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

[Travis James Hall]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com 
> [mailto:torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com] On Behalf Of 
> Benjamin Grant
> Sent: Thursday, 12 March 2009 6:35 AM
> To: torg at justintimeadventures.com
> Subject: [Torg] Any ever thought of or tried 
> reversing/altering Torg'sMetapower vs Advancement struggle?
> 
> 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.

Actually, in Torg (as written) Possibilities do not have a metapower use.
Spending a Possibility involves exerting one's will and expending
Possibility Energy in order to directly affect reality itself. Characters
don't "soak damage", they choose to live in a universe in which some or all
of the damage was never inflicted. Characters aren't just granted a reroll
by a player on the other side of the fourth wall, they choose to live in a
universe in which their attempt (to do whatever) was more successful. The
use of Possibilities in this manner is written into the game world itself,
and characters are aware of the choices they make to spend Possibilities.

> 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.

There's another view, in addition to the two you have put forward. There's
the view that achieving an objective only through the use of maximum
resources is not that great a success; that overcoming a challenge without
expending everything you have.

Think of it this way... You're managing a new project at your place of work.
The project is expected to bring in gross revenue of $1,000,000. You have a
budget of $900,000 to make it happen, but due to overheads if you spend your
entire budget, the profit margin will be razor-thin. Do you think your boss
is going to be happy if you spend the entire budget to just barely make the
expected gross? If you have a choice between spending the $900k to barely
make the $1m, or spending only $500k to bring in $950k, which option do you
think is the more successful? Do you aim to spend the entire budget just
because you have it? (And assume you aren't working for an organisation that
slashes budgets in the next period on the basis that if you didn't spend it,
they allocated too much.)

Sure, there are cases in which you'd rather push the gross revenue out as
far as you can - such as when such is expected to build a business and lead
to an increased revenue stream later without much additional expenditure -
but on the basis of those numbers alone, I wouldn't call spending the entire
budget a success. Success would be finding ways to achieve business
objectives while conserving the budget.

Likewise, in Torg, I regard the character who achieves his objectives - take
down the bad guy, retrieve the MacGuffin, whatever - without spending
Possibilities as being more successful than the character who achieves the
same objectives by burning all his Possibilities.

And success has very little to do with how high the numbers you rolled on
the dice were. That's just a means to an end. Success is about what you
actual achieved. In many scenarios, in fact, I say that if you wind up
rolling dice at all, you've already failed.

> I am very curious to hear people thoughts on the topic

Eh. There's games out there that implement both of your proposals. (Though,
more commonly, games that base advancement on skill use during play tie the
advancement to successful skill use, rather than what you spend points on in
hopes of achieving success. That is, you'd get a checkmark when you achieve
a certain result or better, and spending a Possibility just gives much
better chances of doing that. If you still fail, you'd get nothing.) You'd
be best off reading up on those games to see how the systems affect the
dynamics of play. Why just speculate here when you can learn something
elsewhere and bring it into your game.

Travis Hall