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

[Kansas Jim]

Benjamin Grant wrote:

[...]

> 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.

Not that Torg is the only RPG which uses such a mechanic. A lot of older 
RPGs which incorporated some kind of "hero point" system also had those 
points doing double-duty as your experience. It doesn't seem to be as
common these days though.

[...]

> 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.

If it's the only way to improve a skill then as you later say it's
probably going to lead to some bizarre point expenditures. But if it
were in addition to the usual way it doesn't seem too outlandish to me.
I would probably not go with a one-to-one cost ratio though, maybe it
would take twice as many checkmarks as it would cost to raise the skill
out of play, something like that. (As I recall, either Shatterzone or
Masterbook did have a rule saying that you could buy a skill up during
play but it was at twice the normal cost. This would be kind of like
that, just spreading it out over time instead of doing it all at once.)

> 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.

Shatterzone and Masterbook took this approach, giving out Life Points
for the metapower uses and Skill Points as experience. It's the approach
I see more often these days in games with "hero point" mechanics, though
there's a wide variation in how different games approach it.

-- 
Kansas Jim, Torg guru (ksjim (at) sdc (dot) org)
Torg website: http://www.sdc.org/~ksjim/index.html