METERS 

CHARACTER ELEMENT

The Basics

• Meters are specialized tracks, or gauges, that are filled by a character encountering or interacting with an element of the world or a portion of the wider rules.
• Meters usually do nothing until fully marked, or if represented by a gauge do nothing until the gauge level changes.
• A meter might exist for an element of the world or an element of a character.

Waiting for Change

Meters filling leads to a change of some kind, just like any other track. They're similar to aspects in this way, but with the crucial difference of their special rules not coming into play until that last mark is made.

Meters might be counting up to something good, but are more often used to signal something bad. Marks on a meter might be imposed by the GM in response to a character's action or a happening in the world, but could also be voluntarily made by players.

In Drift, each character in a drifter crew (and the train they share owership of) has a paradox meter, represented by a gauge. This measures the potentially harmful effects of the city's tendency to warp reality. The meter might be marked by moving through unstable areas, or voluntarily marked by taping into a particularly weird or powerful ability granted by an aspect. When the meter fills the gauge level increases - zero has no impact, one shows the character beginning to break under the pressure (imposing a penalty relevant to the situation), and when the gauge hits two the character is in serious danger of permanent change in the form of an unhealable injury. Wildsea doesn't explicitly use meters, but a ship's ratings work in a similar way. Until they're fully marked they function as normal, after being fully marked there's usually an immediate and related catastrophe. In Rise, each nation-state has a meter representing unrest. When unmarke or partially marked there's no effect, but when fully marked a rebellion begins and the player must destroy resources to quell the fury of their populace.

Stress, Wounds, and HP

The most traditional use of a meter-style system is one that Wild Words usually bypasses, as a marker of health or longevity. Aspects are used to track character damage in most games, so while you might want to use a meter for an additional health-style system, we recommend leaving that kind of thing to aspects - they are built for it.

But a recommendation is not a rule. For example..

In Streets by Moonlight, the characters take damage to their Stability (a meter that combines physical and mental state) as they uncover deeper and darker mysteries of the moonlit streets, and suffer at the hands of the cryptic presences that dwell there. When a meter is full, the character dies... But will be replaced by the start of the next scene by a new character called in their stead, a more powerful individual with a fresh and unmarked Stability meter of their own. This would be an impossibly harsh punishment for most games, but frequent death and character replacement are built into the rules of SBM from the ground up. The characters are metaphorical mayflies, getting one or two moments in the sun before hubris takes them.

Meters Are Very Optional

If you've got nothing in the setting that needs tracking like a meter tracks things... Don't use them. Every character element is optional, but these are more optional than most.

PICO doesn't use meters at all - it's specifically stripped back in terms of mechanical complexity compared to some Wild Words games, and there's no element of the setting that requires a meter to manage it.

Marking and Clearing Meters

When incorporating meters, think of what a player might do during the course of an average session to manage the marks on them. You don't want meter-management to become too much of a distraction from roleplay, especially as it's a mechanical system at heart (though there may well be narrative consequences). Ideally, a meter should only start becoming necessary to deal with when the marks are nearing full, though interacting with it early can stave off or delay these moments.

Chop & Change - meters

When adding meters to your Wild Words game, you might...

• Have the GM control and mark meters in secret, with their length or state a mystery to players.
• Give meters break points for additional rules-based granularity (Drift does something like this when it comes to Fuel).
• Tie specific meters to specific character choices, with each player managing their meters in different ways.
• Remove aspects and deal with all health and damage-related situations using a meter.