[Torg] metapower vs advancement, reconsolidation

[Travis James Hall]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com 
> [mailto:torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com] On Behalf Of 
> Scott Schultz
> Sent: Friday, 13 March 2009 3:10 AM
> To: torg at justintimeadventures.com
> Subject: Re: [Torg] metapower vs advancement, reconsolidation
> 
> "Fate points" are more problematic. There is no "currency 
> sink" for "fate points". They either have to become really 
> scarce in order to preserve their value, or the GM has to 
> deliberately engineer his adventure so that it REQUIRES the 
> use of lots of "fate points" to bring it to a successful 
> conclusion. This runs the risk that players will feel 
> manipulated into spending their currency when they would 
> rather save it. It also means that the GM is forced to 
> analyze every adventure from the standpoint of "how can I 
> suck some "fate points" out of the players?"
> 
> Stingy players will conceivably save all of their "fate 
> points" forever until they have a giant pool of them waiting 
> for the one adventure where they blow them all turning some 
> really challenging adventure into a cake walk.

There are ways around that. The most obvious is to simply have a rule that
says that fate points do not accumulate - that each player gets (say) 3 at
the start of each act, and any not spent are lost at the end of the act.

Which is to say, if you don't want fate points to accumulate, they don't
accumulate. It's another case of just deciding what you want to do and doing
it. There's no great difficulty to implementation here.

Another alternative would be to say that fate points do accumulate across
acts, but not across adventures. That gives players the option of saving for
a big climax at the end of the adventure. Or that fate points accumulate up
to a certain maximum, and the character can never have more than that
maximum (which could even be another stat that can be bought up with
advancement points). Or that half of all the leftover fate points are lost
at the end of the adventure - so players can slowly accumulate them until
they have a big pool, but there will be a natural limit to the size of that
pool and they get more value out of using them within one adventure. (That
last is a slightly trickier implementation than the preceding.)

Travis Hall