The discussion of traps reminds me I did a whole set of posts on this, notably here:
I think Numenera also has the “spend or advance” mechanic. What I’d personally prefer (in systems with fairly low numbers of XP, not thousands!) is a “spend to advance” mechanic. You earn the XP by doing something, you spend it to enhance a roll, and only then do you get to improve your abilities. I said if I ever ran Numenera again I was doing that.
That is a really cool idea.
As a player, I try to only advance those abilities I actually used, though sometimes the game system or game culture makes this impractical.
I don’t know whether it’s humans in general or RPGers in particular, but the only reliable way I’ve found to get players to use up resources is to make it clear that anything left over is going to be taken away at the end of the (session, adventure, whatever). So I definitely approve of this as a way to get players to spend points to do flashy things.
I am currently, belatedly, playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker (the CRPG) and have something in the region of two thousand unused potions.
I have also just sent a transcript of this episode to the IRTD Masters for approval.
By “use up” do you mean “spend it all so there is none left”? Or just mean “use a fair amount of it”.
Because one way to get players to spend story points like they are going out of fashion is to give them tons of them and let them know there were be another ton arriving at the start of the next game. Dr Who is like that. You’ve got 12 points, they are versatile and quite powerful… and they’ll all be refreshed at the start of next scenario. And you may get a few back during today’s scenario. So players spend them like water.
People hoard them when they are a scarce resource. People also hoard them when the points aren’t that powerful. If they are going to need 3 points to significantly improve their chance of hitting and they only got 5 to start with, they’ll save them for the End Level Boss Fight.
By “use up” I mean “use at all, unless forced to”. I’d call Doctor Who’s approach of “at the start of the next scenario you’ll be back at 12” functionally the same as “anything left over will be taken away from you at the end of this scenario”: there’s explicitly no benefit in keeping some back.
Ah! Expansionary monetary policy.
Similarly with FATE. When I played Spirit of the Century the Refresh was ten Fate points, so we spent them like water. I think the problem that the designers perceive there was that with a Refresh of ten, players hardly need to accept Compels. So they lowered the Refresh in Fate Core to make players work for their wages.
You remind me of an anecdote from one of my monetary economics textbooks about a baby-sitting that didn’t work until one of the members (who was an economist) persuaded the members to issue themselves three free vouchers per household.
Sorry not getting this. A baby-sitting pool of volunteer members? A baby-sitting business?
Sorry, I got confused while I was composing — the way Safari on the iPad rations screen space when I post here didn’t help.
It was a co-operative, a circle of couples who planned to babysit each others’ children on evenings when they weren’t going out anyway so as to get free child-minding when they wanted to go out themselves.
But because they were concerned with fair shares and worried about free-riders they set up a system in which each family only got to enjoy as much free child-minding as it provided.
In my experience, “You’ll get another batch next session” doesn’t work that well. It’s better than “You have to earn more,” but most of my players just don’t like to use expendable resources except in dire emergencies even if they’re going to refresh next session. It’s like by their own personal metrics they’re doing better if they end the session with 12 story points than if they end it with 3.
I always felt that it was more elegant to complete a James Bond 007 adventure without spending Hero Points. Though once when a GM let me have a motorboat that he ought to have charged me a Hero Point for I spent one to make the boat red.
Ah, yes, several systems have “you can spend a (story point) for a direct benefit on this particular roll, or to narrate an element in the scene”. I want to encourage my players to flesh out my descriptions, so I never charge for the latter – I mean, I’m going to have a veto as I always do, but I don’t want “is there a chandelier I can swing on” (the answer is canonically “yes”) to be traded off against “can I not fumble that roll please”.
In this context, “narrate” is ambiguous. Describing scenery is not the same as having a friendly NPC show up, for example. If the player wants to do add something to the scene that will give them tangible plot benefit (and perhaps derail part of the villain’s plan) , rather than just pulling off a cool maneuver, then charging a story point is appropriate.
I see what you’re getting at, but I don’t think I feel that tension: a thing that is fun and sensibly in-context is a thing that can happen, whether it gives the PCs a tangible immediate benefit or just lets them show off a bit.