Metacurrency Revamp

Goth Witches, as it currently exists in its v0.55 form, is a little rough around the edges. I think it's a perfectly playable game, but also there are elements that are clearly not reaching their full potential, and the game will not be finished until all of those are improved.

Something I've been thinking about lately are the metacurrency elements in the game. Two currently exist; Plot Points and Goddess Points. Plot Points are points earned by individual players that can be spent on a few things, which I'll discuss later. Goddess Points are shared by the entire party, and specifically are spent on things relating to the Goddess that the party worships.

The Plot Point system is honestly a bit mediocre and underbaked in its current form. They are earned in ways that are a bit too pedestrian [good roleplaying and doing interesting things are mentioned in the rules], and they also feel a bit too situational; I think players would be too busy trying to find specific instances where they could use these instead of it flowing more naturally. Also, "Juice Roll" is by far the one that would be used the most; I'll circle back around to that.

By the way, I feel like I should mention that Old Acquaintance is something from Savage Worlds and Lucky Coincidence is from Buffy; there's a lot of blatant lifting that happens in TTRPG design and so I just want to do my due diligence and say where I'm getting some of these ideas from [restated in my own words, of course].

So, I decided to lift another thing from another game, specifically Dramatic Editing from Adventure!, which Ewen Cluney also included in his Ghostbusters retroclone Spooktacular. Dramatic Editing basically allows players to spend points so they can do things that logically would make sense within the fiction of the game, that maybe don't fit neatly into any of the other rules. Something that really got me hyped about Dramatic Editing is this comment on RPG.net, from user LeftWingPenguin:

It's got some amazing mechanics for genre emulation (dramatic editing is extremely cool. Like the one time my gadgeteer master of disguise "The Enigmatic Dr. Feng" was captured by The Voodoo Master, and I used the dramatic editing rules to "reveal" that it wasn't Dr. Feng who had been captured at all, but one of his loyal agents dressed as the Dr.--Dr. Feng was disguised as one of the Voodoo Master's servants standing right behind him!), but these are built on top of White Wolf's generic system chassis, with attributes and skills and such.

A problem is that pulp has a ton of cliches that are easy to imitate, like the one described above. Goth Witches is inspired by a single movie, The Craft, and so "genre emulation" isn't as much of a "thing". But maybe that doesn't really matter.

My current plan is to basically make Flashback, Lucky Coincidence, and Old Acquaintance into specifically codified things that fall under the purview of Dramatic Editing, basically as example things that can be purchased with the Plot Point currency. And Dramatic Editing will be a lot broader, and instead of having specific costs for specific things the GM just decides how much something a player describes would cost [with the extant costs staying, as examples I guess].

Like I said before, Juice Roll is almost too enticing. It's something players will probably consider literally every time they roll dice, and so non-creative players will only spend their currency on Juice Roll, and more creative players will hesitate to use Juice Roll while struggling to find an opportunity to use something like Lucky Coincidence.

Making Dramatic Editing a thing hopefully fixes the problem of creative players practically hunting for opportunities to spend their points, but the other problem of Juice Roll being too useful yet uncreative is still not solved. So, I've been thinking that having three different currencies might be the way to do things:

• Plot Points, which I've been talking about at length.
• Goddess Points, which I mentioned towards the beginning.
• Juice Points, which literally only is used to juice rolls, and maybe needs a better name.

I think Juice Points might be rewarded with something related to degrees of success; basically, if a player succeeds dramatically they get a point. There are things I need to consider here; for instance, players potentially succeeding too much at things they're good at and earning too many points, which they just spend constantly. However, since characters automatically succeed at tasks that are easy for them, this would prevent players from dramatically succeeding constantly at things that are basically beneath them; it's nice that this design problem may have basically solved itself.

However, there's also an opposite problem, where more difficult tasks are inherently less likely to have dramatic successes, which might make players less likely to earn Juice Points if they're too good, basically. It's something I'll have to think about further.

Circling back around to Plot Points, I'm thinking of putting a few FATE-isms into the game, inspired by me reading Kagegami High recently and also looking at the FATE SRD for the first time. Players would basically be able to spend Plot Points to do stuff with things on their character sheets, as if they were Aspects. A problem is that most of the things on the character sheets are Talents, which already provide bonuses when relevant. Something about the FATE-isms in Kagegami High is that character creation creates much more outlandish characters than the ones in Goth Witches, where there isn't really any codified mechanical benefit to being a cyborg, and so it's a lot more obvious how something similar to Aspects could be implimented there.

Characters would be able to earn Plot Points by letting bad things happen to them because of their Impulses and Phobias; currently Impulses are solely there to guide roleplaying, and Phobias just give players penalties when relevant. So making them work like FATE Aspects would make them a lot more relevant, and make players engage with them more often. I might have to limit the FATE-isms solely to the disadvantages; this could still work, because the Dramatic Editing stuff is like an entirely different side of the Plot Point currency. You earn points by succumbing to disadvantages, and spend them on things that might have little relation to your disadvantages.

[In FATE, Aspects are meant to be both good and bad, but there isn't really a similar thing on a character sheet in Goth Witches.]

Something I need to consider with all of this are the probabilities of success. I think the chance of succeeding in Goth Witches by default, without using any metacurrencies, is actually quite low; getting five successes with five dice only has a 13.17% probability [technically less, because I didn't know how to account for the Magic Die, which would lower that further]. And players usually have very low magic stats outside of what they decide to specialize in, a deliberate choice to make the magic vaguely "grounded". Another thing to consider are Level Dice, which are basically like Juice Dice that replenish automatically at the beginning of each session depending on a character's level; these perhaps should be combined somehow.

There's a lot of stuff to consider and ruminate over.

I know that some people really hate metacurrencies . . . but I don't care. Hopefully while reading this you didn't lose confidence in me as a game designer and still have an interest in playing my game. It's going to be a while before any of this stuff is implimented, but I think once they're in the game it will be one step closer to its full potential.

It's interesting that Goth Witches is a very Ghostbusters-inspired game, and Ghostbusters has one of the earliest metacurrencies, Brownie Points, with James Bond 007 being the first iirc. Brownie Points are a pretty contentious mechanic in Ghostbusters, mostly because they can be spent for short-term gain or be used to level up. If I'm remembering correctly the Ghostbusters rulebook presents levelling up as optional, and indeed, it's not really a game that needs advancement mechanics. But none of that is very related to the rest of this post; if you want to listen to me talk more about Ghostbusters you can read this series I'm writing on Cannibal Halfling.