"Story Points" in DnD have a HUGE problem

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In my experience, I feel like "meta-currencies" like luck/inspiration/hero points more often protect the fiction of the characters being competent when the swinginess of the dice makes them look like idiots. This isn't an inherently bad thing. It helps smooth the expectation gaps b/t what the players think they should be (e.g. powerful warrior of the light) and what the mechanics make them feel ("I'm a whiffing chump who can't hold onto his sword").

This whole discussion seems bogged down in slippery definitions, and depending on how the "metacurrency" is defined or implemented, I could see it being at any number of places along a spectrum of "gaming" and "roleplaying". I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that a 1/day/combat/rest martial or physical ability is a metacurrency though. You can say that it's an abstraction of exhaustion, but the concept that you could disarm someone once until the next sunrise is pretty narratively flimsy. I'm also exclusively a GM though, so I don't have as varied a perspective on the "experience" of the game from different angles or stances

The most obvious form of meta currency in most RPGs is hit points. They absolutely are not in any way meant to track the human experience of getting injured. It's not even an abstraction of injury or stamina, it's a pure game balancing mechanic because Arneson's characters died too fast.

Love your content but this video was kind of a miss for me. I also disagree with most of the points in the Reddit post, but I really don't think metacurrencies (or story points) are as serious of a problem as you make them out to be. It seems a bit restrictive to push towards the idea that immersion comes necessarily from eliminating the "out of the world" mentality. Immersion can come from actually simulating a character ("playing a role", as you put it) and also from making decisions from within the game system that influence your character in the game world. We are talking about immersion in a role playing game, not in a simulation exercise after all. Also when you say that that the actor and author stance are actually separate from the director stance because the latter is not focusing on the character, that just seems... Wrong? You can easily have games where players are playing different characters and the game system allows each player to assume a director stance, but they will be using said stance to play the role of their character. Blades in the Dark flashbacks come to mind as an example (which are also tied to the stress metacurrency, funnily enough). I feel like, even though you do mention in the video that this is your opinion and how you like to play, the general message that gets put out there is "meta-currencies vs real unproblematic roleplaying" - which is kind of instigating like the original post, just in the other direction. It just struck me in a bit of weird way.

I was playing Fallout 2d20. My character is useless in combat but he has a Super Mutant companion. I spent a Luck point to add a detail to the scene (with the GM's permisson of course): that there is a heavy metal shelf in the garage that can be toppled on the enemies, which wasn't immersion-breaking for me really. Then I told the Super Mutant to drop the shelf on the enemies but then both he and another PC rolled a complication each. So the Super Mutant dropped the shelf on the other PC and then he himself slipped and hit his head on the fallen shelf. That was honestly more fun and more memorable than "I move and then I attack." In my opinion, there is no correlation between "metacurrencies" and "immersion". I think it depends mostly on the system and also on the group.

I think "heroic" is another term that has a very fuzzy definition. Heroic as courageous is a valid definition, but it is not what people are referring to when they talk about "heroic characters." They are talking about larger than life characters, made from tougher stuff than most people. You can feel a player character that isn't inherently more powerful than any commoner creates more meaningful stories, but that style is not what they are talking about. They want the power fantasy.

I've got a bunch of thoughts here. The first one is this: every rpg ability that says it can only be done once a day, or X number of times per rest, that isn't a supernatural ability, is a kind of special meta currency where it doesn't make sense for your character to know what the limit is, but most people probably collapse that into character knowledge with a hand wave.

"Hit Points" are meta-currency in original D&D and basically all versions & variants (OSR included) since. They represent "skill, luck, divine favor, fate" and so on. They don't really represent "health" in anything but the most abstract (and unrealistic) way. While you don't get to "spend" them directly to change other outcomes, they allow you to do things intentionally that should kill you but knowing you have enough hit points to "soak up the damage", like running through fire or a pool of acid. The real issue is whether the mechanic "feels real" vs "arbitrary". It's the nature of TTRPGs to go on adventures where, in the real world, odds of dying would be anywhere from 10% to 90% in many encounters, or on a daily or weekly basis. With those odds, nobody will last very long. Thus all RPGs have some mechanism that allows player characters to unrealistically defy the long term odds of survival. In D&D hit points serve this function as you go up in levels. At level 1 and maybe up to 2 or 3, you have so few hit points and may lose a couple characters before one survives to higher levels, which does help to make it feel less arbitrary and more dangerous. But any game with a "meta currency" can do this by giving little or none of it to starting characters.

I’m confused and intrigued. By the given definition, hit points (HP) are a meta currency. I understand that they connect to the in-fiction world, but nothing in the world accounts for why a person with 10hp is more affected by a 5 damage sacred flame than a person with 150hp. And for those that say “HP isn’t a currency” I say players make different decisions when they have single digit HP versus double digit HP. It’s a currency and people risk it rather than spend it outright. And that also varies depending on how much damage (another abstraction) they expect to receive for the risk.

"You don't really spend [xp]." Going to disagree with you there, Ben. I don't personally accept that just because (in some or "many" games, as you put it) the advancement options are limited this means that you aren't spending a metacurrency on them. If I went to a restaurant that had only one thing on the menu, it wouldn't much change the fact that I was expending a resource (I.E. money, in this case) on that hotdog. I think, in my opinion, we'll have to allow that there's simply no getting around experience points as a metacurrency. They do abstract something tangible in the real world--this gradual improvement of someone in what they're doing--but they fail your second criteria, which is that the character cannot be aware of them. Sure, they're aware of the improvement, that's the advancement itself, but the points along the way? Harder to argue, I think.

metacurrencies are no more immersion breaking than the act of rolling a dice itself

I think that the other issue that a lot of the discussion focuses on what is meant by "metacurrencies" but not necessarily meant by "immersion." For example, I don't mind metacurrencies so long as I am immersed in the gameplay and playing the game as my character. There are games that lack metacurrencies, but that doesn't mean that I am immersed in the gameplay of those games. There may be long turns, decision paralysis, or play processes that have nothing to do with metacurrencies which will take me out of character play immersion.

I really like Luck, particularly as used in DCC. It gives you a degree of "meta" control, but has in world ramifications, and is a sort of magic system in its self.

I think the meta currencies that I’m attracted to, player wise, are the ones designed to mitigate bad luck, like the luck stat in Cyberpunk 2020 and Red. I recognize that obviously players should be doing everything they can to reduce the need for rolling, so they can stay immersed, but I also recognize that there are times when rolls are absolutely required, such as in combat. I think that a meta currency that exists to mitigate Player luck (I.E. terrible rolls on the dice) can be used to make PCs feel more competent and good at the things they’re supposed to be good at.

XP may not be a currency, but in Knave 2e XP has all the qualities Ben says he doesn't like. You get XP from treasure, and then when you level up your abilities get better. So if you get more gold, your abilities increase faster. If you succeed in all ways, but fail to get that gold, your abilities don't increase at all. This doesn't make any sense in the game world at all. Also, when you level up you are granted three points which you apply to three different abilities. It's a stretch to say this is not a meta-currency. But even if it's not a currency, it's completely meta. This mechanic is completely *dissociated*, to use Jason Alexander's terminology. It's interesting to me that Ben wrote the game this way, since he seems to dislike games with dissociated mechanics. He could have mitigated the dissociation in a simple way, by saying that leveling up can only happen at the end of a session. And maybe he could've found a good way to eliminate it entirely by connecting the ability increases to in-game actions. e.g. increase your intelligence when you do a lot of intelligence checks.

I think metacurrencies are neither "immersion-breaking", or "immersion-creating". Any mechanism or a rule can break immersion if it stops the game. For example, Luck Points from Shadowdark RPG are super easy to use, expecially if you are giving them out as tokens. Player just throws a token to the DM and rerolls the die. Does not take much time and it can create dramatic moment, for example, when player fails dramatically and uses it ro reroll. Whole table is watching and hoping that this time the dice will be with them. While I agree that many of the OSR philosophies mentioned in your videos like "fiction first", "engaging with the game world", "creative problem-solving", etc. are great and (from my observations) are big part of immersion in my games, I feel like in OSR community discussions about mechanisms breaking immersion are getting out of hand sometimes. To the point where anything that feels like a game is considered "immersion-breaking". Meta mechanisms can enhance immersion, depending on the player, group, game, mechanism itself, how it was implemented and many other factors, as immersion is very personal. Coming back to Shadowdark example, I would not say that using Luck feels like "being outside of the game-world". Never saw anybody suddenly losing interest because of that. In my experience it was the opposite. Players happy that they succeeded, narrate they success, sometimes describe what their character feels, or what made them unexpectedly succeed. Other examples of metacurrencies I saw enhancing immersion are momentum in Ironsworn or glitches in CY_BORG. I think roleplaying and gaming are not mutually exclusive, and mechanisms, no matter how meta, can enhance immersion, if they are well-implemented. The hobby is called Roleplaying Games, not Roleplaying after all.

I recently had a PC death in my PF2e game and so had a player introducing a new PC. The new character is a Ranger and is meant to be this sort of master huntress type character. During the session where the new PC was introduced, one of the other PCs suggested in RP that the two of them go hunting together for dinner that night. I could have made the Ranger player do a survival roll and then a combat with an animal, but instead I just asked the player to describe what his character was doing and basically sit in the GM chair for a couple of minutes. He described in vivid detail his character searching the woods, finding some hoof prints, and then how his character set a trap and ambushed a wild boar. I would wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that this player was somehow less immersed in his character simply because he was in "Director Stance". I think the opportunity to be temporarily the storyteller actually allowed him to feel far more immersed in his character. I think assigning value judgments to these stances misses that all of them are different forms of roleplaying.

I feel like it shouldn't take much imagination to abstract "disassociated" mechanics or "metacurrencies" into something that makes perfect sense to your characters. It's not activating a once per day reroll ability for the character, but instead pushing their limits and paying a cost of some kind to do so. Dragonbane seems to integrate this well with their push mechanic, but I don't think you need the permission of the game system to apply the same kind of logic. Inspiration in 5e can be abstracted to a character drawing on some emotional strength such as a loved family member or a desire for vengeance. Bennies in Savage Worlds can represent an abstract level of grit or toughness that more important characters can draw on to push their limits and survive when others perish. IDK, maybe that's just me. I also don't have an issue with abstracting hitpoints, and I appear to be in the minority on that.

I feel like the Deathbringer Dice in Professor DM’s “Deathbringer” can bridge the gap between associated and dissociated resources depending on how you use them. They come off as meta- “badass points”, sort of like those action movie points mentioned in the post, that you can spend on literally anything. However, if the GM rules that the DB dice can only be used for things that your character would be skilled in, then they become “skill points” that can be applied whenever you, the player, wants them to. In this way, the resource is still sort of known to the CHARACTER (they know they can dig deep and put out more ‘oomph’ in their area of expertise), while also being an external resource activated by the PLAYER.