Hello, everyone! The TBM Games team is hard at work on Rust Moon (which you can still make a late pledge for on Kickstarter!), and while working on the book for both Tales of the Valiant and D&D 5.24, I’ve been thinking about the differences between the two systems. Both being D&D 5e-derivatives, the systems have plenty of similarities, but I thought this would be an interesting article to discuss a key difference between the two, and it snowballed into a larger discussion about how a GM can better influence the overall tone of a TTRPG using the game system itself.

A popular metaphor for tabletop roleplaying games describes them as a movie with two independent producers – while a Game Master determines the genre, the players are the ones who determine the score. You might have built an elaborate heist scenario for your campaign, but the players are the ones choosing between the Pink Panther, Mission Impossible, and Benny Hill themes.

What if there were a way to gently guide your players to the tone you’d like to see? Introducing the best option short of bribing your players: Metacurrency!

What is a Metacurrency?

Metacurrency is an abstract resource that can be spent by players or game masters to shape what happens in a game, usually in spite of randomized outcomes. Depending on the game system, players can spend metacurrency to change situations in ways that wouldn’t be expressed by what their characters can do, like describing an element in the scene that their character can use to their advantage. You might’ve lost your sword in a fight deep in the dungeon, but maybe by spending metacurrency, you can find a rusty dagger among the discarded belongings on a skeleton in the next room. The bad guys might have a secure high-tech fortress, but spending metacurrency might mean that the low-ranking guard left his security terminal unlocked for you to use to open the gate for your allies to sneak in.

You might ask, if a TTRPG is all make-believe, then what isn’t a metacurrency? Why aren’t something like your character’s Hit Points a metacurrency? Unlike a character’s stats, metacurrencies are a resource given to the player, and often don’t represent anything quantifiable in the game’s narrative.

Rewards, Rubber Bands, Snowballs, and Budgets

There are a number of ways to grant metacurrencies to a player, depending on what the game system wants to emphasize. In the broadest strokes, these currencies are dealt out as rewards, used as rubber bands or snowballs to control the flow of the game, or offered as a budget.

Rewards are the simplest (but often the most poorly-defined) metacurrency for a game to work with – a GM gives them to you when they feel like it. Usually the intent is to reward roleplay. When a player acts in accordance with one of their characters’ personal flaws, in a way that may be against the player’s interests, the GM is encouraged to reward this behavior. Systems like Dungeons & Dragons 5.24’s “Heroic Inspiration” are designed to be such a reward for the DM to bestow upon a player (or for the players to bestow upon each other) at their discretion. Typically, Heroic Inspiration is granted by a Dungeon Master when a player character does something “particularly heroic […] or entertaining.” What something this subjective means, though, can vary wildly from game to game. A game designer can use metacurrency rewards to encourage a particular style of play within the system by specifying the conditions which earn a metacurrency reward. On the other hand, a player familiar with the system might abuse the reward system, acting against their interests in low-stakes moments to farm metacurrency rewards for later use.

Rubber bands are a common type of metacurrency that are designed to mitigate the players suffering from bad rolls of the dice. Often these types of metacurrency serve as consolation prizes for attempting something and failing, and offer you ways to avoid failure in the future, such as Tales of the Valiant’s “Luck.” When a player fails to hit with an attack roll or fails a saving throw on their turn, they gain 1 Luck. Luck can then be spent on later checks or rolls, each point being spent for a +1, or three points to reroll a d20. Much like Rewards, there are ways to game these systems, sometimes even more easily. Rubber Band metacurrencies encourage you to “try it anyway” if you’re not good at something.

Snowballs are designed to reward you for successful attempts. This type of metacurrency encourages you to find “easy wins” to build a reserve for later. These metacurrencies are designed to produce moments with bigger successes than you can normally achieve towards the “climax” of your game session. Modiphius’s 2d20 system achieves this through “Momentum,” which players can spend to make further checks more likely to succeed. With enough Momentum, a player can usually overcome a given challenge with brute force, even if their character isn’t particularly suited for it. Because they’re a further reward for success, Snowball metacurrencies encourage players to try and shoehorn uses for their best skills and abilities early on so that they’re insured against challenges featuring their weaker abilities later.

Budgets are prescribed by the GM or the system before gameplay begins. This can give players a sense of challenge by offering a small amount of metacurrency, or lead to a feeling of power by offering a larger budget. In Star Wars: Age of Rebellion, at the start of each game session, players roll to determine the current “Destiny pool,” a starting budget of light and dark side points that get passed back and forth between players and GM over the course of the game. This type of metacurrency offers the GM a way to tailor a game scenario without requiring the players to change their characters or the GM adjusting non-player characters, but it can easily break game immersion when a GM is capricious with their metacurrency budgets.

How can I Best use Metacurrency in my Games?

Since they don’t represent anything in-game, it’s easy to copy a metacurrency into your system of choice, and as a GM, this can be a powerful tool to customize a TTRPG. You can use a rubber band currency to make bad die rolls less consequential to a story, or you can use a snowball to build up to epic feats by the end of your game nights. Like any change you make to a game system, though, you need to think through its consequences before the dice hit the table, or you might find that your “innovation” on a system fell short. Namely, you should be able to answer what you want your metacurrency system to change in the game, and how much of an impact it should have on gameplay.

What’s it supposed to change? Even for experienced Game Masters it’s a common fallacy to make changes to a game system before playing it. If you’re introducing a metacurrency into your game, you should know how this addition helps your campaign. Why does Tales of the Valiant have Luck Points? To make each miss failure less likely than the last. Why do you earn Momentum on every “extra” success in a 2d20 game? So that you aren’t encouraged to hoard your metacurrency for a right moment that never comes. Metacurrency is a powerful tool to guide your games, but you should make changes to your game system with a result in mind.

What’s it worth? It should be obvious that a +1 to a d6 probably means a lot more than a +1 to a d20, but you should be careful when you try to copy a metacurrency to a new game system without changing anything about it. If metacurrency becomes the most important factor in success or failure, it’s probably to the detriment of the game system you started with, but if the rewards for using metacurrency are too trivial, then why bother having it in the first place? This is a pretty subjective take, but hey, game design is pretty subjective.

Metacurrency isn’t a universal solution to set your games’ tone, but by being conscientious, you can use it as another effective tool to build the right game experience for your game table. And hey, it’s easier than slipping your players a fiver when they play how you’d like to see your game being played.