Stay in your own chair; on metamechanics and role displacement
I've been brooding quite a bit on metacurrencies recently. After watching Black Lodge Gaming's take on the new VtM 6e rules, I had a discussion with a few people regarding metacurrencies. Now, as surprises probably exactly no one, I loathe them. However, in discussing it, one issue we found was definition. Someone argued for 'a metacurrency is any abstraction you spend for mechanical reasons', but I disagree with that one. It silently drops the all-important 'meta'. What makes the currency meta is that it's above the fiction. A metacurrency is something that the player or the party holds, instead of something that's attributable to the character, or even the fiction itself. And from that follows the problem.
To not get stuck in VtM 6e playtest rules that might change (though its Drama would be an excellent case study in bad design), let's look at Fabula Ultima's Fabula Points. It's a great example of metacurrencies and shows why they are so terrible for your game. Fabula Points are things you use to directly alter the story. You spend a point, and you can change a fact about the world, or insert a new one. It tells the player to change the world in ways that are entirely separated from not just his character's actions, but his entire character period. You are spending brainspace that you could have spent inhabiting the character with a watcher that keeps asking "but is there something interesting in the broader narrative I could use one of my three Fabula Points for"?
Resources like this take players trying to be in their character role and suplex them out of it. Hell, Fabula Points are the worst at this. They actively try to force you to use them, because you get experience when the party uses enough of them. It's not just Fabula Points though. Masks's Team is a more subtle one, but a metacurrency nonetheless. All of them are the same poison: they force the player to stop being their character and stand above the fiction to change it in some way.
Contrast this with something like hunger. Not a currency necessarily, but points accrual is points accrual. You the player dread hunger because your character does. You try to stave it off because you know that if you don't, one failed test might cause the Beast to come out, messy at best and a Masquerade breach at the worst. But all of it is rooted in the fiction. It never attempts to take you out of it. Even stronger: it roots you further into it. We're playing roleplaying games. They are games that sell themselves about creating and inhabiting characters in strange worlds. So why are we using mechanics that are tailormade to take you out of those characters in order to float above them?
Metacurrencies aren't alone in this failure mode though.
A related player-facing one is the choose-your-own failure that many PbtA-likes have. "You fail; pick one of the options below". This isn't a question in the fiction, despite that the consequences might be. The mechanic says "you have failed, now tell us what the consequence of that failure will be". It asks you to make a choice using a preference your character can't have. What's being asked isn't "so does your character prefer to fall 50 feet into spikes or get tangled on the way down and captured by the demon worshippers?" he'd like neither. The question is asked of someone outside the fiction to make a judgement about which would be better for the fiction, instead of in it. Just like with metacurrencies, they force you out of the role of character and into the role of referee.
A similar charge for the move-menus that you see for referees. Look at what's actually on the menu: separate them, capture someone, announce future badness, and take away their stuff. Those aren't consequences based in the fictional world or its mechanics, those are narrative facts. These are statements about the shape of the story and the referee is asked to fill in how this actually translates to the fiction. The menu hands the referee the wrong kind of unit to think in, and no amount of honest world-simulation converts "you are now narratively separated" back into something the fiction actually did.
They are metamechanics (patent pending): mechanics that stand above fiction, in the sense that no amount of in-game fiction can describe the cause and effect of these mechanics properly. All of these share a common failing. They take the player, whether player player or referee, out of their natural role at the table, and force them into another, and the effect is always jarring and detrimental.
Ron Edwards, back in the days when most of you were still a glint in the referee's eye, wrote about the three stances in roleplaying games. Actor, author and director. Now, it's a neat split and he argues players move through roles. I think otherwise, but his phrasing is useful here. Both kinds of players have a natural role at the table (a Patron Player also acts as a director, but does so in downtime), one implied by the entire framework of tabletop rpgs. The natural role of a player is that of the actor. You make decisions based on what the character wants, can, and perceives. The natural role of the referee meanwhile is that of director. He sets the scene, changes the environment based on what the characters do. And the third role, that of author? That one is filled by the Holy Ghost of TTRPGs: the emerging narrative. Like Clerics Wear Ringmail says: the story of the adventure is what you tell to your friends at the Waffle House the night after. It is not the natural role of any of the people at the table.
Justin Alexander identified these as dissociated mechanics, though I feel there are separate clusters of them and this is one branch of them. His definition is: 'mechanics for which the characters have no functional explanations'. These belong to that category, sure, but so do for example Skill Challenges, and I'd argue it's worth separating why these fail. These mechanics fail because they ask you to inhabit a role which isn't the one that's natural for your function at the table.
If I had to sum it up in a simple phrase that can later be misconstrued by later people, it'd be role displacement. All of these mechanics fail because they ask you to inhabit a role outside your natural one, and that makes them jarring. You have to context switch from Cohen the Barbarian to refereeing your own failure, or to authoring a plot point by spending a Fabula Point. And by doing this, you are catapulted from being Cohen, and sliding back in takes time.
A proper mechanic says something about the world and the characters in it. A vampire becomes hungry; you won't like him when he's hungry. HP is an abstract representation of a character's longevity in combat and when it runs out he croaks. When you try to cast a Purple Sun there's a chance you are eating from the inside-out by demons. These rules allow all participants to stay in their natural roles. Players can reason and act from the position of their character without being drawn out of that point of view. The referee is able to be an impartial arbiter.
Interestingly, Justin also identified one important feature but does so almost as an aside: these mechanics are (almost always) a feature of storytelling mechanics, not roleplaying mechanics. He makes a distinction between these games, and even says it outright: "when you’re using dissociated mechanics you’re not roleplaying." These mechanics work, in their own types of games, but not in RPGs.
These metamechanics meanwhile tell you to perform a role that does not come natural. Fabula Points tells a player to be the author, and CYOF-mechanics tell you to be the referee. Meanwhile stuff like move menu keeps the referee half-seated in the author role. None of those feel natural. Sitting in the author chair as either the referee or the player takes you out of the one you should be inhabiting. Getting back into the right one takes time and effort that wouldn't have been needed had the rules been written competently.
Pick a ruleset that allows you to stay seated in your own chair; that one's the most comfortable.