Speaking of cosmological implications, when I was a teenager, we played a lot of MSH Deluxe with the Ultimate Powers book. We would make reams of heroes, constantly pushing the envelope of playability. Eventually we exhausted the UP book and started inventing our own powers. My friend Chris pitched us a giant adamantine mosquito who had the ability to jam its proboscis into its victim and drain their karma.
That moment rang a bell in my design brain. It was obviously a broken character—and the power didn’t make any sense in the world. There was no karma that could be fought over between heroes. But Chris’ clever ploy to attempt to have his character reach through the meta layer to directly penalize another player rather pointedly highlighted the danger of allowing such mechanisms in a game. The meta system layer needs connect to the fictional and the mechanical layers at carefully controlled points…otherwise we’ll all soon be overrun by adamantine mosquitos sucking out our karma.