TheRPGSite

Premise
Heroes, not just in cinema but also in literature, video games, comic books, etc. have luck. Sometimes they rely on enormous amounts of luck. Therefore, any RPG that tries to capture a genre (at least genres like fantasy, sci-fantasy, action, comic book superheroes, etc) or any specific IP within such a genre needs to account for heroes' luck. Heroes don't just get by with their wits and skill alone. Even better yet: having enormous luck elevates them further above the rest - it makes them appear destined for greatness, chosen by the gods.

A brief look at old-school games
This heroes' luck isn't very well reflected in D&D or most OSR games, as far as I can see. First, hit points represents general survivability and as an abstract stat it mixes luck with meatpoints, skill, etc. Secondly, sure, there's other mechanics, like saving throws. But the whole thing isn't intuitive at all and, as we've seen in a previous thread, requires a skillful GM with deeper understanding of the system (and apparently its history ;) ) and creative interpretations. That's what makes the design, arguably, cumbersome to use for genre simulation. Plus, heroes in fiction tend to have more types of luck than what HPs and saving throws normally provide - they usually do have that crate to dive behind when they need it; the world works in their favor. Yes, you could interpret a successful saving throw as such - but it's, again, not intuitive and it's probably not clear if you were saved due to agility or luck in that instance.

So how to address heroes luck in the context of genre sim?
First of all, we got to recognize that this is a bit of a paradox of genre simulation: you need heroes' luck to emulate Conan or Frodo. At the same time, the more your PCs have plot armor the same way they do, the more boring and unchallenging the game becomes. So, there are diametrically opposed forces at work here, which means you must be careful about striking the right balance.
Secondly, we observe that fictional heroes have at times dumb luck saving them when they dun goofed up before and subsequently find themselves in some kind of calamity. This goes somewhat counter to the assumption that when the players blunder, luck shouldn't be able to help them out. In genre simulation it should - while being mindful of the first item above!
Thirdly, luck needs to be its own dedicated property in whatever form. Whether as stat, skill or metacurrency - you want to know whether your character has been saved by coincidence or by his own capabilities. It lends itself to characterization, making your characters more distinct from one another.

Luck as metacurrency
Now, metacurrency has its detractors. Let me make a pitch in its favor by addressing some concerns raised in another thread:

• Violation of the Czege Principle: Giving players control over anything beyond character intention undermines  any sense of challenge. Yes. But that's what we're not talking about here if the GM retains full veto rights. It's not classical player agency. This matters because it turns any need for crates to dive behind into a request, instead of having control over the game world. I can request that Chancellor Merkel steps down as well but it's not anywhere near the same as mandating/ordering it. It's not like I spent a Fortune Point and then whatever I want is definitely going to happen. It only happens if the GM approves of it, so the Czege Principle is upheld. (And the GM is not generally expected to say "Yes" and handwave all requests through. It's up to him.)
  
• Luck as metacurrency undermines immersion: Luck as metacurrency isn't about creating a specific NPC or object. It gets used to suggest events (lucky breaks) that would be helpful. So if you wish one of the random bystanders would distract the enemy wizard, you don't get to choose what kind of NPC and how. You merely get to suggest what kind of lucky break you'd like your hero to have at this point in the story, subject to GM approval. And in-game meta considerations over this don't break the immersion anymore than over, say, combat modifiers do. Gaming is a constant stepping in and out of character anyway. It's just "Would be great if X happened." And maybe, just maybe, the GM will make it come true.
  
• Metacurrency as luck either leads to hoarding or spending like crazy: This is not a principle objection but a matter of skillfully setting the system up so that a fine balance is maintained. We'll briefly look at it next.
  

So how do we implement it with metacurrency?
Obviously, metacurrency needs to be limited in number: heroes rely on luck only a couple of times per story/film/etc., generally. To neutralize spamming, there is a simple trick: make repetition in whatever pattern the GM recognizes (and finds boring/unimaginative) more costly with each repetition. And to avoid hoarding, you could be generous with your allocation of metacurrency - however that raises a new issue: the price of usage (see below).

First, a key observation: Presumably, the party only needs luck when they made a tactical blunder before or they have been rolling badly.

And with that I'll leave you with two question deriving from that observation:

• If luck only gets invoked when you rolled badly or acted stupidly, can't the luck property be used to as a metric to keep track of player(! not PC!) performance? If so, fun stuff can be done with that.
• Should helping the party out with luck each time come with a long-term cost for short-term help? Could that be fun?

Why don't you just film a movie or something instead of trying to mold a game into a movie?

The heroes in the genre are not aware of their luck in the way metacurrency works.

A better way is for the referee of the campaign to track how lucky each character and at semi-random intervals just contrive things so the players find what they need fortuitously or succeeds where they didn't.

This better reflects the genre as players know their character is lucky but never know quite when it will kick in or what form it will take.

Fictional characters are almost never aware of having a spendable luck metacurrency.

I used Fate Points and they don't harm immersion too much. But I find just having the GM adjudicate appropriate to genre norms works best.

Quote from: S'mon;1077603Fictional characters are almost never aware of having a spendable luck metacurrency.

I used Fate Points and they don't harm immersion too much. But I find just having the GM adjudicate appropriate to genre norms works best.

Greetings!

I completely agree, S'mon. I have done exactly as you have.:)

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Brad;1077594Why don't you just film a movie or something instead of trying to mold a game into a movie?

Nothing I have said is specific to cinema.

Quote from: estar;1077601The heroes in the genre are not aware of their luck in the way metacurrency works.

Quote from: S'mon;1077603Fictional characters are almost never aware of having a spendable luck metacurrency.

Neither can they calculate how likely they're to hit enemy A versus enemy B. Nor do they know they have a 10% higher skill in Land Navigation than ally C.
Nor do they know how many hitpoints they have left and if they are certain to survive another critical hit by that enemy with that sword.

The situation with luck as metacurrency is somewhat better: they cannot be sure that the GM won't reject/veto the request.

Quote from: estar;1077601This better reflects the genre as players know their character is lucky but never know quite when it will kick in or what form it will take.

Well, yeah, the GM forcing luck is also an aspect (which I didn't tap into yet). For example, when stuck in an investigation indefinitely, the GM can drop a clue that way. Only, under the approach proposed, it would come at a price: losing metacurrency carries long-term consequences (item #2). And since the GM can reject request for luck, the players never can be quite sure when Lady Luck will smile at them.

I disagree regarding the form of luck however: players can be very creative about that and it's pretty good to tap into that; it enhances play if the GM adopts a suggestion that is better than anything he has come up with spontaneously. Case-in-point: RPG systems in which the use of Fate/Hero Points to avert certain death requires the player of that PC has to describe what lucky circumstance saved his PC's ass. It's tried-and-true. Nobody I know has ever moaned that such a rule gives that player too much control.

The main thing is that players don't have control over the world (inventing NPCs) and about the challenges they're facing. Then we'd be dipping into FATE territory.

Quote from: S'mon;1077603I used Fate Points and they don't harm immersion too much. But I find just having the GM adjudicate appropriate to genre norms works best.

Which brings me to item #1: taking stock of how many times which side needed the help of fate or fortune. You can build challenges around that concept instead of handing it out for free. Particularly with investigations.

I don't know that luck NEEDS to be divided out into a separate aspect or meta currency. You just need the rules to account for some people having the edge that luck gives them and others do not.

Personally, I treat all Hit Points beyond the first hit die as 100% non-meat... a mix of skill and luck that keeps you from tiring or suffering serious injuries so quickly (you parry more efficiently so get less tired from each one). Thus, being of higher level than your species base hit dice already represents luck.

I also rewrote the falling rules so that damage is based on the difficulty to catch yourself and unless you're out of hit points you generally end up clinging to a ledge instead of falling lethal distances.

By the same token, improving saving throws, particularly 2e and earlier/OSR saves where the difficulty doesn't generally increase with the power of the caster/situation also models higher level characters having a greater degree of luck (in addition to skill and developing a tolerance to less pleasant things).

As to pushing things, I think that could also be accomplished without resorting to an external meta currency. In the game system I'm using we have two resource pools, Focus (representing smaller pushes) and Heroic Surges (which resprent deep endurance reserves). You can burn focus to improve the results of an action (though you generally have to spend it before you roll... just because you're putting more than typical focus into something doesn't guarantee success, just better odds). You burn surges to take extra actions on your turn, hit really hard with an attack and rally to regain non-physical hit points, but surges are also your death save reserves... each time you fail a death save at zero hp you lose one; no surges and no hit points means you die... so the more you pull upon your deep reserves the closer you're putting yourself to death.

But even though you could say those things are "luck-like" both of those are still resources internal to the character. You know when you're choosing to push yourself, you know you can only push yourself so far before you're spent and pushing yourself only affects the outcome of your actions; unless you're an actual conjurer, boxes for you to hide behind will not appear to save you... but you could burn a surge to get extra movement and that let's you run far enough to get yourself around a corner or to wherever the GM says actual boxes are.

The distinction here is that not everyone HAS focus or surges. The average goblin infantry has neither. An orc might have a point of focus or two. An orc chieftain might have a couple of surges and a little focus. The PCs (and PC-like NPCs) start with both and their numbers grow with level as they are better able to take advantage of the opportunities luck provides them.

In other words... Conan has levels in a class. This gives him non-physical hit points as plot armor, better odds when bad stuff happens (better saves) and more reserves to draw upon to overcome the obstacles in his path.

Remember, just because it could end up being a story... that doesn't mean it's YOUR story. You may have set out with the intention of telling the story of how you heroically rid the pass of the ogre, but the actual story could be the ogre's story about how the silly human's skull made a funny noise when it popped (no one said Ogre stories are particularly deep).

Maybe your only purpose in the grander picture is demonstrate for the heroes who later recount the story that the hallway had a deadly scythe trap.

Not everyone gets to play Conan in a Conan story.

Quote from: S'mon;1077603Fictional characters are almost never aware of having a spendable luck metacurrency.

I used Fate Points and they don't harm immersion too much. But I find just having the GM adjudicate appropriate to genre norms works best.

I'm not convinced that spendable luck currency is the always best way to handle this. However, I do think that in many genres, characters act like they are aware of their luck - and also that they can't push it too far. Just like characters aren't aware of hit points or initiative, but they are aware of the consequences, like a character saying "She's tough - she can handle that." Characters are never aware of mechanics per se - but there are kinds of player behaviors that are encouraged by particular mechanics.

I think it's no coincidence that Hero Points were pioneered by the James Bond 007 RPG. I felt that they worked great there, because using them meant that the PCs regularly had a assuredness and confidence similar to James Bond as a character. Lots of similar fictional characters act in a very confident way that is hard to simulate in systems where the player could roll a critical failure at any point. (James Bond 007 is also interesting because Hero Points are gained by rolling a critical success naturally - which are most likely from rolling on a high chance. So players are encouraged to show off, rolling at simple tasks with their highest skill. Showboating in non-critical situations is also very James-Bond-ish.)

Conversely, this sort of Hero Points are less fitting for everyman hero genres, where the protagonist acts like an ordinary person who is in over their head - like Dorothy in Oz or Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077589Premise
Heroes, not just in cinema but also in literature, video games, comic books, etc. have luck. Sometimes they rely on enormous amounts of luck. Therefore, any RPG that tries to capture a genre (at least genres like fantasy, sci-fantasy, action, comic book superheroes, etc) or any specific IP within such a genre needs to account for heroes' luck. Heroes don't just get by with their wits and skill alone. Even better yet: having enormous luck elevates them further above the rest - it makes them appear destined for greatness, chosen by the gods.

The problem is heroes in fiction do not have luck. They have writer's fiat. Any metacurrency should model writer's fiat to simulate fictional "luck".

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1077613The problem is heroes in fiction do not have luck. They have writer's fiat. Any metacurrency should model writer's fiat to simulate fictional "luck".

I concur. And most notably, writer's fiat is (or should be) limited by what he thinks his audience will find plausible (and even more narrowly: limited by what the audience probably will find appealing).

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077614I concur. And most notably, writer's fiat is (or should be) limited by what he thinks his audience will find plausible (and even more narrowly: limited by what the audience probably will find appealing).

Interesting take. If we continue the analogy: I, as a player (audience) find it most appealing that in an RPG, there is no writer's fiat.* The difference between an RPG and a piece of fiction like a book or film is that the player have agency, and that agency can involve taking risks that may or may not work.

*Fiat for outcomes. The GM, of course, has to set up the scenario, which does give him/her some input on the character's odds of success.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077610Neither can they calculate how likely they're to hit enemy A versus enemy B. Nor do they know they have a 10% higher skill in Land Navigation than ally C.
Nor do they know how many hitpoints they have left and if they are certain to survive another critical hit by that enemy with that sword.

Players in my GURPS games usually don't know those things either.

When I do know those things in games, I tend to relate to the game mechanics rather than the situation, and tend to wish I were playing a game with rules and/or GM that support a higher level of non-gamey modeling and uncertainty.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077610Neither can they calculate how likely they're to hit enemy A versus enemy B. Nor do they know they have a 10% higher skill in Land Navigation than ally C.

But they are likely, just as we are in the real world, to be able to assess or rank character skill to some extent. Sometime even with great precision.  Knowing skill levels is, in part, a rough proxy of this real world ability
.
And of course the GM could keep skill levels, number of hit points, and such hidden from the players. In the early days of my D&D play we talked about doing exactly that. But, rarely is this done because the added burden on the GM is usually considered excessive and players like to track and see their character's improvements. So we compromise and allow the player some knowledge that his character does not have. And some people object to increasing that out of character, system knowledge any more than is really necessary.

QuoteNor do they know how many hitpoints they have left and if they are certain to survive another critical hit by that enemy with that sword.

As mentioned, the number of hitpoints could be hidden from the player. And there are certainly systems where the player can never know with 100% surety that the character can survive the next hit.

QuoteAnd since the GM can reject request for luck, the players never can be quite sure when Lady Luck will smile at them.

You don't need metacurrency to do this. Players can already request things that GMs may then allow or include in the world. Most GMs have always done this at least to some extent.

QuoteI disagree regarding the form of luck however: players can be very creative about that and it's pretty good to tap into that; it enhances play if the GM adopts a suggestion that is better than anything he has come up with spontaneously. Case-in-point: RPG systems in which the use of Fate/Hero Points to avert certain death requires the player of that PC has to describe what lucky circumstance saved his PC's ass. It's tried-and-true. Nobody I know has ever moaned that such a rule gives that player too much control.

Moaned? No. But when playing Honor & Intrigue (H&I), which uses Fortune Points, both I and some of my players have complained about that exact aspect of Fortune Points.

I find that the more a metacurrency changes during play, the more attention I need to invest as a player or a GM in tracking that metacurrency. I find it to be an unwelcome distraction from what I do enjoy about play. For example, Force Points in D6 Star Wars don't get used too often in play and typically are only awarded or renewed outside of play. Therefore little attention is required to track Force Point accumulation and expenditure. H&I, on the other hand, presumes that Fortune Points will used and new points awarded during play. Perhaps frequently during play. For me that is often too distracting.

QuoteThe main thing is that players don't have control over the world (inventing NPCs) and about the challenges they're facing. Then we'd be dipping into FATE territory.

That is to you the main thing. Some players just don't want a world that is at all jointly created even if the GM has a veto over player creation.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077589Premise
Heroes, not just in cinema but also in literature, video games, comic books, etc. have luck. Sometimes they rely on enormous amounts of luck. Therefore, any RPG that tries to capture a genre (at least genres like fantasy, sci-fantasy, action, comic book superheroes, etc) or any specific IP within such a genre needs to account for heroes' luck. Heroes don't just get by with their wits and skill alone. Even better yet: having enormous luck elevates them further above the rest - it makes them appear destined for greatness, chosen by the gods.

A brief look at old-school games
This heroes' luck isn't very well reflected in D&D or most OSR games, as far as I can see.

Note that you are making an unstated assumption that, in an RPG, every PC is a "hero".  Old-school RPGs frequently do not share that assumption, which is why they do not model heroes' luck.  As an earlier comment in this thread pointed out, there are a lot of people in Conan stories who aren't Conan.

Even if they are heroes, they can still die in genre fiction, and even die in an "unheroic" fashion.  I'm told that Clark Ashton Smith's The Seven Geases (http://eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/192/the-seven-geases) was one of Gygax's favorites.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077589First, hit points represents general survivability and as an abstract stat it mixes luck with meatpoints, skill, etc... Plus, heroes in fiction tend to have more types of luck than what HPs and saving throws normally provide - they usually do have that crate to dive behind when they need it; the world works in their favor.

I've seen several discussions in OSR and OSR-adjacent circles of allowing players in D&D-type games to burn HP as generalized "luck" rather than restricting it only to combat survivability.  The game Scarlet Heroes even has a rule for this, called "Defying Death".  "A hero can Defy Death any time they wish to avoid the consequences of a failed saving throw or escape a situation of otherwise certain catastrophe. They may also Defy Death to overcome some insufficiency of skill."  When you choose to Defy Death, you take 1d4 damage per level of your character.  If you still have HP left after taking this damage, then you somehow miraculously succeed in handling the situation; if you are reduced to 0 HP or less, you are left with 1 HP remaining and have to find a different way of dealing with the situation.  If you Defy Death more than once in an adventure, you take 1d6 damage per level the second time, 1d8 per level the third, and so on.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077589Violation of the Czege Principle: Giving players control over anything beyond character intention undermines  any sense of challenge. Yes. But that's what we're not talking about here if the GM retains full veto rights. It's not classical player agency. This matters because it turns any need for crates to dive behind into a request, instead of having control over the game world. I can request that Chancellor Merkel steps down as well but it's not anywhere near the same as mandating/ordering it. It's not like I spent a Fortune Point and then whatever I want is definitely going to happen. It only happens if the GM approves of it, so the Czege Principle is upheld. (And the GM is not generally expected to say "Yes" and handwave all requests through. It's up to him.)

You're just playing semantic games with this argument.  If I say "there are crates there" and the GM says "ok", then I have, for all intents and purposes, created the crates, GM veto power or no GM veto power.  To say otherwise is like claiming that, if I have a gun to your head, I don't have the power to shoot you because someone might grab the gun out of my hand - while it's certainly true that someone could grab the gun and stop me from shooting you, I still have the power to shoot you right up until the point that they actually do take the gun.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077589First, a key observation: Presumably, the party only needs luck when they made a tactical blunder before or they have been rolling badly.

These situations can be dealt with through the use of a metacurrency which can only be used to reroll dice, and perhaps also negate "character death" results, without also giving it general-purpose narrative declaration powers.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077589If luck only gets invoked when you rolled badly or acted stupidly, can't the luck property be used to as a metric to keep track of player(! not PC!) performance? If so, fun stuff can be done with that.

Too metagame for my taste, but, if it's what you're into, knock yourself out.

I suspect it's kinda niche, too, given that, when I ran Savage Worlds and allowed bennies to only be spent for rerolls (no Soak rolls, no narrative declarations), nobody at the table ever even hinted at the idea of the number of bennies left at the end of the night being a measure of players' relative skill levels.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077589Should helping the party out with luck each time come with a long-term cost for short-term help? Could that be fun?

It certainly seems to be a common aspect in many "player-chosen 'luck'" systems, usually implemented with something along the general lines of "each time you spend a 'good luck' point, you also give the GM a 'bad luck' point to use against you later in the game".

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077610Neither can they calculate how likely they're to hit enemy A versus enemy B. Nor do they know they have a 10% higher skill in Land Navigation than ally C.
Nor do they know how many hitpoints they have left and if they are certain to survive another critical hit by that enemy with that sword.

Those 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 think you will have more luck here if you tie luck to the setting directly. For example if you want it as something the player spends, tie it to the fantasy version of saying the lords prayer or making a gesture signifying a desire to be lucky (kissing a medallion or something). You might even cloud the amount of luck characters have, having the GM keep track of how many points they have left (perhaps even starting them with random  amounts of luck).

Quote from: nDervish;1077687You're just playing semantic games with this argument.  If I say "there are crates there" and the GM says "ok", then I have, for all intents and purposes, created the crates, GM veto power or no GM veto power.  To say otherwise is like claiming that, if I have a gun to your head, I don't have the power to shoot you because someone might grab the gun out of my hand - while it's certainly true that someone could grab the gun and stop me from shooting you, I still have the power to shoot you right up until the point that they actually do take the gun.

This quote gets to the center of things, I think. I don't think it is playing semantic games at all. I mean it in this way:

In any game I've GMed, I don't know the details of the world in 100% photographic detail. Let's take a scenario.

A group is playing DC Heroes, where "Hero Points" are Experience Points, but also function a bit like Marvel Super Heroes' "Karma" and can be used also like Alexander Kalinowski is proposing. Players are in an office building. Player asks "Are there any power outlets nearby?" GM thinks it is extremely plausible that there are, so he says "Yes". Players then move out of the office and into a warehouse. Player asks "Is there a crate I can duck behind?" GM thinks it is extremely plausible that there is, so he says "Yes". Another player asks "Is there a power outlet nearby?" Hmm, well, warehouses have some power outlets, but not like an office. How do we determine if there is a power outlet nearby? Some things a GM clearly knows, "No" and others, "Yes, definitely", then there is this middle ground. Unless described as part of the scene, none of these things exist before someone asks about them, metacurrency spend or not. It's only a player's wish to pretend the GM has a perfect picture in their head that would make 'em think otherwise.

1. GM makes sure he has detailed blueprints of all locations, including where the outlets are. It's maximally realistic. No funny business at all. Super not realistic to do in any real game.
2. GM makes a call based on his gut feeling of how plausible he finds the question (which... honestly is also kind of a request) and the asked about item then pops into the fictional reality or not based on that feeling.
3. GM takes the input of the player asking and makes a call based on something like how interesting a game it would make, or based on how lucky or unlucky he feels the players have been so far and cuts 'em a break or gives 'em the business based on that, or if he's feeling kind towards or annoyed with a particular player.
4. GM ad hoc comes up with a probability that the asked for scene feature is present, then a random roll is made.
5. GM determines how likely it is, and if pretty likely he says something like "Yeah, for 5 Hero Points it's there" or if less likely but possible, "Sure... for 20 Hero Points"

Clearly, some people here don't like option 5 for various "immersion" related reasons. If those kinds of mechanics mess up immersion for you, definitely don't use 'em. Others think the idea is necessarily storygame-y or somehow undermines GM control of the situation. There are metacurrency based luck mechanics I agree can do that, but in the DC Heroes situation I don't see how that could be thought to be the case. If there is anything to be said for option 5 in my experience, it's that it creates a sense of pressure & desperation when I'm put into those situations where the GM offers the feature for a price. 20 Hero points!?!? I could maybe push my Martial Arts next round into AV, and have enough to boost my Body so I'm not knocked out if my desperation attack against Gorilla Grodd doesn't score enough push back to knock him off this platform. Or... my desperate desire that there is a construction crane on this platform turns out to be the case.

I can see how that wouldn't work for some people, but the agonizing costly options vibe just tends to pull me more into the game.

There's a couple of things to be said in this thread. But I'll start with this:

If the luck of heroes in genre fiction is based on writer's fiat and you don't like any amount of writer's fiat in games, then you're probably not in the target audience for genre sim. At least not mainstream genre sim. The mainstream of the fantasy genre is Conan, Aragorn, Jon Snow - characters like that. We experience fantasy worlds through their stories. The thrill to this type of gaming is finding out if you're really Conan, Aragorn or Jon Snow and not: Valeria, Boromir or Robb Stark, if you catch my drift. Now, you can of course play some random guy in a fantasy world and he may or may not tumble to a meaningless death in act 2 when trying to scale some cliffs. That's okay; it's alright. But it's not what the big stories of the genre are about. Same with Luke Skywalker in Science-Fantasy. Or Peter Parker for Supers.

If that type of sim is NOT what you want, we have to ask what remains of genre sim. I suppose it's the setting without the genre conventions. Or maybe just traces of them (high hitpoint PCs for an inaccurate representation of heroes luck). Like I said, that's alright. I'm not sure I would refer to that as genre sim - we'd have to check case-by-case what else remains of a given genre. To me, that sounds at least closer to the other broad category of simulationism: real sim - simulation of the real or a realistic world. The difference to genre sim is the difference between playing to find out what would it really be like to be an elven archer in a world like Middle-Earth as opposed to playing to find out what it's to be someone like Legloas (not necessarily Legolas himself).

To me, both can be interesting and fun - but they have different requirements.

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 dunno. Consider something like the superhero Domino (as featured in Deadpool 2), who has in-universe luck. I feel like it would be impossible to represent her luck by just modifying skill rolls. A huge part of her luck is having favorable circumstances, like a truck passing at the right time, or a box being in the right place. She doesn't summon a mattress truck into place to break her fall - it was always there and acting normally, but it happened to be in the right place at the right time because of her luck.

Also, I'm not sure that Force Points are really associated. The Force in Star Wars doesn't seem like a resource that characters bank and use up. It's supposed to be an omnipresent field that characters can tap into under the right circumstances. i.e. A character wouldn't say "I'm out of Force now".

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077723There's a couple of things to be said in this thread. But I'll start with this:

If the luck of heroes in genre fiction is based on writer's fiat and you don't like any amount of writer's fiat in games, then you're probably not in the target audience for genre sim. At least not mainstream genre sim. The mainstream of the fantasy genre is Conan, Aragorn, Jon Snow - characters like that. We experience fantasy worlds through their stories. The thrill to this type of gaming is finding out if you're really Conan, Aragorn or Jon Snow and not: Valeria, Boromir or Robb Stark, if you catch my drift. Now, you can of course play some random guy in a fantasy world and he may or may not tumble to a meaningless death in act 2 when trying to scale some cliffs. That's okay; it's alright. But it's not what the big stories of the genre are about. Same with Luke Skywalker in Science-Fantasy. Or Peter Parker for Supers.

If that type of sim is NOT what you want, we have to ask what remains of genre sim. I suppose it's the setting without the genre conventions. Or maybe just traces of them (high hitpoint PCs for an inaccurate representation of heroes luck). Like I said, that's alright. I'm not sure I would refer to that as genre sim - we'd have to check case-by-case what else remains of a given genre. To me, that sounds at least closer to the other broad category of simulationism: real sim - simulation of the real or a realistic world. The difference to genre sim is the difference between playing to find out what would it really be like to be an elven archer in a world like Middle-Earth as opposed to playing to find out what it's to be someone like Legloas (not necessarily Legolas himself).

To me, both can be interesting and fun - but they have different requirements.

I think you will find there are people here who are fans of genre emulation (I know I am, I know Pundit has written about it quite a bit). However, some ideas are pretty prevalent here that you are going to be battling uphill against. One of them is dissociated mechanics and the idea of interacting through the setting with your character. I am not saying this is the best way to do things. But on this forum, at least in my view of it, you'll find this is a pretty strong point of view (though by no means does everyone adhere to it). All I am trying to say is, there is a path to genre emulation that doesn't put you at odds with that viewpoint (perhaps that isn't your aim, and if so, by all means, I suggest doing what you are doing). As long as the luck resource is either part of the cosmology and can be handled by the character (if you want players to spend it themselves) or operates in the background of the setting and is mainly handled by the GM, I think you'll find it will go over. Where people tend not to be happy is stuff like bennies, or luck points, that the characters don't really have any awareness of in the setting, but the player spends out of character (again there are Savage Worlds fans here, and I am among them, but just pointing out the fault line you are rubbing against here).

All that said, I don't particularly mind having a luck resource that players spend to emulate genre. If you are going for the idea of some kind of plot immunity, I think there are easier ways to do it. One would be, when you reach 0 HP, or would otherwise be killed, by some miracle you are not. You emerge from the rubble unharmed due to (insert after the fact explanation). That would model the fiction you are looking to emulate, and would only really come up when it matters. However, I would expect there to be plenty of people here who really wouldn't be into that approach.

Savage Worlds bennies and wild die. Heroes and Villains are always luckier with the wild die and can further do unlikely things with bennies.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077723There's a couple of things to be said in this thread. But I'll start with this:

If the luck of heroes in genre fiction is based on writer's fiat and you don't like any amount of writer's fiat in games, then you're probably not in the target audience for genre sim. At least not mainstream genre sim. The mainstream of the fantasy genre is Conan, Aragorn, Jon Snow - characters like that. We experience fantasy worlds through their stories. The thrill to this type of gaming is finding out if you're really Conan, Aragorn or Jon Snow and not: Valeria, Boromir or Robb Stark, if you catch my drift. Now, you can of course play some random guy in a fantasy world and he may or may not tumble to a meaningless death in act 2 when trying to scale some cliffs. That's okay; it's alright. But it's not what the big stories of the genre are about. Same with Luke Skywalker in Science-Fantasy. Or Peter Parker for Supers.

If that type of sim is NOT what you want, we have to ask what remains of genre sim. I suppose it's the setting without the genre conventions. Or maybe just traces of them (high hitpoint PCs for an inaccurate representation of heroes luck). Like I said, that's alright. I'm not sure I would refer to that as genre sim - we'd have to check case-by-case what else remains of a given genre. To me, that sounds at least closer to the other broad category of simulationism: real sim - simulation of the real or a realistic world. The difference to genre sim is the difference between playing to find out what would it really be like to be an elven archer in a world like Middle-Earth as opposed to playing to find out what it's to be someone like Legloas (not necessarily Legolas himself).

To me, both can be interesting and fun - but they have different requirements.

True, and my point wasn't to dismiss the idea of luck metacurrency. But I think it did help clarify what that metacurrency should be simulating. If character luck is writer's fiat, then putting that metacurrency in the hands of the player will not simulate that accurately. Frodo didn't spend a resource to influence events in LOTR, Tolkien decided what happened. So this currency should be a GM resource to spend on the characters actions and events to drive a specific narrative.

Quote from: NeonAce;1077700This quote gets to the center of things, I think. I don't think it is playing semantic games at all. I mean it in this way:

It's also a false analogy. A correct analogy would be if he held a loaded gun to my head and I had a 100% foolproof way to prevent him from shooting - something like magical mind domination. Because that would be the equivalent of GM veto. Under these conditions, yes, he may place that gun to my head.

Quote from: NeonAce;10777001. GM makes sure he has detailed blueprints of all locations, including where the outlets are. It's maximally realistic. No funny business at all. Super not realistic to do in any real game.
2. GM makes a call based on his gut feeling of how plausible he finds the question (which... honestly is also kind of a request) and the asked about item then pops into the fictional reality or not based on that feeling.
3. GM takes the input of the player asking and makes a call based on something like how interesting a game it would make, or based on how lucky or unlucky he feels the players have been so far and cuts 'em a break or gives 'em the business based on that, or if he's feeling kind towards or annoyed with a particular player.
4. GM ad hoc comes up with a probability that the asked for scene feature is present, then a random roll is made.
5. GM determines how likely it is, and if pretty likely he says something like "Yeah, for 5 Hero Points it's there" or if less likely but possible, "Sure... for 20 Hero Points"

This is a splendid summary. We'd have to know analyze each option for how well suited they are for genre sim involving those famous heroes... Conan, Han Solo, any big Schwartzenegger action role. Let's have a look:

#1 is not possible to pull off all the way. The player might require some minute detail and you can't guarantee that you've thought of it. What if you're Sean Connery and the GM forgot to consider if there were any seagulls on that beach? And that's just where it begins. What if a player plan requires empty syringes from that trashcan over there? Are you going to prepare the contents of every trashcan?
#4 works for genre sim if you don't base the probability of the roll on real world probabilities but genre conventions/likelihoods. And these are hard to determine. Even worse: if your player has really this great idea about driving seagulls into the enemy plane, are you going to potentially ruin it by giving him only a 30% of a flock of seagulls being nearby? You can do that - but will that make your game still feel like you're playing inside an Indiana Jones story? Which approach is really the immersion-breaking one here?
#2 suffers from the same problem, except when the GM strictly determines it on plausibility for the genre: "Surviving the nuclear bomb in a refridgerator? Sorry, that won't work." "Jumping with your cart from your part of the rails and landing straight on the opposing rails, continuing your ride? Well, that's borderline okay." The problem with that approach is that it, as described above, is blind to how much luck each side has drawn on before.
#3 is complicated. If the GM bases it on genre plausibility AND at least relies on gut feeling regarding how much luck has been "consumed" already, that can work. But it probably should be net luck consumption because luck for the opposing side makes it more okay for your side to have luck AGAIN. You're missing out on the fun of #5 and turning luck into a metric for player performance though. It will feel more capricious.
#5 is basically case #2 with keeping track of luck consumed but without considering net luck - so it could be improved. Here's a neat little idea: suppose the master villain is going to end up becoming recurring or not, depending on if you manage to reach the boss battle with 70 or more Hero Points. NOW you can suddenly build challenges around that.

As a final thought: metacurrency implementing heroes' luck is limited because there is only so much luck someone can have before it becomes too much for the reader/viewer, depending on circumstances. So, does it even make sense to model it individually? Or will the readers/viewers groan if EVERY member of a party has moderate amount of times luck per story? Doesn't it make much more sense to have "group luck"? And if there is group luck and the enemy having some luck themselves makes it more plausible for you to have luck again - shouldn't luck then best be modeled by two opposing pools with luck being traded back and forth?

Quote from: NeonAce;1077700How do we determine if there is a power outlet nearby? Some things a GM clearly knows, "No" and others, "Yes, definitely", then there is this middle ground. Unless described as part of the scene, none of these things exist before someone asks about them, metacurrency spend or not. It's only a player's wish to pretend the GM has a perfect picture in their head that would make 'em think otherwise.

You make an interesting point.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077723...that sounds at least closer to the other broad category of simulationism: real sim - simulation of the real or a realistic world. The difference to genre sim is the difference between playing to find out what would it really be like to be an elven archer in a world like Middle-Earth as opposed to playing to find out what it's to be someone like Legloas (not necessarily Legolas himself).

That's a nice way of characterizing the difference you see. Originally RPGs like OD&D and Runequest were designed to do the former and not the latter.

Quote from: jhkim;1077725Also, I'm not sure that Force Points are really associated. The Force in Star Wars doesn't seem like a resource that characters bank and use up. It's supposed to be an omnipresent field that characters can tap into under the right circumstances. i.e. A character wouldn't say "I'm out of Force now".

I'd say weakly associated.

Number of Force Points corresponds to how strong a character is with the Force which is something that exists in the game world. Knowing how many times they can "use the Force" isn't something that characters in the movies/novels/comics seem to know.

In that sense Force Points are kind of like D&D hit points. Players know things that characters, strictly speaking, don't know. Of course one could address this by having the GM track Force Point totals and not letting the players know what those totals are. Just like one could have the GM track hit point totals. Few people do those things because doing them adds more GM book keeping for an additional benefit that most players don't strongly care about and it takes away the knowledge of character improvement that most players enjoy as part of the RPG experience.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077741As a final thought: metacurrency implementing heroes' luck is limited because there is only so much luck someone can have before it becomes too much for the reader/viewer, depending on circumstances. So, does it even make sense to model it individually? Or will the readers/viewers groan if EVERY member of a party has moderate amount of times luck per story? Doesn't it make much more sense to have "group luck"? And if there is group luck and the enemy having some luck themselves makes it more plausible for you to have luck again - shouldn't luck then best be modeled by two opposing pools with luck being traded back and forth?

Managing luck pools is not something that I'm interested in doing as a GM, but I think there already are games systems that do that.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1077735True, and my point wasn't to dismiss the idea of luck metacurrency. But I think it did help clarify what that metacurrency should be simulating. If character luck is writer's fiat, then putting that metacurrency in the hands of the player will not simulate that accurately. Frodo didn't spend a resource to influence events in LOTR, Tolkien decided what happened. So this currency should be a GM resource to spend on the characters actions and events to drive a specific narrative.

Even in a story game, though, as GM I am *not* the writer.  A writer creates all of the character background, dialog, and actions - that's a huge part of a writer's work. So the writer is the combination of all the players and the GM.

In practice, as GM, I find spending on behalf of the PCs is a pain in the ass. I think the player can handle player-specific tracking much better than I can. So i will often hand off character-specific things to them. A wargame parallel is having the player control the actions of their attack dog in combat - with the restriction that they should have the dog act like an obedient trained dog, not like a telepathic extension of the PC.

Now, some players would complain that controlling the dog drags them out of character - because really the character isn't telepathically controlling the dog. But a lot of players are fine with it, even though they enjoy getting into character.

Quote from: Bren;1077747That's a nice way of characterizing the difference you see. Originally RPGs like OD&D and Runequest were designed to do the former and not the latter.

Yes and nowadays you have mid-level D&D characters with, I don't know, 80 HPs and it puts them in a weird inbetween. They have the basic suvivability of real heroes and their saving throws but they don't have the crate to dive behind when they need it (which would reduce the need for bloated HPs and saving throws).

Quote from: Bren;1077748Managing luck pools is not something that I'm interested in doing as a GM, but I think there already are games systems that do that.

Sure, it's not for everyone. We didn't even look closely at alternatives to metacurrency so far. But I'd like to once more point out my response to item #5. This is something that other approaches, like Genesys, generally do not do: shaping the outcome of a story in part based on how well the characters mastered the challenges along the way, how little luck they required to help out.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077761But I'd like to once more point out my response to item #5. This is something that other approaches, like Genesys, generally do not do: shaping the outcome of a story in part based on how well the characters mastered the challenges along the way, how little luck they required to help out.

Yeah 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.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077741Ishouldn't luck then best be modeled by two opposing pools with luck being traded back and forth?

I find the best way to model luck in a game with dice is using the dice.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1077761Yes and nowadays you have mid-level D&D characters with, I don't know, 80 HPs and it puts them in a weird inbetween. They have the basic suvivability of real heroes and their saving throws but they don't have the crate to dive behind when they need it (which would reduce the need for bloated HPs and saving throws).

The 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: VincentTakeda;1077798Unless the pursuit is story over simulation, narrative karma currency is a solution looking for a problem that wasnt really there.  

That's my feeling. GM decides if there are barrels, based on what's plausible. Works fine and rewards creative play.

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.

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.