[Cranium Rats] Token Economy, also, Gamist Encouragement of Narrativism.

[Thunder_God]

I have been thinking over the various ways to incorporate Tokens in my game, with the basic reasoning is that I need to add another angle to the Gamist Resource games. Specifically, I wanted to add some strategic depth, where the Player as opposed to the Aspect* has a pool of finite Resources.
I read this thread by TonyLB and found myself nodding as I read it. In reviewing my game I found that I already did what he suggested doing!

Tokens in my game function as follows:
You can only use your own Tokens when you want to perform an action that requires giving Tokens to another player(Except for the Enlightened**{?})
You can only use someone else's Tokens when you want to perform an action that requires Tokens and results in adding to a Dice Pool.
When you get your own Tokens back they are removed from play.
Each Session begins with each Player receiving 3 Tokens and the Enlightened receives 5.
Each Session ends with all unused Tokens being removed. Use them or lose them.
When a Goal is resolved(succeeded or failed) its Aspect gains a Token.

The above create benefits for the player to use their Tokens before the session ends, a reward for giving Tokens(and receiving them) and also strategic thought(Do I give him his token or someone else's? His and he gains nothing, another's and we have another token in the global pool).
Using another person's Tokens can be used to gain Narration out of turn, narration for the "passive" Aspect, create new Goals for different Aspects. Players want there to be more Goals, even for other Aspects, as it lets them "control" them in a way.

As many things done by the Enlightened result in Tokens being removed, and when there are no Tokens being moved around the game loses much of its Narrative control and begins to slow-down/move towards "Resolution" I thought I should insert a way(or several) of letting the Enlightened regain Tokens, they are as follows:

• Every turn
• Every time a Conflict Roll fails
• Every time a goal is accomplished
• Every Flood Scene

Eventually I decided Goals belong to the Aspects and to stop "Hoarding" didn't take "Every Turn".
Every time a conflict roll fails was chosen because it shows how your failure results in others gaining more power, and gives the Enlightened more power to drive this failure into interesting future conflicts.
Every Flood Scene was chosen partly because colour, The Enlightened usually strives for Balance, and that is his role. Flood Scenes show things going out of balance. Also, to present another balancing-factor to the shifting power-balance of the Aspects following the Flood Scene.

I also considered how it'd affect Session-length: Short-Long-Short or Medium-Medium.
Short sessions will end with people putting their Tokens into Goals as not to lose them, followed by a (suggested) long session, where they relatively quickly run out of their Tokens and are forced to resolve their Goals to generate new ones, resulting in an increasing pace of things being resolved. Like how things speed up towards a movie's end.
The medium sessions will have people set some Tokens to be turned into goals and see some Goals being resolved.

Thoughts? Questions?

* Aspect is what you play, you own three Aspects.
** The "GM".

[Thunder_God]

My goals with Tokens were:

1) Create another level of Resources.
2) Have these resources be of limited nature, more open-ended in use but more limited in amount, to force choices.
3) Have them be able to affect Narrative Control, Scene Framing. Bolster the non-Gamist portion.
4) Later, needed some way to keep them flowing, in order to keep narration active and fast, wanted to have them act as Balancing. They give the Enlightened more to do, giving him more control of the story, in exchange for not having any Aspect to play. The Enlightened is also a player, albeit with different rights.
5) After I decided on Goals being resolved give Tokens, and also leading to that choice I figured the Session Length and how it connects to the movies that inspire what I want the "in character world" action to look like.

Do you think I could do it otherwise?
How do you think I accomplish these goals?
Do you think these goals aren't the right goals to begin with?

Also, seems like a rules-rewrite is in order, which sections did you find to make little sense?

[Thunder_God]

To show the cross-way in which game creation works, at least for me(I'm trying to use this game in order to "chronicle" the process of game-creation, from my viewpoint), I'll show how the Dice Economy thread and the Token Economy thread(this one!) relate.

So in that thread I decided to move "Pool" to some certain number, using "9" there. I gave it some thought and decided on 6, not to give people too many dice but then again giving them enough to affect change, almost constantly.
I also had the idea of using Tokens to replenish the Dice Reservoir, requiring some change of how Tokens relate to Dice, since the 1-for-1 method strictly was out of the window.

So, 1 Token of each type(Owned and Given), for a total of 2 Tokens in order to replenish the Dice Reservoir completely, to be useable only outside of Bids and Conflicts, this forces you to think of when to use it, stops you from using your whole pool, refreshing it and using it again, and gives space to what follows:

1 Owned Token(which is used mostly for Story enhancing reasons) can give you 2 Dice during a Bidding.
1 Given Token(used for mechanical enhancement) can give you 2 Dice during non-Bid Conflicts(real-world conflicts).

This will make you try to keep some of your Tokens yet try to get others to give you theirs. It adds another element, which may yet backfire due to increased complexity, but gives the players more options.

Now, how do you think this will make the in-game action look like, in regards for jockeying to gain/re-gain(Goals completion) Tokens?