Meta Currencies

Okay, game designers, you are going to burn us all out on meta-currencies if that is all your games are about. Draw Steel is the next meta-currency game, closely following Daggerheart, and it too, has a special currency for each player, and the referee.

What is it with all these new-age RPGs and meta-currencies?

Daggerheart? I have it.

Draw Steel? Backed the Kickstarter.

I spent my money, I can talk about these. 

Okay, here is my game and my meta-currencies, and I will purposefully name them something terrible to say at the table. Players get heroic panache and referees need to spend verisimilitude. Of course, when we are playing, everyone will call them "hero-pan and verm" and nobody will know what the heck we are talking about. Somebody will call the player resource HP and people will get confused why some characters can spend their hit points to make a cleave attack.

Again, designers are trying to control the language of the game. You see this when they replaced race. They are forcing you to think one, special way. You will adopt the buzzwords and special code words to be a part of the group. Say the right things, and you aren't a threat to the group. I hate it when designers take cult indoctrination and codify it as role-playing game rules. Plain, simple language never hurt anyone. 

I remember the days when a referee's meta-currency was "each enemy took a turn."

Okay, I had enough already, I am abbreviating meta-currency to MC from now on. I am already sick of typing it.

And these designers will explain why we need MC with the line, "This is why the dragon can't use their breath weapon every turn." Uh, we had that problem solved until D&D 4E broke it with recharge mechanics. Seriously, this problem has been solved by the original white box version of D&D, and better designers already came up with a fix for this in 1974.

It is like these new-age game designers are wannabe AAA video-game designers and they are in the wrong business. The "game within the game" is not all that interesting, is another system to balance, and it will inevitably break at high levels.

I am here to play a role-playing game, not shove tokens around tracking another shared resource in a game with already a few hundred pages of rules. This is like one of those county fair foods you can only eat two bites of, think is the greatest thing ever, before you realize you can't eat the two foot-long piece of fried bread covered in cinnamon sugar because you will get sick.

The MC mechanics will be great the first four fights.

The next four fights, we will be short-handing them and trying to speed up play so we can get through the adventure.

The last four fights and we will be assuming it all away into the normal turn mechanics and trying to make it go away so we can play something more like D&D.

The next four fights and we will be hating them and wondering why we need to slow down play so much. 

Then the group goes back to D&D. We don't want to, really, so we play Tales of the Valiant instead because we have a conscious and higher standards. Butter, meet margarine.

The groups that stick with it and get to high levels will wonder if anybody tested any of this.

Version two is coming out to fix all this, we promise!

Oh, and the next version of D&D is coming out to fix all that, too! Maybe they will jump on the MC bandwagon!

And I like Savage Worlds, and that is a heavy MC game. Part of the reason I stopped playing Savage Worlds is I felt the game had "too many toys" required for play. It was fun, but laying out tokens for bennies, decks of cards, spinners, and all sort of other "fidget toys" left me feeling like the game went out of its way to put "table junk" in the game when what I wanted was a streamlined, simple, character-sheet-focused system.

I still love Savage Worlds, but it is one of those games that I play in smaller bites with fewer characters. To me, Savage Worlds is a good solo-player game, but I would never run a four-person party by myself, as the amount of tracked resources would quickly become overwhelming.

And while the MC in Savage Worlds was more player-sided, the MC in these new games are intended as a referee narrative control tool. Has the DM crisis gotten so bad people forgot how to run a game? Does it now have to "be a game" to "run a game?"

Pathfinder 2 is also an elegant solution to the MC problem. It makes its MC the action economy, with three actions total, and you spend them with your turn options. Again, there is a one-to-one relationship that is easily understood. Three actions. How do you spend them? This choice is the same for every character on every turn, and everyone easily knows what the MC "is."

I give Pathfinder 2E a lot of heat, but this is a better game than either Daggerheart or Draw Steel. I would play this before I would play either of those two. This game works and is balanced out to level 20, and it still works at that high level. This is a solid design that gives you more character options than those two games, and it scales all the way up to the highest levels without breaking.

While Pathfinder 2E leans heavily on the tag system, it is an easier system that is more logical and streamlined than these newer games. The MC is the action economy, and people can rapidly grasp that. Monsters recharge special abilities on critical hits or other special situations. No "invisible external MC economies" are needed.

Refereeing PF 2E is easy. Where it falls short for me is solo play, but this plays excellent with a group that can manage the complexity. The more people you have, and the greater the rules knowledge, the better it gets.

Shadowdark proved you can focus on the group dynamics with a simple external tool, a timer, and get a wealth of tension, interaction, and play just through one external factor. Shadowdark needs no MC to make the game highly compelling, since the designer understands social group dynamics and how those external factors put pressure on players as a group to perform optimally.

These new games have no timer, and they go out of their way to invent all sorts of MC to raise tension, and it almost feels artificial, too nerdy, over-thought, and unneeded. These games will take even more time to play, and the turns will be longer since everyone will be optimizing their MC spending. 

I get the feeling with this current crop of MC games there is nothing to see here.