Metacurrency

(I’m back! Took an extended break over the holidays that lasted a bit longer than I’d anticipated, but we’ll jump right back into more design theories now. Thanks for your patience!)

If I had titled this “Currency in RPGs,” you might have thought I was going to write about gold pieces, which is fair because treasure in games is very much a factor in game design. If you can buy magic stuff with gold, it absolutely affects game balance and character progression.

But that’s NOT what I want to discuss today. I want to talk about all the currencies in games that aren’t actual money that characters possess. RPGs are actually full of such currencies. The most common one is character health. Hit points (and their many cousins in other systems) are essentially a currency. Or rather, a metacurrency.

If the money a character possesses is their narrative currency to earn and spend, then other currencies in games are earned and spent by the player. Thus, the term “metacurrency.”

A player’s character has only 15 hit points left (out of, say, 30). Do they “spend” some of their hit points to get into the next fight, or do they avoid it until they can heal some of them back? It’s worth mentioning that I use hit points (or any kind of similar health mechanic) as an example of metacurrency because everyone knows what they are, but as a concept, they are actually more complicated than many other metacurrencies because you don’t spend them so much as you risk losing them and you have little control over how many you lose. As a transaction, it’s more like gambling than spending.

So let’s look at more straightforward metacurrencies in games.

Experience Points

Basically, a character earns experience points (or whatever the game’s equivalent may be) and then the player “spends” them to improve the character, which might mean going up a level, gaining a new superpower, or whatever the game offers. One of the most important things about experience points is that they should be awarded for doing what you’re “supposed” to do in the game. You can have a lot of philosophical discussions about what an experience really is, and how it may or may not improve your character, but from a purely game design point of view, it’s the way the game rewards a player for, well, playing.

While the very concept of roleplaying is decidedly open-ended, every game has some general activity that characters are supposed to partake in. In Numenera, it’s discovering the wonders of the Ninth World. In Call of Cthulhu, it’s defending the world against the forces of the Mythos. In modern D&D, it’s fighting monsters (in older editions, it was finding treasure). The promise of experience points is what tells players, “if you do this activity, your character will advance.” It’s kind of like saying, “When in doubt, this is what you should do.” It should tie into the game’s underlying story in broad terms. Defeating supervillains is the story behind a superhero game, exploring new planets is the story behind many science fiction games, so these are the activities you (hopefully) get rewarded for doing.

Some games allow players to use experience points to do things other than advance, making them even more of a currency. Crafting magic items, for example, might cost experience points, although having a new magic item or having a new ability from gaining a level are pretty much the same thing in the big picture. A game like Cypher allows players to spend experience points to do special actions or even reroll a die. Which really just allows one currency to do the job of two, as we get into the next type of metacurrency…

Hero Points/Luck Points/Karma Points

Many games, going back to the late 70s, gave players some kind of metacurrency that could be spent to change outcomes. Often, this is just simply the ability to reroll a die to get a more favorable result. Other games give out special points (or cards, or whatever) that grant a character a way to do something really special, often something impossible or very difficult using the rules as written. You inflict more damage, leap near impossible distances, shrug off what should be a lethal wound, and so on.

This kind of metacurrency has many different names depending on what game you’re playing and its effects range from the very straightforward to something that relies heavily on player creativity in the situation at hand. Virtually all of them, however, focus on the idea that PCs are luckier, more heroic, or more blessed than NPCs. It’s the idea that PCs are special, and that’s what makes them the main characters of the story being told by the group.

Often, these points are awarded for doing heroic acts or taking special actions, and typically allow (or force) the GM to make judgments on the acts of the PCs, meaning that the frequency this metacurrency is available can vary greatly from GM to GM. It’s difficult (but not impossible) to incorporate rules or at least guidelines for awarding them, which makes the metacurrency feel somewhat separate from the regular rules of the game found in the books.

Integrated Currencies

Some metacurrencies, however, are enmeshed directly into the game’s mechanics. In Cypher, the points in your stats are a currency that can be spent to power abilities or lower the difficulty of a task. Narratively, this portrays the idea that using abilities or putting in effort is taxing. The spent points, of course, can be restored with rest. Thus, the very act of playing the game means that you are managing resources and spending or conserving your metacurrencies.

Other games use cards rather than dice, and many of these involve each player having a hand of cards. A careful player will save their best cards for an important moment in the game, thus managing them like a resource.

While these are just two examples, they show that a metacurrency can be more than just a little bonus to let a player be lucky or heroic. While people sometimes feel as though metacurrencies are extraneous mechanics that sort of sit on top of the main rules of the game, they can be mechanics that are the very core of the game functions.

Again, calling upon a mechanic that we’ve all been familiar with since the earliest days of RPGs, consider D&D-style magic items. If your character has a magic potion that can only be used once or a magic ring that works three times per day, those uses are a metacurrency.

Or, many games will have limited uses built into character abilities (not the magic gear the character has, but the inherent talents and powers a character has on their sheet). Fourth edition D&D gave players abilities that were all based on how often you could use them—once each encounter, once each day, and so on. The whole game was driven by this metacurrency.

Why, even everyone’s favorite (or least favorite as the case may be) magic system—the Vancian system used in most of D&D’s history—turns spells into a metacurrency. And if your fantasy game doesn’t use Vancian magic, it was probably replaced with something involving spell points which are—yup, you guessed it—a metacurrency.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of including metacurrencies in a game’s design, but I think you’ll agree that it’s almost impossible not to have the concept in some form in practically any game.

Also, we’re updating Numenera to the new Cypher rules and adding in cool new products. Check it out!