Incentive Systems and Wanting to Lose

[Doug Ruff]

I suspect that, in this context, "winning" is more about player narrative control than about Maximum Game Fun. The following with a massive dose of IMHO:

One thing that Capes and Dogs (and others, but these were the original examples) do very well is that they give players a great deal of narrative power before the outcome of a conflict is resolved.

In Dogs, every single trait on a character's sheet is relevant to their story, and the player gets to choose what these traits are, more or less at will. The players get to decide how their contribution to the conflict will play out, by choosing which traits to engage, and whether or not to Escalate.

Even so, the system and setting virtually demand that the players go flat out to win every single conflict - I think that the "say yes or roll" really contributes to this, because every conflict is important.  believe that the Dogs win conflicts far more often than they lose them, but only because they are willing to pay for it in Fallout.

In Capes the players get to declare their own Goals and Events, and can do anything they want as long as it doesn't resolve a Goal or Event to early (or violate the Code.) That's a helluva lot of narrative control already. The difference from Dogs is that the players are encouraged to include conflicts that they don't care about (but that another player does care very much about!) in order to harvest enough resources to introduce - and win - a conflict that they do care about.

(I think this difference is key to understanding why Dogs has a GM, and Capes doesn't, by the way.)

I think this is an entirely different means of enabling narrative contribution, from systems where the player is allowed to narrate their own character's failure (Monologue of Defeat). This is still empowering but in a different way.

I guess that the difference is between:

"winning even when you lose" - games with a Monologue of Defeat

"winning because you lost before" - Capes, Pace

"winning because you paid the price for winning before" - Dogs

Sydney, does this help with the Joy of Defeat?

PS Crossposted somewhat, I think this is still relevant if you're interested in taxonomy.

[TonyLB]

I mostly agree with what you're saying, but would propose a slight rewording.  Capes isn't about "winning because you lost before".  It isn't really about winning at all.  In-character victory is just the carrot I use to lure unsuspecting players into using the system enough to realize the freedom it gives them.

The fun of a choose-to-lose game is that in-character defeat is a legitimate option.  Many games give you only one permitted goal:  In-character victory.  With only one goal you have no choices.  You achieve that, or die trying.  With two permitted goals (win or lose, either is valid) you have a choice.

Your job as a player isn't to win, it is to choose.  

You can never fail at that.  You can make happy choices, or dreadful choices, or stupid choices, or choose to delegate the choice to someone else, but you have succeeded in making a choice.  You win!

[Mark Woodhouse]

At this risk of tangenting, what about games that reward the player for giving up power/narrative control at one point in time by giving them tokens that enhance their power/narrative control later?

Drama Points in Buffy are the example I thought of immediately, but I'm kind of playing Dogs in the Vinyard that way currently - "dice farming" by deliberately courting Fallout so as to gain experience dice.

Is that the kind of "economy of failure" you have in mind?

Best,

Mark

[Brendan]

Heh.  Mark, does that mean you're Gaming Dogs?

[Callan S.]

On D&D:  Uh... no.  You're still saying they won.  Heroes live, monsters die, virtue saves the day.  But if they fail to kill any monsters then they get (at least in the old-school D&D I'm most familiar with) nothing.  The characters lose and therefore the players also lose.

We're talking about systems where, for instance, a party would choose to go into a dungeon and come out ragged, battered, bloody, having lost all their magic items, killed nothing and been humiliated by the goblin king... because the players succeed in their goal through that.

They did win. Gamism is about admiration of resources won...or even maintained in the face of adversity. They are all alive after such a harrowing ordeal! COOL! I've seen plenty of 'And the GM screwed us but we survived, so it was cool!' stories on the net. Just the game status of 'alive' is a resource to be admired. And being alive gives you another chance to reap reward...which is a reward.

I think your nar preference is clouding the issue here. As a nar player, your winning, and the gamist player is winning too. Your both working toward your goals by loosing stuff. The goals you meet, whether they are hitting a nar point or gaining BAB (or even just surviving) don't make a difference. But you seem to want to seperate yourself from that 'loose stuff to accumulate resources so I can win more' thing, at the same time you 'loose to accumulate problematic resources so I can latter suceed at accumulating even more problematic resources'.

Yur nay that different.

[John Burdick]

No.  If they went up against a foe that they could beat, but somehow found a situation where they could get more XP for losing, and lost, then that would count.

As I said, I think you might have to go a bit off the beaten path to find that in D&D.

I could see something like that happening in HackMaster.  One of the critical scores in HackMaster is Honor Points. A player trying to raise his guy's honor might play recklessly and lose. He doesn't get EPs or GPs, but he might gain honor. If he dies nobly, he might increase the party honor and his family honor.  

John

[LordSmerf]

Callan,

I believe that Tony is specifically referring to mechanical metagame rewards here.  We're talking about more than the players accomplishing their CA here, we're talking about the mechanics rewarding the accomplishment of that CA.

Tony's not asking, "What games can you have fun losing in?" he's asking "What games mechanically encourage you to lose?"  Capes does this through the awarding of Story Tokens.  Dogs does this by making the cost of success high (you'll have to escalate beyond what you're comfortable with).

This does not happen in D&D, the mechanical incentives are all for winning: XP, phat loot, whatever.  While you may be socially rewarded for losing, the mechanics do not encourage you to lose.

There's also an interesting middle ground where the mechanics don't say one way or the other.  Games like The Burning Wheel and The Riddle of Steel where you are rewarded, not for victory, but for trying.  Assuming that you survive the results of an encounter then you are likely stronger.

Thomas

[Callan S.]

Yes, and I'm noting that mechanically their basically the same. Tragically lose in capes and you get some story token resources. Get hit a few times and burn off some spells in D&D and you get some more resources.

Same thing, mechanically. It's just that the descriptions of what's happening that differs.

Besides, I could go all monty python and say "What, in capes your loosing tragically but your PC stays alive...and you don't think that's like D&D? Your characters alive and he's gotten more of these story point things...just the same as the D&D PC living on and prospering! In my day our characters died tragically straight away...and we liked it!. Tell that to kids today and they wont believe you!"

[LordSmerf]

Yes, and I'm noting that mechanically their basically the same. Tragically lose in capes and you get some story token resources. Get hit a few times and burn off some spells in D&D and you get some more resources.

I don't think these are actually the same thing here...  As Tony (I believe) mentioned, there is a difference here.  There is a point at which mechanically you still lose.  If you expend those resources, but fail utterly then you don't get any other resources back.

This is not true in Capes.  There is not point at which you will spend resources and get nothing back.  Ever.  I'm not sure about Dogs as shamefully I have not read or played it.

Do you see the distinction?  Or do you think there is no distinction?

Thomas

[TonyLB]

I think we need to make a more rigorous definition of "in-character victory" in order to continue this discussion.  For my purposes, I define thusly:

In Character Victory (for character A):  An end-state in which the goals of character A (e.g. to save the town, to humiliate their opponents, etc.) have been accomplished at the expense of the goals of character B (e.g. to burn the town to the ground, to save face).

In Character Defeat (for character A):  An end-state in which the goals of character A have been prevented, to the benefit of the goals of character B.

The party which departs a dungeon having been beaten and battered has probably not achieved in-character victory.  However, they may have if, for instance, they leave beaten and battered but in possession of the relic they went in to find.

Additional definitions:

Marginal Benefit/Cost of Victory:  The amount of resources gained by In-character victory minus the amount of resources gained by In-character Defeat.  Benefit when positive, Cost when negative.

Marginal Benefit/Cost of Defeat:  The amount of resources gained by In-character defeat minus the amount of resources gained by In-character Victory.  Benefit when positive, Cost when negative.


When I talk about "Choose-to-lose" game-play I am discussing situations in which the average Marginal Benefit of Defeat of a game-as-played is zero or positive.

I have never seen D&D fulfill that in any consistent way.  Assume that GP and XP are of equivalent value (because it makes the calculation simple).

[*]Defeat:  You kill ten gribblings (10x300XP) and two stinkhogs (2x500XP) but are routed by the Slime Wizard (0x4000XP) and barely escape with your lives.  Total benefit:  4000XP.
[*]Victory:  You kill ten gribblings (10x300XP) and two stinkhogs (2x500XP) and spend a two-thousand GP diamond for a spell to defeat one Slime Wizard (1x4000XP).  Total benefit:  8000XP - 2000GP = 6000XP.
[*]Marginal Cost of Defeat:  4000XP - 6000XP = -2000XP.[/list:u]Now it is possible to rewrite this example in a way that creates a marginal benefit of defeat:  If the diamond is five thousand, rather than two thousand, GP then the marginal benefit of defeat is 1000GP.  Which is a fancy way of saying that it's not worth sacrificing the diamond to clip the wizard (in the short term... I recognize the compounding earning-potential of XP, but am leaving it out so that the example can be less convoluted).

Callan:  Are you suggesting that players in D&D regularly encounter situations where the Marginal Benefit of Defeat encourages them to deliberately lose a conflict they could otherwise have won?

Edited to clarify and fix a little math.

[Callan S.]

Let me give examples of how two different games might work:

Game A: You get 50 XP if you kill the monster

Game B: You get 50 XP if the monster beats the crap out of you and runs off laughing.


Both are mechanically identical. There's no point in trying to say their different mechanically, by stipulating the character is loosing. They are exactly the same process of accumulation. There is a thematic difference in that your described as loosing to do this...it's certainly different from the majority of the market. But it isn't mechanically different.

I don't think these are actually the same thing here... As Tony (I believe) mentioned, there is a difference here. There is a point at which mechanically you still lose. If you expend those resources, but fail utterly then you don't get any other resources back.

This is not true in Capes. There is not point at which you will spend resources and get nothing back. Ever. I'm not sure about Dogs as shamefully I have not read or played it.

So in context to my previous comment, Capes is actually more 'win to win to win' than D&D is, since you can't go backwards in resources. Sounds like a smart way to support something other than gamist resource management, but not really mechanically different. Your still spending in order to gather more than you spent. You just don't need to step on up to do so now (special note: Don't think stepping on up means the PC has to win. Ron has already given his Elfs example...which pretty much says what I'm saying anyway).

Really I'm just repeating myself. There seems to be a missconception that:
If the player is getting what he wants and the PC isn't, that is different from the player getting what he wants and the PC getting what he wants.

In terms of theme or just color, that's the only difference they have between them.

[TonyLB]

Okay, how about we posit Game C:  You can get 50 XP and an ally by defeating the monster, or get 500 XP and the potential ally holds you in contempt if you lose.

Where does that stand in your estimation... still just the same mechanics of resource management?

[Callan S.]

The same. Because if a contemptuous ally is unpleasant for me, then it'll outweigh the 500 XP. So I'll go with the D&D advancement scheme.

However, if as a player I enjoy the idea of a contemptuos ally, then I'll go the D&D advancement scheme and collect both of these rewards. Because either way is D&D like advancement.

The contemptuous ally not being a reward to the PC, doesn't mean it isn't a reward to me, the player. Once you ditch the PC's perspective and see it from where it matters, the player perspective, you see that your collecting two rewards in both cases. In other words, both options are identical, in that they both just present rewards.

Your only case could be that the contemptuous ally might be considered a 'loss' because it might take me out of my comfort zone latter as I squirm in answering some nar question. Fact is though that D&D gamism can equally take me out of my comfort zone as I squirm over tactical descisions. Such squirming isn't a loss in either case, even though it's uncomfortable.


I'll note a clever design mechanic that Ralph described awhile ago. In the thread he described how players will squirm and argue when their PC disadvantages are applied. Because if they can argue their way out of it, they avoid the penalty. Thus arguing is rewarded by the system. So he suggested they actually get a reward when these disads are applied. Soon, he noted, you would find players trying to insert their disads as often as possible. The players themselves would want them there! Because they wouldn't be loosing, even though their PC is.

They would want to use these 'you lose' powers just like they would want to use their 'you win' powers. They'd want to in the same way, because they are the same thing.

[TonyLB]

Okay... so, continuing this logic:  If I want to create a game situation that tells me whether the respect of your ally is worth more or less than 450 XP to you, as a player, Game C provides it, yes?  

I give you a choice, you make it based on your personal (and subjective) standards and then we know.  Maybe you think the contemptuous ally is neat, so you gladly take it, plus the extra 450 XP.  Maybe you value the support you can get from an ally, and think it's worth more than 450 XP, so you win.  Maybe you value the ally, but not 450 XP worth, so you reluctantly lose.

Incentive systems provide an objective currency.  It is then possible to place two items in the balance:  a subjective value ("The value of this ally") and an objective one ("450 XP") and judge how the player compares the two.  To do that you will very often (but not always) be assigning the subjective value alongside character victory.

You're offering the players the opportunity to buy a subjective item in the SIS for the Marginal Cost of Victory (which is the same as the Marginal Benefit of Defeat).  If you want that to be a sensible exchange that they can actually make a choice about then you need the Marginal Benefit of Defeat to be zero or positive, as I've said.


I agree with you that the mechanics of optimizing your resources are largely identical between Capes and D&D.  Offer people the chance to earn a meta-game resource and they will try to do so.

But in concentrating on that you seem to be ignoring how having a Marginal Benefit of Defeat lets you use the system to negotiate in ways that are not available when you have a Marginal Cost of Defeat.  It's not mechanically different, but the social interactions it engenders are nothing alike.  Does that make more sense of what we've been saying?

[Christoph Boeckle]

Very interesting thread!

Let me see if I've followed correctly:

Basically, what is important for a designer is to consider whether it is the player via PC success or the player through a variation of PC success and defeat, who is rewarded (there's also the design that is supposed to support coherence of the PC's actions according to the game world, which is at first view independant of PC victory or success, and this can also be favored by player reward).

In fact, what we're discussing is what kind of CA we want to support.
I'm not saying that Gamism absolutely requires a positive feedback loop, or that Narrativism necessarily demands a negative feedback loop. The fact is that it changes style of play, and we must consider that from that point of view.


Side note: Since we're talking a lot about player choice here, we must avoid situations where a player will be forced to make a certain choice.
For example by awarding exclusively one kind of ressource for success and another for defeat. If both ressources are necessary, the player will have to make the other choice to continue play.