Just Desserts (clarify Reward techniques, please)

[Dotan Dimet]

Forge newbie ramble. Please bear with me.

In The Whole Model, Ron writes:

I consider the two most important Techniques to be reward system and IIEE.

Now, I understood why IIEE (action/announcement, or perhaps "negotiated verb conjugation" - "I drop him"/"You are dropping him"/"He is dropped") is very important, because as GM I run into problems with that all the time. I started my current game using Powergame (one session), switched to Wushu ("this is the magic solution! this is just how we play, only with rules!"... "No, it isn't") and went back to freeform, mostly because I really wanted maximum control over pacing.
But I scratched my head a bit about the rewards point. I suppose Ron isn't talking about XP here. IMO, XP are dead weight, vestigal tailbones from gaming's D&D ancestry. Mainstream Sim RPGs only pay Experience lip-service, using XP to let PCs ramp-up in power gradually. But gradual ramping-up is silly: Shouldn't you let the players create characters they actually want to play, rather than weak "before-versions" of them? Sorcerer's handling of character advancement ("make a new character") seemed to me to be the first time this sensible idea showed up in a printed game, and it seemed clear to me back in my Champions/GURPS days: Characters too weak? Give the players more points to build them with.

So... I searched past messages and I think "Reward" is meant here as anything which gives the players incentive to play in a certain way. For example, "normal" D&D play encourages the attitude that looting corpses is good, because people have cool stuff ("Magic Items") which gives you more powerz. Games like mine where the GM makes stuff up on the fly encourage the PCs to "click on everything", because if it didn't do anything, perhaps by investing enough interest, they can make it do something (example: hit on waitress, waitress becomes important to plot, gains contacts, whatever).
Other examples would be the bonus dice for colorful action description that Wushu is all about, Sorcerer's "Victories carry over" which encourages players to elaborate on plot-important actions (breaking them down into several actions/rolls), or just letting PCs succeed more if their narration is detailed and cool (this is the drama version of Wushu's bonus dice - the benefit comes as part of the player-GM-group negotiation).

So, OK. Rewards are a cornerstone for the game, and for the expression of your creative agenda.
Right?

[MachMoth]

I would say, from a psychological stand point, you have it perfectly.  A reward (or positive reinforcement) is any action that encourages a specific behavior to occur again.  I've been doing some psychological studies, in relation to roleplaying games, and have found some interesting things.  But, suffice to say, I have to agree with Ron on this point.  Rewards are, quite possibly, one of the most important elements a game can have.  Rewards, when implimented correctly, self-teach players the general way the game was designed to be played.  D&D's XP does indeed teach players to pilage and kill.  However, XP is not a very good teacher of even this (for reasons I may get into deeper some other time), often leaving players with differing ideas of what they should be trying to acheive.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dotan,

So far, so good. Let's work with that, but I'll also have to do some thread-digging to come up with some past discussions. We've had some good ones.

Various different reward systems (very general) include:

- personal privilege: getting to say certain things or to have authority over outcomes in some way

- character privilege: whether heightened effectiveness (e.g. re-rolls) or heightened resources (e.g. more Endurance, more gold, etc) or customizing a character's metagame (ruthless nemesis becomes ally, secret ID revealed but bad rep canceled)

- character improvement - which falls into the interesting categories of "tracked" and "untracked"

- redefinition of character, without necessarily improving anything - this is essentially transforming the "situation" of your character, creating a different chassis for conflict

That's off the top of my head. As I say, I need to do some thread-searching. Also, reward systems are featured in my GNS essay stuff, in various places.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Some thread-searching results ... Here is a smattering - there are more, I know. Also, keep an eye on the dates - some are old. I listed them in chronological order.

Reward systems, or making your players behave
Rewarding Color
Failure=advancement
Item collecting
Interpersonal reward system
Gamist/Narrativist hybrid: possible or impossible?
Pan-reward-ism
Anti-Gamist, or pro-what?

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

I will add mention of the http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/23/">Applied Theory article in the articles section here, particularly because it discusses Advancement and Rewards as distinct issues in game design, it debunks the notion that advancement has to mean getting more powerful, and it specifically shows that the problem with traditional experience point power advancement systems isn't that they don't do what they're supposed to do, but that we want them to do something else for which they are not suited.

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

[MachMoth]

Well, I promised I'd expand on why experience points where bad facilitators of learning.  One of the key points discussed about operant learning (the use of rewards, punishment, etc. to reinforce learning) in relation to timing and scheduling is that a reinforcement loses much of its effect shortly after the behavior occurs.  For example, if a character kills an orc, and takes his sword, the sword is easily recognized as a reward for killing the orc.  However, if a character kills an orc, then later down the hall, finds a treasure chest with gold inside, the players is more likely to cognitively relate the reward of gold, with opening the chest, than with killing the orc.

Experience points often suffer from this same effect.  For the sake of time, GM's tend to give out experience points at the end of play.  Unless the players have been consistently performing the same behavior (killin' stuff), it will be difficult to relate the reward to the behavior, due to the delay between the two.

So, why is XP so universally excepted as a reward, despite both these arguments, and those mentioned earlier.  For starters, most RPG rewards are what are known as secondary reinforcers.  This means you must learn to except it as a reward.  The most commonly known of this is money.  Your dog won't learn to roll over for 500 XP.  Neither will a human, until they learn to except it as a reward.  Because of its interval style of reinforcement (you don't actually level up everytime you kill something), this can take time to learn, but when it is learned, it is very difficulty for it to become extinct.  Many of you may find it hard to remember learning RPG advancement, but just try taking someone who has never played anything with XP before (good luck) and explain experience points and levels.  Prepare for some glazed looks.

[Dotan Dimet]

Lots of good points here and in the threads Ron dug up.
Having reminded myself of Underground (in the "Race and Races" thread which Ron floated off here), I had a look through it and read it's section on "Theme" and Rewards - the game seems to zig-zag between grimy cyberpunk social satire and post-post-revisionist superheroism; the Rewards section has a big discussion of how the PCs can pool and spend their Reward points to alter social parameters to achieve story goals, with the bit about using Reward points to amp up your skills and powers hidden like a footnote at the end.
I think that getting the PCs to go along with the game's premise (i.e, that despite the dark cynicism of the cyberpunkish set-up, the characters will still be motivated to act as Super-Heroes), requires running a few sessions in Slumberland (the VR/dreamworld where the boosted characters adjust to their powers), to build the personality the game takes for granted (in fact, the personality the game's setting gleefully focuses on deconstructing).
Uff. I should have just started a thread on Underground instead.