Ug]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d72s4Ts59Ug[/youtube]

And outside of the fantasy genre, this is even easier to find. Plus, if you look at named characters in Game of Thrones, then people like Ser Vardis or the Mountain go very much through a deathspiral. So should it really be different for PCs? I doubt it. But that's part 3 on cinematic combat, so I'd like to avoid the debate within the scope of this thread, if you don't mind. We'll get back to it. But your general observation regarding heroes otherwise is pretty much on-point.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1077943The challenges were smoke and mirrors, and if anything ever became too rough, just a spoonful of sugar and snap, the job's a game.

Vincent, thanks for your long and thoughtful posts. Let me preface my reply by saying that I have some experience with that from running Deathwatch RPG in which the PCs are demi-gods in combat (one low- to mid-rank PC had occasionally a melee skill >100%) AND which have 3 to 5 Fate Points, each can be burnt to negate a fatal attack. There was very little sense of danger.

That being said, I would like to ask you for a favor: I'd like to ask you to revise your thoughts with the following in mind:

• We need to strictly distinguish luck and the capability to do cool stuff. Luck is an exterior event which is not meant to influence your chance of success at taking an action. It's meant to help you out after you have failed.
  
• The proportions and frequency of luck need to be limited to not stretch credibility. See surviving a nuclear bomb in a fridge; it's too much.
  
• One of the proposals in this thread is that every luck expenditure comes at a long-term price. So if I get some crates to dive behind now, it might mean that my love interest dies later (to stay with Indy) or the artefact I recover gets lost in some warehouse in the epilogue. The desired effect is that every luck expenditure matters.
  
• Finally, does luck depend to some degree on scene? Prince Oberyn would surely carve through some random bandits the way Bronn carved through the ambushers in season 1. No danger for the character. But when facing the Mountain it's a different challenge.
  

So you have luck only coming in when you have already failed in some form, drawing the ace out of the sleeve is an implicit admission of that, and there is a long-term price everytime you admit such failure. On top of that, the limited(!) amount of luck you can draw on may vary from challenge to challenge. In fact, it can be tailored to challenge even.
How do these points impact your considerations? I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

This is kind of the gist of my first response earlier.

First we look at what we're doing.  We've got a player attempting to introduce a nudge to the setting or event in an attempt to in some minor way adjust the outcome in his favor, and the caveat is that he's donig so in a way that is both minor and narratively plausible.

Obviously nobody's got a problem with that going on since we've established that such things happen already in games of all types already.  Asking the gm if there are barrels, then the gm deciding that its plausible happens even in games that are fundamentally gamist or simulationist as well as narrativist without a luck point being exchanged.

The effect of this moment is that the gm then has the opportunity at some point in the future to introduce a nudge to the setting or events, not necessarily in a minor way, also in a way that is narratively plausible.

Obviously nobody's got a problem with that going on either since again, such things happen already in games of all types already.  A gm deciding that you were so busy chasing monsters in caves up in the mountains that you weren't in town when the basilisk arrived and well... Now we've got to deal with that situation.

Obviously genre doesnt really matter in these cases.  These things happen if you're a loincloth wearing caveman fightin dinosaurs or an anthropomorphic dinobiped on an alien world fighting the squid monsters of some distant star cluster.

So we've ticked a few boxes there... we've got this sort of schroedingers narratively plausible xanatos setting nudge event... and its not only so ok that its in use in existing games of games all along the GNS spectrum, but for me the crux of it is... its being done already without monetizing it.  We're doing it already without referring to it as a currency of any kind.

This is why we say its a solution in search of a problem... Assigning a mechanic to it when its already being done all over the place wthout a currency mechanic.  But we don't want to necessarily rest on our laurels and simply say its the way its  already being done so whats the point of doing it differently.

But we do have to then ask the question.  What IS the point of doing it differently.  In monetizing this, what changes about it?

Obviously one thing we may be trying to establish is a 'balance'.  Player gets to do this thing, so the gm is free to then also use this thing. One for one. An even exchange.  I'm not convinced its so even if the player is using his schroedingers narratively plausible xanatos setting nudge buck in asking for a few barrels to solve a minor plausible issue creates a schroedingers narratively plausible xanatos setting nudge buck to kidnap your family while you're out of town.  Obviously both purchases are no big deal to such a degree that, as we've said, we're already doing those things all the time already, but that still hardly seems like balance.  And woe betide if this is visible in play at the table...  I can just see a player marvelling  when he sees the coin spent on barrels being returned as a coin spent kidnapping his family.  Might be flipping tables instead of coins if what we were going for is 'balance'.  One might posit that the reason we don't assign these activities a currency value is for the very reason that while they're both just fine, they're certainly not equal, particularly if at the end of the day the gm still has fiat power over  your request and free reign when its time to cash in.

Obviously as a palladium gamer, everyone will tell you that the pursuit of balance seems laughable to me in the first place, so I've kinda got some bias baggage on that front.  I certainly own it.

Are we instead then monetizing it because its 'fun'?  Thats always going to be tough one to answer since fun is always subjective... So thats a question folks can only answer for themselves... The exchange of these items need not even necessarily be a currency  exchange... we could just as easily demonetize the concept by saying these aren't points we're spending.  They're like xbox achievements that we tally up.  By the end of the game player x made 5 successful and 2 unsuccessful attempts to introduce plausible narrative nudges!  The gm on the other hand made, lets be honest, 250 attempts to introduce plausible narrative nudges. All successful and some of them clearly less of a nudge, heheheheh.

That would sort of further illustrate how little balance is going on and I don't disagree that it might be pretty fun to tally up if only to prove the point.  Not an experiment that I'd want to do more than a few times though.  Certainly not something I'd want to be a permanent fixture in the  games I'm in.

When folks ask me why I prefer the saving throw system in 2e which  is clearly not as clean cut and balanced and simple as say, pathfinders saving throw system, its because when you study the lack of simplicity and balance within it, you discover a narrative within the mechanic itself... Thieves start out more resistant to poisons  because they probably use them a lot, but they don't get much better at  that over time.  on the other hand fighter has a horrible save vs poison at the beginning because he has been out in the field wrasslin hi mates, but by the higher levels he's more resistant to poisons than anyone else, probably because he more than anyone else had to build up a tolerance to it the hard way... By being poisoned a bunch and now his robust constitution is immune through exposure.  Its just numbers on a chart, but they create 'genre' in a way that kinda got lost in these nice clean cut balanced versions like pathfinder.  The intention of the pathfinder table is simplicity and balance, while the intention of the 2e tables is, dare I say it, narrative of the genre.

On the  other hand palladium made megadamage. To what end I totally appreciate, but the rule they decided to handle the concept is frankly horrible... of all things D&D and pathfinder's damage resistance handles the same genre emulation in a much more satisfying way. Dice pools create bell curves that create more reliable statistical bell curves, but adding bonuses to those bell curves alters probabilities in a way that I find destructively problematic...

This is the part of game design I find fascinating, so to me any time a newfangled mechanic comes out, the question becomes 'what new goodness does doing it this different way bring to the table.'  We're donig it this different way to what end, and what are the consequences of doing it this new different way.

I'm open to the idea of schroedingers plausible narrative nudge points... The question for me is always 'to what end' and 'what are the consequences'?

What is doing it that way trying to do, does doing it that way accomplish what it sets out to. Does doing it that way add or interfere with enjoyment or immersion?

Painfully for most of us the end result is we gather up all the mechanics we do like and throw them together in a bouillabaise we call homebrew stew.  And we just keep adding new ingredients as we find them and trying a little taste until its just right.  Or worse we give up and just go play fate and ptba and 5e because at least thats what everyone else is doing and we just wanna play, dammit.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1077976As you point out in your example above, the most palpable moments with Doctor Superbad and Baron Hypnos aren't 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 expenditure of hit points provides.

I have to say that overall I think my position is very close to yours. I too find "Spend a Fate Point and you miraculously didn't die"... feels a little "training wheels", undermines some of the "I earned this". I'm willing to try things out, but have generally not enjoyed "Story Games" as much. I prefer my RPG experiences provide me with entertainingly game-like challenges while also producing interesting character interactions and developments that I can experience both in an internal "immersive" way when playing my own character, or enjoy witnessing as an audience member as it goes down with other players. Any mechanics in the game that try to foster these interactions or situations I would prefer they do it in a way that does not undermine the engaging game-like challenges, softening up difficult situations or whatever. I also prefer the "game-like challenges" be centered on my character's perspective and capabilities, not some mechanic totally separate from the character's interests or in-game desires.

This gets to the quoted section from your post above. I think that in DC Heroes, this metacurrency spend is a gamble, and gambling when you can lose can feel more engaging than just plain rolling a die. Also, the fact these points are also XP in the system makes the use of them a real trade off. They are not Bennies that come and go, only used to make your life easier. To chose another game completely, the Marvel Universe RPG (aka, the one with the stones), there are no dice. You allocate stones which only recharge at a certain rate. You make a gamble and invest as many stones as permitted into your Optic Blast this turn, but if it doesn't pan out you'll be vulnerable for the next few rounds as your stock of stones recharges and you're deciding to blow and/or conserve them. Now, in MURPG, these stones pretty clearly feel like they represent your power reserves more than "luck", and so in that way do not have the chance to feel "disassociated" as S'mon would say. In DC Heroes, it's more slippery what these Hero Points represent. For me, so long as I am personally agonizing over the situation... I'm engaged, interested, and trying, then it doesn't pull me out of feeling the challenge is real. I don't feel that the situation with Dr. Superbad & Baron Hypnos are taken over by the metacurrency any more or less than I would feel it was taken over by the Stone Allocation in MURPG, or by the spell I choose to cast in D&D and roll for to take away or resolve those dangers. There are luck mechanics I think really undermine my ability to feel there is danger or challenge, and they do hollow out my whole experience. It may be a matter of subjective feel to some extent.

TL;DR: I think I mostly agree with you. If I differ, it's that I'm still OK with a spendable metacurrency so long as it is well integrated into the game challenge part of the rules, rather than just being a way to opt out.

In my Conan game I would arbitrarily screw over the PCs ...and give them a Fate Point every time I did it. Points that could then be cashed in for a lucky break in turn (almost always to not die). I think that makes vastly more sense than giving the GM permission-slip points to screw over the PCs with; everyone knows the GM can always screw over the PCs.

Quote from: S'mon;1078044In my Conan game I would arbitrarily screw over the PCs ...and give them a Fate Point every time I did it. Points that could then be cashed in for a lucky break in turn (almost always to not die). I think that makes vastly more sense than giving the GM permission-slip points to screw over the PCs with; everyone knows the GM can always screw over the PCs.

They're a bit more storygame, but Mutants & Masterminds ties gaining Hero Points (basically Action Points/Stunt Enablers) to your complications being invoked in game. Stuck at your day job when the city is need of a hero? Get a hero point. Is your significant other starting to suspect your double life? Get a hero point. Do the police draw guns on you instead of the bad guys because you're a known and dangerous vigilante? Get a hero point.

Basically, you gain advantages by deliberately giving the GM ways to complicate your life.

The nice thing about the system as well is that while you don't get more hero points when the GM isn't complicating your PCs life... the fact that the GM isn't complicating your PCs life is itself a benefit of sorts.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030Obviously nobody's got a problem with that going on since we've established that such things happen already in games of all types already.

It seems to me as if a lot of people have a problem with it, feeling as if the player wishes into existence through the expenditure of metacurrency. That is objection based on principle, not implementation.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030But we do have to then ask the question.  What IS the point of doing it differently.  In monetizing this, what changes about it?

That's a valid question. What happens in general in game design when something is no longer solely dependent on GM gut feeling but becomes cast in hard numbers and subject to equally hard rules?
I would say that it becomes less negotiable. It's a mutual agreement that ties bother the hands of the GM and of the players (except for house rules and blatant rules violations). If the players have started with 2 currency units and "created" crates 2 times already, there won't be crates for a third time. Out of luck...

And you know what it also does in this case? It eliminates the feeling of cheating. The GM no longer handed your party victory by fudging the dice 3 times. No, you earned it within the parameters set out in the beginning of the adventure. And you paid the price for every time the GM intervened on your behalf. Likewise, I have witnessed a GM in an encounter in CoC that was otherwise running too easily suddenly come up with additional enemies. Under these rules, however, the players can at least get some compensation for that by the GM giving them a currency unit in exchange. If they can hold on to that currency unit until the end of the adventure, good things might happen to them.  Maybe the FBI will finally take note of the evil cult and start taking action!

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030Obviously one thing we may be trying to establish is a 'balance'.  Player gets to do this thing, so the gm is free to then also use this thing. One for one. An even exchange.  I'm not convinced its so even if the player is using his schroedingers narratively plausible xanatos setting nudge buck in asking for a few barrels to solve a minor plausible issue creates a schroedingers narratively plausible xanatos setting nudge buck to kidnap your family while you're out of town.  

Correct. That's why we can price things differently. There's no need for a bigger nudge to only cost one currency unit.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030Obviously both purchases are no big deal to such a degree that, as we've said, we're already doing those things all the time already, but that still hardly seems like balance.  And woe betide if this is visible in play at the table...  I can just see a player marvelling  when he sees the coin spent on barrels being returned as a coin spent kidnapping his family.  Might be flipping tables instead of coins if what we were going for is 'balance'.  One might posit that the reason we don't assign these activities a currency value is for the very reason that while they're both just fine, they're certainly not equal, particularly if at the end of the day the gm still has fiat power over  your request and free reign when its time to cash in.

I doubt it's going to be that dramatic. For one, GM's adjudicate all kinds of things and a lot of player care a lot about... XP received, for example. In many games, the GM has enormously leeway about that and players who flip tables over that... well, we can hardly consider their existence an argument against XP distributed by the GM. It generally works. And mind you that some players will only care about their character's survival and to hell with family, while other players will consider the kidnapping of family the bigger event. So pricing takes skill, no doubt. As does handling XP - we just have decades more experience with that.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030Obviously as a palladium gamer, everyone will tell you that the pursuit of balance seems laughable to me in the first place, so I've kinda got some bias baggage on that front.  I certainly own it.

I'm a Palladium gamer as well and when you talk N&SS I know exactly what you're talking about. It's highly unbalanced towards (Body) Chi, a few Atemi forms and some Invisibility arts, especially Mystic Invisibility. One of my RIFTS characters was an Atlantean Undead Slayer with Ninjitsu. Damn, that was a nasty combo.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030Are we instead then monetizing it because its 'fun'?  Thats always going to be tough one to answer since fun is always subjective... So thats a question folks can only answer for themselves... The exchange of these items need not even necessarily be a currency  exchange... we could just as easily demonetize the concept by saying these aren't points we're spending.  They're like xbox achievements that we tally up.  By the end of the game player x made 5 successful and 2 unsuccessful attempts to introduce plausible narrative nudges!  The gm on the other hand made, lets be honest, 250 attempts to introduce plausible narrative nudges. All successful and some of them clearly less of a nudge, heheheheh.

Well, our first purpose is genre sim. We use metacurrency to model heroes' luck, remember? I would argue best as a party-level resource and opposed by a GM's pool, with metacurrency trading back-and-forth. That reflects the plausibility of yet another writer's fiat injection. And the level of luck available might have to change from scene-to-scene. So that is the simulationist angle.

From a game mechanics angle, it can make sense to attach long-term negative consequences to that, so that players will only expend currency when really needed. It has the added advantage that some things do not get decided by the GM anymore. Some gamers advise others to not create family and friends for your PCs because the GM will only kill them off sooner or later for cheap dramatic effect. But with luck metacurrency you can, of course, make it dependent on the players' prior performance whether they come too late to save their brother or not. So the GM doesn't kill your brother NPC straight anymore - instead, he places him into danger and leaves it up to your prior reliance on luck to save him.
Just one example of "fun" things that can be done with luck metacurrency beyond the initial objective of genre sim. It kinda introduces scales of fortune to your plots. But, of course, it is not necessary for genre sim. But I have to note: it doesn't go counter to it either.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030The intention of the pathfinder table is simplicity and balance, while the intention of the 2e tables is, dare I say it, narrative of the genre.

The potential drawback is that it's archetpyical, ie non-personalized. It's the same story for all thieves. What about thieves that don't encounter much poison?

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030On the  other hand palladium made megadamage. To what end I totally appreciate, but the rule they decided to handle the concept is frankly horrible... of all things D&D and pathfinder's damage resistance handles the same genre emulation in a much more satisfying way. Dice pools create bell curves that create more reliable statistical bell curves, but adding bonuses to those bell curves alters probabilities in a way that I find destructively problematic...

I did a conversion on the rules: made the armor give MDC damage resistance. Also, I created random damage tables for penetrating, iirc, that gave a factor by which a point of MDC damage would translate into SDC damage, drawing on the GURPS principle of over-penetration. A penetrating shot might only do 5 SDC per MDC point penetrating. Or it might do 100 SDC per. As a GM I would narrate it differently, depending on factor. Oh, and the 3 different damage tables represented 3 different sizes of MDC attacks (penetrating MDC sword cuts tend to cause higher factors than puny energy pistols).
That's what made RIFTS so much better: you suddenly had SDC creatures bleeding (or being burnt) underneath their MDC armor, but still fighting on.

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1078030Painfully for most of us the end result is we gather up all the mechanics we do like and throw them together in a bouillabaise we call homebrew stew.  And we just keep adding new ingredients as we find them and trying a little taste until its just right.  Or worse we give up and just go play fate and ptba and 5e because at least thats what everyone else is doing and we just wanna play, dammit.

I'm German so that's not a problem I have, the gaming scene is quite fragmented here with DSA's/TDE's former dominance slipping. Even though it was never as dominant after the 80s had ended as D&D is today, I feel.

To VinventTakeda -

As others said, the problem you cite has nothing whatsoever to do with luck points, but rather is a trope that goes back to long before luck point mechanics were ever established. In the old days, we would call these "Monte Haul" GMs, who gave the player's tons of treasure and XP without any significant challenges. It's something that can happen regardless of luck points or not.

What you describe is -

Quote from: VincentTakedaSo 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: VincentTakedaThe 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.'

This is no different than any other player resource. It's like saying that all damage is meaningless because it can just be healed - until you're out of heal spells. Therefore the only interesting part of the game is the time when you're out of heal spells and heal spells should just be eliminated.

If you don't have a Monte Haul GM, though, then you're worried about when and how to use your heal spells. Damage isn't meaningless, because you know you'll run out of healing, so you try to hoard your spells and selectively use them for maximum effect.

It should be the same way with luck points. In cinematic games with luck points, the PCs should be facing big challenges - just like how high-level characters aren't just mowing down orcs. This is how I run my games like James Bond 007, Cinematic Unisystem, or FATE.

Quote from: VincentTakedaAre we instead then monetizing it because its 'fun'? Thats always going to be tough one to answer since fun is always subjective... So thats a question folks can only answer for themselves... The exchange of these items need not even necessarily be a currency exchange... we could just as easily demonetize the concept by saying these aren't points we're spending. They're like xbox achievements that we tally up. By the end of the game player x made 5 successful and 2 unsuccessful attempts to introduce plausible narrative nudges! The gm on the other hand made, lets be honest, 250 attempts to introduce plausible narrative nudges. All successful and some of them clearly less of a nudge, heheheheh.

Fun is subjective, but there are patterns of experience. If we've both played FATE, we can compare how we like it - and likely see some common ground.

There have been a ton of games which use various hero points or luck points, so I think it's better to compare real games and real experiences rather than making theoretical arguments about how things might go.

Quote from: S'mon;1078044In my Conan game I would arbitrarily screw over the PCs ...and give them a Fate Point every time I did it. Points that could then be cashed in for a lucky break in turn (almost always to not die). I think that makes vastly more sense than giving the GM permission-slip points to screw over the PCs with; everyone knows the GM can always screw over the PCs.

I agree. In practice, I've hated when I have a meta-resource to spend as GM, like Marvel Heroic with its Doom Pool. It was impossible to have a clear reasoning of when I should use the points. Using them with the mindset of meta-game beating the players was difficult, but using them otherwise seemed like a sham.

I find giving out points to the PCs when I use power makes a lot more sense.

I do have the feeling that if I found myself at a table with a gm that cheats, I'd be more inclined to walk away from the table far more than I'd be inclined to give him a pass.  I can't imagine using luck points to mitigate a situation where someone at the table isn't using good judgement or they are playing in bad faith.

Even with a luck point mechanic a gm with bad intent is free to choose to murder your cousin while you're out of town.

Quote from: jhkim;1078067This is no different than any other player resource. It's like saying that all damage is meaningless because it can just be healed - until you're out of heal spells. Therefore the only interesting part of the game is the time when you're out of heal spells and heal spells should just be eliminated.

This is definitely true, its what caused the advent of the 15 minute workday and the creation of short rest/long rest.  My opinion on it is that those things made the game less fun for me personally.  Healing is a slow process unless you have someone in your party (chi healer or cleric or what have you) to handle that part of the actual game mechanics in a way that the task of healing has to be handed by the character's choices and developments specifically to that end which feels more satisfying to me.   It places the choices/effort/agency back in the hands of the characters themselves.  

The more effort a thing requires, or the more inconvenience it creates, the more weight it has.  Build a mechanic to shrug off the problem so we can move on to other things and whats the point of anyone taking injuries in the first place.  The damage is meaningless until you run out of heal spells, so instead lets take away heal spells wholesale and make taking damage entirely meaningless.  I agree that those kinds of things are bad for not gaming in general, as some folks love 4e, but its something I personally dont prefer.

Thats the other distinction thats important to make. The difference between me liking a thing and a thing being a bad idea.  I'm not saying luck as currency is a bad idea. I'm just saying theres detailed semantic reasons I personally dont prefer it.

The largess of storygaming is about the exchange of narrative currency and there are plenty of storygamers out there.  I just don't happen to be one of them.

I'd go so far as to say that narrative nudge points are to storygaming what hit points are to more simulationist or gamist systems, which is why when i'm talking about how I prefer to model a genre, I want to model it with hitpoints, not with narrative nudge points.  They are our ply in trade and they clearly both ebb and flow to create drama in their respective systems.  They are the fires in which we burn.

The reason I prefer hit points is because the gm sets up a narrative in which I can take damage but the rules and the swingy dice choose if things go good or bad for me, and even the gm can be surprised by bad rolls on either side.  If we take out the middleman of hit points and simpy decide that the exchange of narrative points determines if things go good or bad, we're removing the randomness and swinginess which is the whole reason I play in the first place.

It is also why I gravitate to linear systems instead of dice pool systems.  Of course we use system mechanics to nudge the outcomes of dice rolls... And a nudge of a linear dice roll is uniform in its effect, while even the tiniest nudge of a dice pool can swing probabilities waay too much.

But again its all just preferences.

Quote from: jhkim;1078069I agree. In practice, I've hated when I have a meta-resource to spend as GM, like Marvel Heroic with its Doom Pool. It was impossible to have a clear reasoning of when I should use the points. Using them with the mindset of meta-game beating the players was difficult, but using them otherwise seemed like a sham.

Well, how would it impact your attitude if the choice was between spending now for short term pain on the players OR conserving it now meaning later pain for the players? What you describe seems to be the flip side of what Vincent mentioned in one of his posts - where the players, not the GM, were able to spend metacurrency without ramifications. However, I think the equation changes if each point expended comes with a cost. In my particular implementation that cost incurred during the scenario impacts the ending or aftermath in one form of another. You could attach other costs to it, if you like, of course. The main thing is that it's no longer "Oh, what the heck, I'll spend this point now... I have 3 more after all - so why not??"

I want to avoid becoming too implementation-specific but I think an example might be called for in order to make things less abstract. I tested my implementation of luck metacurrency (Fortune Points) with long-term costs first running the first scenario of Deathwatch's "The Emperor Protects" (so SPOILERS). The metacurrency is modular to the rest of my system, so it plugged in directly.

Example 1: The Astartes come to a planet to bring it into the fold of the Imperium. They get approached by a street merchant that tries to sell them crap, among it a dagger. The PCs fail to note that it is made from genestealer bone. They are about to move on as the merchant does one last pitch. One of the PCs grabs the dagger (and again fails to notice the origin) and states his intent to throw the dagger into the air and blast it to pieces. Now, the scenario plays differently if the players get this clue early on; as the GM, I wasn't in favor of it because it lifts the mystery a bit early. But still it was such a good dramatic moment to take one of their Fortune Points and place it into my GM's pool and tell the player that his character notices something odd and upon inspection he finds out that it's made from a genestealer. It was not the branch I preferred but it made dramatic sense in that moment. None of the players balked at the forced spending of one of their points.

Example 2: Later they are supposed to defeat essentially a T-Rex with just primitive weapons to prove that they are true warriors. And I forgot that they got some kind of useful ability which made the fight super-easy for them. I should have then spent a Fortune Point and... I don't know, make the T-Rex sweep some of them aside for 2 rounds. They'd still have clearly won but it wouldn't have been THAT one-sided. Due to inexeprience, I didn't think of that.

Example 3: Here's where it comes together - at the end of the scenario the genestealers attack the local king's feast. The critical part, unknown to the players, is that the genestealers intend to infect the Rogue Trader that inserted the kill-team and will extract them, thus spreading beyond the planet. Now normally played the PCs would have tests to notice what is going on during the fight, etc. I decided instead in advance that he would get infected or not depending on how much Fortune the players relied on during the scenario before. So all Fortune gained or lost prior to this would impact the outcome. Therefore, the way to prevent it from happening had nothing to do with rolls or strategies in the final scene but everything with what went on before. Of course, one doesn't have to attach such consequences to the final Fortune tally - but one may.

You can of course play completely adversarial under these rules. But what is adversarial GMing here? Giving the T-Rex a better fighting chance? Or saving all the currency for the final battle? And why would I even want to choose the worst possible outcome and not the most interesting path, according to my whims as GM?

[EDIT: I wanna add that in the above adventure the main objective to bring the planet under control of the Imperium. So the Rogue Trader getting infected does not mean mission failed. It just taints the kill-team's victory in the long-run.]

Alexander, I found those examples really helpful in understanding what you want to do and how you might want to go about doing that thing.

You're welcome. As mentioned, I am kinda gunshy about making it too much about my particular implementation. Other versions are possible, you just need to attach other costs to luck expenditure:
For example, in a werewolf RPG the GM might get a Rage point everytime a character draws on luck - and he might be able use them later to induce you changing form in a rage. Only 1 Rage Point for making you murder a random stranger in a back-alley. 5 Rage Points for slaughtering your whole family (and what if the GM already has 2 saved?). Or perhaps in a religious campaign, your character needs to do some kind of in-game penance for each time his deity has to help out through fortune (or at least that's how the character sees it). You get the idea.

The main thing is to avoid a situation like in RAW Deathwatch where, if you get fatally hit you just reduce your Fate Points from 5 to 4 and life goes on. If there is a cost to that, it's probably so far down the line that you don't feel much the sting of it in the moment. Who knows if the campaign won't peter out before I run out of Fate? But if it has more immediate repercussions (ie, in the current adventure), you start to feel the teeth. You are all but certain to feel the backlash - the consequences of your prior failure to resolve the situation without being helped by the gods.