[RPG] Is the use of XP as a narrative currency for both GMs and players a novel idea

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In Monte Cook's new roleplaying game Numenera, XP is used as a narrative currency not only by the GM but by the players as well. Taken from his design diaries:

Say the PCs find a hidden console with some buttons. They learn the
right order to press the buttons, and a section of the floor
disappears (this happened in the second playtest session I wrote
about). As GM, I don’t have the players specifically tell me where
they’re standing. Instead, I give one player an XP and say,
“unfortunately, you are standing directly over this new hole in the
floor.” Now, if he wanted, the player could refuse the XP and spend
one of his own, and then he would say, “I leap aside to safety.” Or,
he could just make the defensive roll that the GM calls for and let it
play out.

At first this just seemed like D&D and Pathfinder's Hero Points variant rule, but Hero Points come across as more of a "get out of jail free" card for players, and not the narrative currency that XP points will be in Numenera. Furthermore, XP points will still be used to "increase character abilities… or advance in levels."

The idea of XP as a currency to drive two-way narrative dialogue intrigues me, and as I've only played various d20 systems, have not seen this before. Is this concept new to Numenera, or has it appeared before in other systems? If so, in what ways has the concept evolved over the history of roleplaying games?

Best Answer

No, this isn't novel (although that does not mean that it isn't clever design in Numenera).

There are two separate things married in that mechanic as you've described it. Both have been done before, and I can think of at least one game that has married them in the same way before.

First there is the concept of a pull mechanic. Most GM-initiated events are examples of using push mechanics—the GM imposes something and the player has to deal with it. In a pull mechanic, something is offered at a price, and the player is faced with a tempting choice. Pull mechanics are not inherently better, but they do have some nice side-effects that a designer can take advantage of in ways that are different than push mechanics. Compels in Fate games work like this.

The second thing being joined here is a game currency that is the source of advancement. This is familiar to all of us as XP and isn't anything new. D&D does this, of course.

When you join a pull mechanic with advancement currency as the bait, you get a very neat mechanic that puts advancement and choice more into the players' hands. In my experience, that significantly increases players' sense of agency and control over their characters' destiny. (It's not fool-proof of course—the GM can offer bad deals—but you can break any mechanic if you try.)

The most well-known game that I can think of that does this is Apocalypse World (and its fantasy child, Dungeon World). The same bargains happen: here is a choice, and the choice is to accept trouble and then deal with it and get to mark experience, or refuse the experience and don't suffer the trouble. AW even calls it "experience". It's not as free-form as it sounds like in Numenera, but that's just a side-effect of the GM being bound by rules about when they can inflict "interesting" events on the PCs.

If you read designer blogs, after a while it becomes obvious that there are very few truly novel mechanics out there—they're all learning from and inspiring each other. What is novel is the way these small bits are combined into systems that create new rules-player interactions that we haven't seen before. Though they're pretty much identical, the XP pull mechanic in Numenera is almost certainly going to have different effects on the rest of the game system and the people playing it than the XP pull mechanic of AW does.

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