The Pros and Cons of Metacurrency

Last time, I wrote about metacurrencies and proposed a way of looking at them not so much as extraneous to the rules, but as a part of the rules that can be a resource to manage (spending, conserving, restoring, etc.). In other words, stressing the “currency” part more than the “meta.” I think the term metacurrency initially found use to describe what was absolutely an extraneous addition. It was a house rule or an optional rule layered atop existing rules—specifically, D&D. In my own D&D games of bygone days, I had a house rule involving Hero Points that you’d get for doing something heroic, and you could spend them to break the standard rules and do something really over-the-top. It always felt like an add-on, because it was.

But today many games employ metacurrency systems in their rules that don’t feel like last-minute additions or house rules at all. They’re an integral part of the main rules.

So let’s take a look at them from a design perspective.

The Good

Metacurrencies offer a lot of interesting options. More specifically, they offer players interesting options, and that’s often a good thing.

Metacurrencies usually give a player more to consider than just rolling the die. Each character in a game that uses them has more options when the GM asks, “What do you do?” And they give players something to think about when the GM asks one of the other players the same question. This is true if it’s a special system that allows a character some limited ability to do something outside the standard rules or if it’s as simple as thinking about how low their health is, and contemplating running away the next chance they get.

They also often give a player more agency over what happens to their character. In the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG from TSR, characters had “karma” that served as experience points but also allowed them to perform over-the-top comic book-style actions. Karma points gave players the way to play their character in the way they wanted to play them. In Cypher, using Effort allows you to decide how important a task is to your character. Your character’s priorities and desires in a given moment are as important as your skills.

This sort of mechanic can give the players an opportunity to escape what can sometimes feel like the tyranny of the dice. Whether spending the metacurrency allows you to reroll the die, or allows you to modify your chance of success, it gives you a way to do more than just live with a string of unlucky die rolls on a bad evening.

But that kind of interaction with the rules is more than just keeping players from being disappointed by failure. Almost every game is simulating or recreating a particular kind of fiction (grim and gritty fantasy, heroic space opera, etc.), and allowing the player to nudge the mechanics a bit gives them the ability to better reflect that fiction. We’ve all seen the situation where the massively muscled fighter can’t open the door because the player rolled badly, and then the emaciated slip of a mage steps forward and flings the door open with an extraordinary roll. Metacurrencies are a good way to give people the tools to avoid (or reduce) those moments which just feel “wrong.” It’s much less about making sure the PCs always succeed and more about keeping the game moving in a direction that the group consensus has determined the game should go.

The Bad

As a fan of metacurrencies, I don’t think there’s a lot bad about them, assuming they’re not overused. Players don’t need to think of multiple kinds of resources to manage for long before they become overwhelmed, so moderation is the key. Personally, however, I’ve never seen this problem truly arise in an RPG. I have seen it happen in various “big box” board games with a wide variety of counters and chits and trackers and meeples and whatnot. But that’s not the topic at hand.

In most games that rely heavily on metacurrency, a player might have to handle one governing their physical stamina/health and another for their mental willpower/stress, but these are usually very similar mechanics or even consolidated in some games. On top of that, the same game might have a currency for character advancement and maybe one other for luck, heroism, special maneuvers, or similar. That’s a lot, but it’s not egregious. Very typically, a system like this wouldn’t allow these to interact overmuch. For example, while I’m worried about how few hit points I have left, I’m probably not thinking about experience points.

There’s also the consolidation I mentioned. When working on The Magnus Archives RPG, I wanted to include a mechanic that reflected the amount of stress a character was under as they dealt with horrific events and tense situations. To reduce the cognitive load on the player, however, I combined this with most of the physical damage a character might sustain. Stress, then, represents not just mental “damage” but also all the worrying little cuts, bruises, and scrapes a character might suffer. This, in turn, allowed me the room to reflect the effects of truly serious injuries (the kind of thing that would send someone to the hospital) in a very straightforward manner that makes the game quite deadly—further heightening the feeling of real danger.

Probably the major objection to the use of metacurrencies is that they can feel “gamey” to some. In other words, they present an unwanted reminder that the player is playing a game and not actually a character in a fantastic story, which is the core of playing an RPG to many. While I’m sympathetic to the immersion-breaking nature of this mechanic, I struggle to find any meaningful distinction between metacurrencies and other game mechanics with this objection. If spending points to perform some amazing maneuver breaks immersion, doesn’t rolling dice and adding your stat bonus?

When I was quite young, I was entirely enamored by the idea of players playing their characters without being distracted by mechanics—any mechanics. In a D&D game we played, I had everyone’s character sheet in front of me, the DM. I tracked everyone’s hit points, made all the die rolls, checked everyone’s stats, and so on. The players just had their “backstory” on the sheet in front of them and notes about their personality and appearance. If a character attacked a foe, they described exactly what they did, and I replied with a description of their success or failure.

If you think that sounds awful, well, you’d be right. It was terrible and not fun at all. I don’t think we got through a whole session doing things that way, because rolling dice and keeping track of your hit points and so forth is fun. It’s the G part of RPG. Mechanics of any kind—metacurrency or otherwise—might break immersion somewhat, but it’s a price worth paying. In fact, I might go so far as to say that for many people, pretending you’re someone else in a world not your own is so difficult that game mechanics actually enable immersion more than they distract from it. In part, this comes from the mechanics helping to create the shared imaginary space needed to play the game as a group.

Ironically, when you see someone playing an RPG in a movie or show—like the infamous Community D&D episode—it appears to kind of work like what I tried to create. It looks and sounds better when you watch because the players don’t use game jargon when they state what action their character takes. They are always looking at each other and never at their character sheets. In actual gameplay, though, the naïveté of attempting such a thing makes me think of a young couple in love for the first time who want to spend every second together and focus only on each other and their love. It all sounds very romantic to someone experiencing love for the first time, but in truth, it quickly becomes an impractical disaster.

Metacurrencies come in many forms and have a lot of different uses. They’re particularly good at providing player agency and aiding in genre simulation. Conversely, not having a metacurrency that allows players to affect absolute power of the dice dictates a chosen path for the game as well. Strictly following the results of the dice will send the game in a specific direction—one with the potential for amazing good fortune or complete disaster. But it should be a conscious choice to achieve that kind of gameplay and not because a metacurrency mechanic is too complicated or too intrusive. Because they certainly do not have to be either.