Non-Gamist Rewards

[Harlequin]

Stuff all over the place here.

Marhault: It's still under development, and in fact has recently ramped up to more aggressive development including a PhpBB forum of its own.  I'm just working on getting the basic writeup chunks into readable form rather than note form, prior to releasing the website address here and in general.  Stay tuned, and I'll make sure to PM you when I do put out the word - I am looking for people interested in contributing to the discussion phase.

Two of the other three "thought threads" I see in this thread, I would say are actually facets of the same thing.  Stated goals, whether with fixed or unfixed requirements to achieve, and mode-of-advancement as a character statistic, are actually both things (and, come to that, they're the two things) I played around with before settling where I am now.  Stated goals leaves things a little more open, while a fixed set of options in a mode-of-advancement stat pins things down and thereby does a better job of prompting, but I'd say they're two sides of the same coin.

And the prompting thing won out, for me, because it felt very powerful - just not right for the game I'm working on now, benched until a later design.  I was quite quickly able to identify some very clear patterns of "advancement" from relevant literature, and classify those into a set of options.  If I recall correctly, the list was roughly:

- Learning To Fly - Character begins mechanically weak or talent-reliant, typically also physically young.  Development is in effectiveness/skill, and quite rapid, especially in quick increments ("training montages") under a mentor figure.  Has the potential to be great in his chosen field.
- Old Dog's Tricks - Character begins as a worldly, skillful, and usually jaded figure.  Development is emotional and moral in nature, and quite slow in coming.  Effectiveness remains roughly constant, though often the "effective effectiveness" goes up gradually with increases in willingness/determination/moral fibre.
- Own Worst Enemy - Character begins with considerable power and high effectiveness, which always has strings of some kind attached to it, the innate moral corrosion of power if nothing else.  "Advancement" is a matter of either retaining the power but resisting the corrosive effects or drawbacks, or else surrendering the power in favour of a more ordinary life; this can be modeled mechanically in several interesting ways.
- Pawn of the World - Character begins with low to medium effectiveness and a comparatively low degree of connectedness to the world.  Development occurs as the character is bound more deeply to institutions and events, and increases involvement rather than power.  Effectiveness increases are rare but very abrupt, and tied to external factors - gifts, discoveries, supernatural allies, and the like.

I think there may have been some others, I'd have to find my notes.  In any event, using that sort of taxonomy to prompt and drive the selection of more specific goals for the advancement process strikes me as quite powerful.

With reference to this thread, it also presents the interesting situation that it can address more than one playing style with the reward system, such that one player is developing effectiveness-wise in a potentially Gamist manner, and another player is developing moral-wise in a more SimChar or Nar manner, at the same table.  Backed by some strong mechanics for both, this might be very interesting to see.

- Eric

[Jason Lee]

Effectiveness determines success or failure; it determines whether you, the player, have your intent validated.

In some games, a player may win a roll but decide his character fails.  

I think effectiveness determines the player's ability to add to the shared fantasy.

If you prefer - same diff to me.  If game systems just apportion credibility (lumpley principle), then effectiveness can simply be thought of as one the factors that determine how many "votes" a player gets in a given situation.

[M. J. Young]

M.J.:  Sorry, I didn't mean to step on your toes.  Upon reading your post, I went back to reread the article.  I didn't realize at the time how much of what I said came (pretty directly) from there.  Applied Theory was instrumental in helping me understand GNS, at least insofar as I do understand it.

As Ron says, no harm, no foul. I was just a bit surprised to read things that were so similar to my article in a thread where no one thought to mention the article; I'm pleased you found it helpful, and that the ideas there echoed so in your memory that you reproduced them so faithfully.

I was actually hoping you would mention Multiverser, M.J.  It is, to my understanding, without any effectiveness reward system, right?  Does it include any form of overt, mechanic reinforced form of reward, or is it a "play is it's own reward" system?

No, you're understanding is correct: there is no reward system in Multiverser.

The really peculiar thing is that it never occurred to us that such a thing was missing.

We had seen a lot of games (E. R. Jones had run maybe a hundred different systems and read a lot more; my background was more focused, a lot deeper in what I knew but not near as broad). We saw experience points earned and spent in all sorts of ways, usually to increase character abilities. We knew that we needed a way for characters to improve; but we also knew that with the scope of what we were doing it would be impractical to begin trying to devise something point-based.

In Multiverser, your character skills and attributes improve when your character invests game time in improving them. If you exercise, you get stronger; if you practice shooting, you get better; if you study, you learn. The "cost" of such improvement generally comes in a couple of different ways. One is that you wind up with a small amount of player downtime. It's not extreme, because generally as player characters split up they wind up on completely different timelines, so there's no problem with letting Chris go through three years of seminary in a couple hours while Bill is making a cross-country car chase to escape the police that takes about a week of game time but is over before the end of the night. Still, if you're going to go for the downtime, there's a degree to which others get the spotlight for a while while you watch your numbers slowly creep up. You also improve by using skills, getting credit for finding new ways to use known skills, or learning a new skill by trying to do it in a critical situation. In these cases, you've got a certain amount of risk--you could fail, you could botch, but if you succeed you've probably saved your tail and gotten a bit better at whatever it was you did. Thus the "character improvement system" was entirely integrated into character actions and player choices, without any points bridging between the two. You worked on this, it got better.

It wasn't for quite a while that I realized, as I came to see the Creative Agenda theory more clearly (Multiverser was published about the same time as, maybe just before, Sorcerer, so we didn't benefit from Ron's insights), that my players were taking the game in whatever direction they most enjoyed. Those who wanted challenges found them, and tested their characters against them, and I rolled with them in that direction. Those who wanted to consider the issues, the deep questions of life, found ways to explore these, and running the game went right with them. Those who just wanted to explore the strange places presented did that; sometimes they bumped into dangerous challenges, and sometimes they brushed against moral issues, but mostly they explored.

And sometimes people drifted.

And as I came to see how OAD&D's experience point system encouraged gamist play, I also saw that not having a reward system allowed players and referees to take Multiverser in any direction they desired. We had intentionally designed it to make it possible to play in any imaginable world, and to interface with any other game, but we had accidentally made it fully driftable.

The obvious concern appears in the question of balance. If one character takes the time and effort to build up tremendous abilities and another ignores that in favor of, I don't know, considering the meaning of this life after life that has fallen upon him, doesn't that mean that one character is going to be more powerful than the other? Well, sure it does--but the beauty is that it doesn't matter. Player characters aren't forced to work together; they work together when they wish to because they want to. That means they've already recognized that some of them are stronger and others are weaker, that they have strengths in different areas, and they aren't really balanced in some artificial fashion. Each brings his own abilities to the mix, and does what he can, and often the character you'd have picked for the weakest will do something extraordinary, while the one who is the strongest will mess up royally.

And of course, if you're killed, that's a good thing--it means you're starting a new adventure, and you get to decide what you want to do this time. So it doesn't really matter whether you're stronger or weaker, only whether you want to do this.

People who play gamist enjoy winning when they thought they were going to lose, and their friends recognize that they've done incredibly well in those situations (even those who don't play gamist). People who play narrativist like to immerse themselves in the difficult questions, and as they complicate the questions in search of the answers, everyone appreciates what they do. People who play simulationist like to explore, and everyone enjoys seeing what they discover. It all happens at once in Multiverser, because each player gets to decide his own play preferences, and change them whenever he wants.

So I've come to see reward systems as something secondary. They're nice to have if they integrate with play and encourage that which the game already facilitates, but they're really only the icing on the cake. (That, of course, can be very important for those of us who think of cake as that fluffy dry stuff that provides the excuse to eat icing, but its importance varies from cake to cake.)

--M. J. Young

[Rob Carriere]

I think one hidden assumption is still that ‘more effective to the player’ means ‘more effective as a character’. I can think of character concepts where the character should be getting weaker with time. I don't see how an inside-the-SIS currency can handle such generality. If anybody does see, please tell, because I do like the concept.

SR
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[Shreyas Sampat]

Rob:

Maybe Torchbearer's reward system can give you some insight into that.

In Torchbearer, one is rewarded with a resource, Fuel, for using a symbolic language (that the players construct collaboratively at the beginning of the game) in interesting ways, and for nothing else.

A player can use Fuel to increase his odds of deciding how a conflict turns out; certain manipulations will affect the result even if he doesn't win the privilege to decide. Straight player effectiveness.

[Rob Carriere]

Rob:

Maybe Torchbearer's reward system can give you some insight into that.

I just looked at your sample PDF. Yes, it sure does. I guess my error was conflating the location of the reward system and the location of the payment. You have the system (Torches) inside the SIS, but the payment (Fuel) is a resource at the game mechanics level. Cool.

SR
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