[Torg] Any ever thought of or tried reversing/altering Torg's Metapower vs Advancement struggle?

[Benjamin Grant]

In Torg, one is awarded possibilities.  You can do two broad categories of
things with these resources:  

1.       Use them to influence outcomes in the moments, one time per use.
For example:

.         Gain a reroll

.         Block an opponent's reroll

.         Soak Damage

.         Bring up a Reality Bubble (if you use them)

2.       Save them to increase you skills and advance the overall power of
your character for a permanent increase every time from the skill purchase
on.

.         For example, raise your Dodge from a +1 to a +7 over the course of
several Acts and/or Arcs.

 

The first category I call Metapower - the ability of the player to change or
affect through out-of-character or -game choices the results of in-game
situations.  The second category I call basic Advancement - common to just
about all RPGs.

 

Torg has a single award point - the Possibility that can be spent for either
of those two options.  If you make a terrible roll in a situation where
success is important to you (the player, not the character) you can choose
to expend this resource point for a reroll.  On the other hand, if you are
saving up these points to raise your Dodge, for example, you may think
twice.

 

Ultimately in Torg, choosing Metapower means sacrificing Advancement, and
vice versa.  My friend hates that.  He hates that if you embrace the
situation, and spend several possibilities over the course of a scene, while
you most likely succeed resolve the scene favorably - or at least more
favorably than if you hadn't - you do so at the expense of character
advancement.  In effect, he argues that you are *penalized* for success.

 

Now I can see the opposite point of view, the one that I suppose Torg was
founded on.  That if you choose to husband your possibilities in order to
prioritize advancement later on, that you reap a less successful present,
and that lack of success creates drama through potential temporary failure,
loss, and hardship.  That by enduring this, you earn the advancement you
gain.  This incentivizes potentially accepting story results that normally
you might not, in order to ultimately gain in the long haul.  I get that.

 

Neither Torg's approach nor my friend's reaction are right or wrong, it all
is a question of aesthetics.  However, it is intriguing to me to play
devil's advocate and imagine a different way of doing it.  Two spring to
mind.

 

The first is an opposite system to Torg's - where instead of choosing to
gain metapower now or advancement later, you get both in the same action.
One simple way to arrange it is that for every possibility spent on a
reroll, you get one checkmark in the skill the roll was for.  Get enough
checkmarks in a skill (say 4 checkmarks to go from a +3 to a +4) and it
simply goes up.  This way it precisely the actions you value and in which
you invest in the moment that automatically advance.

 

The potential pitfall to that scenario is that this method may wind up
incentivizing strange kamikaze-like behavior of people jumping in more or
less recklessly in order to blow through possibilities on the skills they
want to raise.  Still, perhaps that could be addressed somehow.  It
certainly has no more (or fewer) warts than the existing method.

 

Secondly, you could simply separate the possibilities themselves from one
"bucket" into two:  Possibilities that can be spent for all metapower uses
as normal, but cannot be used to raise skills or attributes, and Skill
Points that can *only* be spent on skills and attributes.  One way off the
top of my head to do this could be to award Possibilities as session/Act
awards, but to awards skill points as Arc awards.  Or something similar.

 

I am very curious to hear people thoughts on the topic - so long as the
people are open minded and not just pumping out the party line that "if it
ain't broke, don't fix it".  I am NOT calling for a change to anything, I am
simply curious as to the implications and effects of these lines of thought.
Any else have some reactions, ideas, or commentary to share?  Anyone else
already implementing a solution to this issue different from the standard
Torg conflationary and conflicting one?

 

-Benn Grant

eFix Computer Consulting

 <mailto:benn at 4eFix.com> benn at 4eFix.com

603.283.6601

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.justintimeadventures.com/pipermail/torg/attachments/20090311/1d7a9ce6/attachment.html>