You’ve been roleplaying a diplomat and really getting into character. You want eternal enemies to put aside their differences, but the dice just won’t deliver. If only your good roleplaying could pay off with some extra oomph to your roll.
Fortunately, many systems have such a mechanic. Call them Drama Dice, artha, or Kiai points, these meta currencies all serve a similar function: incentivizing players to roleplay in a certain way. Players buy in through character actions and then get currency they can use to influence the story. Of course, each system has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it’s important to know them when deciding which is right for you.
1. Drama Dice, 7th Sea
In this high-seas adventure, if you want bonus dice, you’ve got to quip like a black-hearted pirate. Drama Dice are earned whenever a character does something to reinforce swashbuckling themes. This includes witty repartee, swinging from chandeliers, leaping to the defense of your true love, and so on. Mechanically, Drama Dice can be spent without limit on any roll, before or after the dice fall.
Pros
Drama Dice are simple and straightforward. If your character wants to accomplish something difficult, spend them until you get there. You don’t have to take anything else into account. This is a big help when trying to create an environment where the heroes can reliably accomplish great feats, but only when it’s dramatically convenient.
Cons
For all their simplicity, Drama Dice are not terribly functional. Because they’re awarded in play, they tend to be granted far more often for comedy than for drama. When a PC does something dramatic, it reinforces the narrative flow. No one thinks to hand out a Drama Die because everyone’s too busy waiting to see what happens next. When a PC does something funny, everyone stops to laugh, and giving a Drama Die seems obvious.
Perhaps worse, the game encourages you to hoard Drama Dice. Any you don’t spend become experience points, which are otherwise few and far between. This has the bizarre effect of characters who perform fewer impressive feats and advance more quickly.
2. Fate Points, Fate
The aptly named fate points are earned and spent by playing to a character’s aspects. Aspects are short, descriptive phrases that say something important about the character. A PC with super speed might have an aspect like “Fastest Mammal Alive,” for example. When an aspect is beneficial, fate points are spent on it to generate bonuses. When they are detrimental, players receive fate points for playing them up.
Fate points are baked into every aspect of the Fate system. Where Drama Dice compliment core abilities, fate points are themselves the core ability. While Fate characters still have a variety of skills, they aren’t nearly as important as the number of aspects and fate points you can bring to bear.
Pros
Because fate points are so important, they really encourage playing to your character’s aspects. Since aspects are central to who your character is, this becomes a positive feedback loop. Players get super into character because doing so is hugely beneficial. Aspects are very specific, leading to distinct and memorable characters. For players who enjoy control over their rolls, the importance of fate points over the actual dice results means fewer nasty surprises.
Cons
Because fate points have so much influence over dice rolls, it’s rare for characters to fail important tasks. Often, it’s rare for characters to fail any task at all, especially in one-shots. While some players may enjoy this, eventually rolling feels like a pointless exercise.
In addition, nearly every mechanic in the game works the same way, allowing you to spend fate points for a bonus to the dice. While this is certainly simple, it gets repetitive fast. For example, locations will often have aspects that players can spend fate points to activate. A spooky warehouse might have Dark as an aspect, allowing players to spend fate points for a bonus on stealth. Except, characters who want to use stealth will already have several aspects that give the same ability, so what’s the point?
3. Artha, Burning Wheel
The previous systems were both abstract and lighthearted; Burning Wheel is anything but. In this gritty fantasy game, artha is earned after each session based on how well a player stuck to their beliefs. Sometimes, even more artha is earned by playing against a belief. In fiction, this is when a character’s journey makes them reconsider what they once held to be true, as with Han Solo coming back to help Luke at the Death Star. That was in direct violation of Han’s “Fighting the Empire is pointless” belief.
Pros
Because artha is awarded at the end of the session instead of in the middle of play, it’s easier to make sure everyone gets their fair share. Since you don’t have to stop the action, people whose roleplaying kept the story moving are more likely to be recognized. There’s also little ambiguity on when to award artha, as the conditions for doing so are very specific.
Burning Wheel has multiple types of artha. Fate* is the easiest to get and the least powerful. All you need for fate is to generally stay in character. Next comes persona, which you get for really deep roleplaying: epic revenge speeches and the like. Finally, deeds is earned for the completion of campaign-scale goals, like defeating the six-fingered man who killed your father. Having different types of artha means players who really put their all into roleplaying can reap greater rewards.
Artha also appears in Torchbearer,* where it’s part of a neat leveling system. While a character’s skills and attributes still level up based on how often they’re used, your class level is determined by how much artha you’ve spent. This encourages players to roleplay, thus earning artha, then spend that artha to do cool stuff. It combats the temptation to hoard that’s so common in other meta currencies.
Cons
Despite the leveling features of Torchbearer, characters often accumulate more fate artha than they can spend. While hardly useless, fate is situationally specific. If the correct situations do not arise, then there’s no opportunity to spend it. Deeds artha also presents a problem: it’s near impossible to get and so powerful as to be potentially game-breaking. It’s telling that later games from Burning Wheel HQ, such as Mouse Guard, dropped deeds entirely.
Artha is also one of the few meta currencies that is mostly spent before a roll is made. While some players enjoy the added risk, others will get frustrated if they spend a bunch of points on an important roll, only to fail anyway.
4. Fan Mail, Primetime Adventures
While Fate’s meta currency is central to playing the game, Primetime Adventures’ (PTA) is even more critical. Besides fan mail, characters have a maximum of three or four other stats. The rules for earning fan mail are even looser than those for earning Drama Dice in 7th Sea. It boils down to “Did one of the other players like what you were doing?” In conflicts, fan mail is a player’s primary source of power, a larger factor than any other ability.
Pros
Like most of PTA, fan mail lets you tell your story and doesn’t get in the way. It’s simple to hand out and simple to spend. Because PTA is played in discrete scenes, it’s easy to award fan mail after the exciting action has passed. This avoids the problem of more currency going to players whose antics interrupt the narrative. Fan mail also strikes a good balance between guaranteeing success on a roll* and letting players fail despite spending lots of resources. Because players always know how difficult a roll is going to be, they can decide for themselves if it’s worth risking precious fan mail.
Cons
If your group is at all generous, fan mail will accumulate faster than most players can spend it. While this isn’t the worst thing in the world, it does feel a little silly to reach the finale session and then blow through every challenge on a tidal wave of fan mail. The other major problem is that according to the base rules, the GM can’t give out fan mail, only players can. This is a serious issue because the GM is often the one paying closest attention to each player as they roleplay.
5. Aiki and Kiai Points, Tenra Bansho Zero
Tenra Bansho Zero (TBZ) has by far the most involved meta currency system I have ever seen. Not content with just one, it has both Aiki and Kiai points. First, a player gets Aiki for roleplaying in line with their character’s Fates,* plot-relevant chunks of backstory. Once a player has Aiki points, they convert those points into Kiai during breaks in the action. Then they spend Kiai to perform incredible, high-action anime feats.
Pros
For all their complexity, Aiki and Kiai points make TBZ feel like the over-the-top, dramatic action-fest it’s supposed to be. Your character is fairly capable on their own, but with the help of Kiai, they can tear the earth asunder and cross blades with gods. Because TBZ is by default a game of one-shots, there’s no incentive to hoard Kiai. It won’t do you any good next week, so be sure to spend it all now in a galaxy-shattering final attack.
Cons
Did I mention TBZ was complicated? Converting Aiki points to Kiai points is a headache, and then figuring out how many Kiai points you can afford to spend is an even bigger headache. It’s not impossible, but it’ll put a serious damper on the action. This is a system to be attempted with only the most dedicated of players.
Far more meta currency systems exist than we have time for today, but these five are a fairly representative sample. Meta currency is often a game’s heart and soul, so it’s important to know which one you want before choosing a game. You might even find you prefer games like Pathfinder or Call of Cthulhu, which have no meta currencies at all.
Treat your friends to an evening of ritual murder – in a fictional RPG scenario, of course. Uncover your lost memories and escape a supernatural menace in our one-shot adventure, The Voyage.
As Fate Accelerated has become my favorite default system, due to its incredible versatility and the ease of adapting the rules to any scenario, I have a few points with regard to Fate points.
Fate, more than most games, is about opportunity cost as opposed to outright failure. It is always possible to push and get the sucess that you want, at some cost. Fate points are a key part of this. If players have too many Fate points, it is because they are not facing a sufficiently high difficulty. Opposing main characters should often have around a +2 advantage over the players overall.
Another factor that is missed here is the importance of the Create Advantage action, in which you create an aspect with a free invocation(which allows the player to spend it without a Fate point). This is also useful as a means of interacting with aspects that are tied to things like the environment. If the environment is Dark, you can use Create Advantage to take advantage of that fact. It also serves as a way to take advantage of an enemy’s weaknesses, by hitting on his skills that are weakest.
A final gameplay factor is that aspects don’t just represent a passive dice bonus, they also represent a narrative fact and narrative permission. If a character is ‘Handcuffed to a Desk’, they can’t chase after the hero, regardless of dice rolls, until they remove that aspect. If the environment is ‘Dark’ it means that the thief can use a Stealth skill to cross the room without being noticed. Without that aspect, it would be impossible. This is also true with regard to character aspects. Because I am a Jedi Master, I can sense that something is coming without paying anything.
When it comes down to it, Fate points are a tool of narrative control and Fate is about modeling fiction as opposed to any sort of reality. If we think about a room being dark in a work of fiction, it allows things to happen but doesn’t have a focus in the story (what would be a mechanical effect in an RPG). The other issue comes down to the idea of try-fail cycles. In almost all fiction, the here fails before eventually succeeding. Fate points handle this quite nicely by rewarding failure, allowing the hero to return and be effective later. Look at Luke Skywalker’s consistent failures in The Empire Strikes Back and his runaway sucess in Return of the Jedi. That was a player smart enough to concede throughout the losing fights so that he could win when it mattered.
Yeah my GM has a simple home brew fix for 7th sea among others.
Any spent drama dice turns into extra xp. So the player is always encouraged to be as awesome as possible.
Our GM also encourages more than just comedy scenarios as well. Sometimes by playing into the arcana virtues and vices.
Which makes me wonder what do you guys think of the 7th Sea 2nd edition Kickstarter rules so far?
Pretty sure I’m the only one at Mythcreants who’s involved with the kickstarter. I have mad nostalgia for 7th Sea, and I gave them money because I really want 2nd Edition to be good.
Unfortunately, the quick-start rules they released are not good. For one thing, they’re badly edited. It’s hard to figure out what several sections mean because they’re super unclear. For example, in 1st Ed, Dramatic Wounds and Flesh Wounds were nicely differentiated. In 2nd Ed, they’ve changed it to Dramatic Wounds and Wounds. So now any time the game refers to “Wounds,” it’s not clear if it means all wounds or just the non-dramatic type.
There’s a fare amount of that. Maybe when they first released the rules, there wasn’t money for an editor, but then they updated it after their kickstarter had been wildly successful. They could have afforded someone to help them edit for clarity.
The rules themselves also leave me worried, editing aside. Just off the top of my head, they have both Sailor and Profession: Sailor? Why? It’s also super unclear how conflicts are supposed to work. The rules talk about using successes that don’t go toward achieving your primary goal (usually taking out the bad guy) for other things, like jumping out a window. Which I think means I can use my Firearms skill to jump out a window?
I still hope the game is good, but I’m worried.
An interesting metacurrency-based game I know of is Golden Sky Stories (Yuuyake Koyake in the original Japanese); one curious thing it has is that you never roll dice: you succeed or fail by comparing your relevant attribute with the target difficulty, and if it’s too low you then choose whether to fail or to spend meta to increase your attribute and succeed.
In fact the game has not one but three meta currencies: “Feelings” are the points used in the attribute checks I mentioned, “Wonder” fuels your magic powers, and “Dreams” (“Kudos” if you translate it more literally) are used to increase your relationship values with other characters, your “Connections”.
You get Feelings and Wonder at the beginning of each scene based on said Connections, and Kudos are to be awarded freely by all the players: whenever any player (GM included) thinks that something another player (GM included) has done or said is cool, nice, neat, awesome, smart, well played or literally anything else she likes, she gives that player one point (an action may be rewarded by any number of players, for lots of kudos).