[D20 Arcana Evolved] How do I improve my reward cycle

[Sean]

Hi Frank.

I think you're onto it. If people are really into being their characters, then keys - hero points - reinforcing who your character is cycle can be a feedback loop after all, because then you rake in the more hero points for being more who you are. Just keep the xp awards more or less constant to ensure that the party stays together, and let hero points drive the reward cycle.

Well, and magic items. Magic items are always a joy in D&D.

The MVP thing might bring the wife out, or not. Of course you might try to set it up for her to do something cool and encourage the other players to vote for her if she seems like a credible candidate during some session - but it's really impossible to judge how social stuff like that is going to play out at a table I haven't seen. For instance - if the guys got jacked up over the reward, would she respond to their enthusiasm positively or negatively? That's really hard for anyone but you and your group to say.

Best,

Sean

[Chris Geisel]

A quick question: did the players choose their own Keys? I ask because I ran a two-shot d20 adventure with pregens, using the Sweet20 system. I found that some players got saddled with Keys that they just weren't that interested in, because I chose the Keys when I made the characters.

Whether or not they chose the Keys, now that you've all seen them in action, why not have a session where you ask people if they want to change up the Keys? Brainstorm some new Keys, as a group so you'll all vibe off each other, and then start the next game with an opportunity for the players who are changing Keys to buy off their old ones and replace them. Bingo! They'll get a nice bump in XP, plus they'll get a new Key, that hopefully they grok better than the last one.

When I read the Sweet20 rules, I got the distinct impression they haven't been extensively playtested, so you might want to tweak them a bit. Or even ask a player to swap out one like Bloodlust... presumably, even folks with Bloodlust have their lust for blood sated, eventually.

Also, beware Keys that reward mere color (the Scary Key could easily fall into that category, depending on how it's played in your group). I had a character with a Key that revolved around his insatiable Hunger... the intention being that he would take big risks to devour people that he shouldn't, and get himself into trouble. But I made a mistake and made the smallest XP award in the Key be merely for "shirking your duty to feed". The player racked up tons of XP, simply by noting that he'd eat something just before each scene. It became increasingly difficult to arrange consequences for the behavior, so he often got 'free' XP for very little risk.

Consider, if the Scary guy makes the rest of the party uncomfortable... but there's no consequences (they still trust him, etc), it's just free XP. Hardly seems fair when another PC has to actually sacrifice wealth or enter into mortal combat to earn his points.

[Kerstin Schmidt]

I agree with those who are recommending a simpler reward mechanism. You're currently using three things for rewards (and that's not counting treasure for the moment), none of which are being used the way they were designed:

- XP, awarded arbitrarily, so people can level up now and then - this is a change from the default XP tables.
- Keys, an incentive to players to decice what they wish to be rewarded for - this is a change from Clinton's system in that this doesn't give XP. I suspect he had a good reason for making Keys tie into XP, XP and levelling (and the effect of levelling up) being at the core of d20.
- Hero points, with a mixed bag of effects, involving a general "other things" clause if I read you correctly. Conan RPG does a similar thing with Fate Points (awarded arbitrarily by the GM), the designer wanted to promote bits of narr play with this - but as far as I remember, what FPs can be used for is defined quit a bit more narrowly than what you're doing.

Not saying that any of this is necessarily wrong, but taken together it seems unnecessarily complicated and a hell of a lot of changes to default rules for no very clear reason.  

The Key of Healing: this was player defined, defined to be sort of like Key of Conscience. One issue is that players want to create their own keys, but we haven't really sat down and worked out just how the key should work.

You're kidding, right? You say this is one of the ones that made Keys not work for the group, yet you haven't so much as defined it?  If you want to stay with Keys in whatever capactiy, that one would be easy to fix. :-)

Further if you want to keep using Keys, reread Vow. It's not what you're describing in your first post, which might be part of the player's struggle in using it to any good effect (if he's trying to use it as witten while you're applying the definition in your post above).

Now there is a question, which is part of my big question, is leveling up and gaining treasure in D20 part of the reward cycle if everyone gets the same amount, and the reward isn't directly tied to events in play?

Not sure what you're asking. Levelling up is _the_ reward system in d20 games. Disconnecting it from events play takes the edge off play and takes away the point of using d20 in the first place, to a large extent. Yes, many groups play like this. I've played and DMed like this. The real question in these cases is, why use d20 in the first place?

Please don't say it's "because everyone knows it". No one in your game knows the reward mechanism you're using because you're in the process of inventing it, pulling elements from different reward systems and cobblng them together. You're replacing a large chunk of d20 with something else you are having to invent. Doesn't mean d20 is necessarily the wrong rules set for you to be using, but it makes me wonder why you're finding it necessary to drift this far from default reward rules (=XP tables).

Using a hero point to enable something cool is also good (M used a hero point to jump a balcony and land safely, despite his heavy armor - good start, but the followthrough failed since he didn't have the speed to chase the opponents - I needed to do something a bit more there, or make sure the player had a stash of hero points so he could then have burned another to catch up with an opponent).

A thought on the side: in a situation like this I'd tend to have the opponents react in a manner that still lets the PC look cool. Maybe they're so flummoxed by the armored guy coming bouncing up like a rubber ball that immediate flight didn't occur to them on their next turn...

My initial use of Sweet 20 was definitely not functional. If I didn't want to have people leveling up at different rates, giving individual XP is absolutely the wrong way to accomplish that.

Ok, cool. One goal defined: what you want are flat XP awards. This pretty much also rules out individual XP awards for cool stuff done, because it'd cause some people to get ahead (if slightly) of others over time.

Of course players with a higher "coolness factor" may well keep reaping more hero points simply by doing cool stuff spending hero points. As in your play example. "You bounce up on that balcony in full armor? Coool. Here, take a HP."

So the question is how stringent you want to be with flat awards, or how much room you'd like to leave for players doing "cool things". What leads to the further question (possibly not easy for you to answer at this point) what "cool things" you and the group want to encourage in players.





Kerstin

[Kerstin Schmidt]

And perhaps it's as simple as that. Tell the players that the idea is for them to define what is cool about their character, and then play the character, and get feedback in the way of hero points which the player can use to help further demonstrate their character (part of which is denying death, saying "no, I'm not done with this character yet." or "my character doesn't go down in the fight, he's cool and shrugs off the deadly blow and keeps on fighting.").

So you're adding arbitrary heo point awards to arbitrary XP awards. :-) Again, just saying. It might be a workable way for you to go. But the more I read this, the less I'm getting why you're using d20. Have you considered playing other games and trying out whether another shoe might be a better fit?

On the other hand, this player may not be proactive ever. This is the young wife, the one who really shrinks into her shell, and may be there primarily to enable her husband's play. Though she does come out of that shell, sometimes to say really random, but energizing things, sometimes with a quite logical contribution. So she is contributing to the game. I'd just like to find a way to get the feedback loop going with her.

I'd love to discuss this further, I've always loved bringing new players into the hobby and on the whole have had more succes with them than with trying to convert well-entrenched veterans to new forms of play. Want to start a separate thread, Frank? :-)


Kerstin

[Jasper Polane]

Hi Frank,

I have a little difficulty understanding why you changed your reward system. D&D is all about killing monsters and dodging traps, that's why you get XP for it: It's the point of play.

From what little I know about your game and old Judges Guild modules, the characters in the game are still fighting monsters, right? If that's the case, D&D's standard XP system would work pretty good for you. So, why change it?

--Jasper

[Mike Holmes]

I have a little difficulty understanding why you changed your reward system. D&D is all about killing monsters and dodging traps, that's why you get XP for it: It's the point of play.

Well, he's changing it because he knows that he really doesn't want to play "killing monsters and dodging traps" as the focus of play.

The real question is why he's not playing TSOY, given that he's using it's reward system.

Or, rather, you seem to be creating a system, Frank, by cobbling together cool parts of other games. Well, that's going to give you some random focus to the game. Which, unsurprisingly, you've found is coming out crappy.

Instead, decide on what sort of game you want to play first, and then we can discuss what reward system you want to use to cause that. Until you've decided what sort of game you want to see, speculation as to how to tweak the reward system can only be answered, "tweaked to do what?"

Sweet20, is designed, I believe, to create functional narrativism in the context of otherwise gamism producing D20 rules. The resulting beast is, I think, odd, but probably playable in the sort of way that Hackmaster is playable. Almost tongue in cheek, where the combat resolution is like watching a long Buffy fight in which she's talking to the antagonist a lot about her personal problems. That is, the fights are no longer really the focus, but just fun to watch as they happen.

Is that what you thought the system would do? What you wanted it to do?

Attaching cool things to the game system and hoping that they make it better is like putting a blower on the engine of your AMC Gremlin. It's simply not going to alter the system like you'd like, and is going to look pretty odd in the end. Oh, it might be fun and useful in some ways or to somebody. But it just might not be what you wanted.

Mike

[Sean]

In Frank's defense, I think he's on to something.

He's not using the Keys for Narrativism, he's using them for Simulationism. The idea is that you define what you want your character to be like, what you want to it to do in play, and then when you do that, you get rewarded somehow.

Having the reward be xp is problematic in D&D for reasons Frank understands and we've already hashed out in the thread. So he wants to make the reward be hero points instead - not for the purpose of narrativism so much as for character preservation (since exploring character and setting is what they're focused on here) and for the ability to keep doing what your character does well (which further defines the character as 'the healing guy' or 'the heroic warrior' or whatever). And, perhaps with some tweaking, I think this is a great choice for him - he can create a feedback loop a little like Luke's Artha feedback loop, though probably with different CA priorities.

I don't want to put too many more words in Frank's mouth for him but I do sort of feel like a lot of the posters on this thread are missing a lot of what he's saying. He's enjoying his game more, is using the term 'reward system' correctly, and has a clear problem that he's trying to solve. This is a very focused request on his part for figuring out how to reward the kinds of play he wants to reward.

[iago]

Oh, I'm not missing that really, but I am suggesting that the nar take on them does, at least, provide some of the balance that simply isn't inherently there in keys as they stand. 

Some keys are going to have a vast abundance of opportunities to operate, whereas others are going to have to have things deliberately put in their way by the GM.  If Frank isn't inclined to put those things in the way of the "less abundantly available" keys, then those keys become bad choices.

There are a few fixes I could see for this -- for example, the keys that are most abundant in their triggering could have the smallest rewards, while "narrower" or "rarer" ones would get bigger dollops when they have an opportunity to get relevant.  In general, the rewards need to be tuned such that each player is getting about the same quantity of reward over a largeish length of time.  Or, instead, situationally, you could leave the narrower/rarer keys as is, and simply inflict greater consequences for pursuing the more common/abundantly available keys (like bloodlust).  But that may skate too close to a non-Sim way of addressing things again.

[Jasper Polane]

Well, he's changing it because he knows that he really doesn't want to play "killing monsters and dodging traps" as the focus of play.

The real question is why he's not playing TSOY, given that he's using it's reward system.

Actually, I wasn't asking about the keys specifically. If the characters level up by gaining arbitrary XP awards, I think that is the primary reward system. Hero points, in Arcana Evolved, are more of an add-on.

The reason I don't understand the changes is because all the bits about the game - the running combats, the spellcasting doors, destroying magic gems, etc - reads as standard D&D play to me. It's the kind of play the default XP rewards works well for. So if you're going to play that way, why change it?

--Jasper

[ffilz]

Wow, what a flood of responses. Give me a while to catch up and think about these.

Thanks

Frank

[jaw6]

What do I want my reward system to achieve? I like the idea of hero points to give the players more control.
Hi, Frank --

I think this is the real question, and you're not really answering it. To me, at least, a reward system is some kind of carrot; it incentivizes certain play activities, as well as setting up the pace of development of some game resource.

What kinds of activities do you want to reward? What sort of pace do you want to set?

[Christopher Weeks]

I have a question about d20 -- I haven't played it.  Do the various classes all level at the same bars these days?  When I was last playing D&D, you'd have like seventh level magic users with ninth level fighters and tenth level theives...or something like that, because of the different progressions.  And it was all good.  And even, a fourth and seventh level fighter could adventure together as long as the expectations were set realistically.  Has that changed?  I'm wondering why it's bad to let them level at different rates -- not that I'm arguing for it, just curious.

So xp will be static and equal -- the party will level together.  And keys or something will produce hero points that can be used for cool effects and mortality aversion.  What else?

Frank's not going to play those other games because, as he has written in the past, he doesn't know how to find players for them.  Now, I know Frank in person, and I think the real deal is that he doesn't particularly want to play those games.  I think he wants the good parts of the 'good ole days' with some modern tweaks.  And I think Sean's right that he's onto something.  But I do think he wants to play the "killing monsters and dodging traps" game, but with some fun and intelligent veneer.  Is that fair Frank?

[Eero Tuovinen]

As if there's not games for that. Play Donjon.

[ffilz]

Chris Weeks - yes, D20 has unfied the XP scale so all characters level at the same rate. At the same time, they've made character building a much more interesting exercise, because instead of the old style multi-classing where you were a fighter/magic user and split your XP 50-50, each level, you choose which class to level up in (so a 3rd level character might be a fighter 3, a wizard 3, a fighter 2/wizard 1, or a fighter 1/wizard 2). Additionally they've added skill choices, feat (special ability) choices, and attribute increases. They've also formalized point buy for attributes (though you can still roll).

You're also right in that I want to run that old style killing monsters and dodging traps (well, not so much dodging traps these days), but with a little something on top tying in together. In fact that's essentially what I used in my recruiting pitch. I wouldn't quite say that I'm not interested in "those other games" but you're right in that at least right now, I have little interest in running them (I do actually have an interest in playing them). (And actually, an area where I do have an interest in doing something different from that old school D&D is the LEGO pirate gaming that I've been running at cons).

So take it as a given that I'm not looking for Nar play, and I don't want to sneak up on it either.

That being said, if everyone gets the same XP (and really, I don't see much of a gap between everyone gets 300 XP because the party defeated 4 CR 3 monsters and everyone gets 300 XP because that's the rate I want to hand out XP - the main difference is possibly that with the XP by CR the players have some control over pacing by trying to be more efficient at play [however that might manifest itself]). But fundamentally the XP is not an individual reward system, so the individuals are getting rewarded somewhere else (or am I wrong there - is that player ability to optimize for faster XP important?).

Now I really like hero points, even if they wind up mostly as get out of death free cards. The old days sucked with divine intervention where I rolled percentile dice and if I grooved on the number that came up and I liked the character, the character was saved and if not... Also, despite my interest in "realistic combat" (whatever the heck that is with some characters manifesting firebombs and flying sprytes and dragons and whatnot), I like the idea of hero points allowing PCs to stretch the rules somehow.

With all of this, I think the reason the counters never really came into play in our play so far (once the spryte had to accept -2 XP for coward to fly into a melee to heal a PC, but this was countered by a +5 XP for healing at personal risk) is that we are not interested in addressing premise. I think I grok what Nar play is all about, and I think I understand just how those keys work for Nar play. But Nar is not what we're about. But that doesn't mean that the idea of the player defining just what it is he should be rewarded for doesn't have merit in Gam or Sim play.

Stepping back a bit - I think leveling up is part of the reward cycle, but it feels flat with everyone getting flat XP. The previous campaign started to fall apart when I instituted flat XP. Though part of the problem there was that I was giving absent players XP also, but if there is a goal to keep everyone the same level, and there are players who are absent with any frequency, you need to give them XP even though they aren't there. One of the big problems - characters became throw away (since you could start a new PC at the same level). So purely flat XP doesn't work. So that's why I'm looking to hero points to be the non-flat part of the reward system.

I also have to feel that somehow I'm doing something right. I've got more dedicated players than I've perhaps ever had. I've got players telling me at the end of the session that they had a good time. A player choose to play Tuesday night before having to get up early for a flight to GenCon (ok, maybe he was just getting an early start on the low sleep mode of con attendees).

Chris (Bankuei) - interesting thought to reward everyone. So your suggestion is use the keys, but when the healer does something worth 5 XP, everyone gets 5 XP? That does allow the players to have control over the rate (by being efficient) PLUS they get to define the type of activity that will be rewarded. But Iago does have a point that the keys do have to mesh with the module in play (or inform the choice of module, but I have to admit that part isn't working for me. The players keys have not really helped me choose modules or encounters at all, perhaps partly because I don't operate on that level of detail when prepping. One phase of D&D I never got into was the plotted campaign arcs where I knew everything that was going to happen, in my play, I present a module, and let the players make of it what they will with it (the only caveat being that if they choose not to engage the module at all, we might have to skip the session, or I'll be running something mighty off the cuff [which is a lot harder with D20 than the systems I used in the past]).

Sean: would the wife respond to excited players? I'm really not sure. I'm honestly somewhat at a loss how to reach out to her. I have talked to her and her husband some, and I understand her learning disabilities are quite a serious impact. I do know that it's easy to put too much pressure on her and have her freeze up (in the previous campaign, she had a translator character and a translation opportunity came up, she froze up when put on the spot, and didn't even loosen up when we told her all she had to do was say "I'll translate everything they say" and then we just talk as a group with the understanding she's translating). From out joint and failed attempt to play in a Fudge game, I know that one of the big reasons the couple is playing with me is that I accomodate them. As Kerstin requested, I may start a separate thread for more discussion along those lines (hmm, Kerstin, is this what you actually wanted a new thread for? The wife isn't exactly a new player, she has played in a variety of games for at least two years now).

Chris G (ok, folks, can we have a few more Chris's here...:-): the players choose their own keys. The players have changed up their keys, but we're still having trouble getting definitions. Clearly if we continue with something like this, I need to freeze the game, and resolve as a group whether we want the keys at all, and if so, how they are going to work. I am worried about passive color keys, but so long as the player has to make an effort, and that effort adds to the game atmosphere, I'm cool. The way the player is playing scary, it's working good (it actually is driving into a sort of over the top metagame atmosphere that is part of what I like about the game - I'm not describing it well at all, but what's happening is exactly why I really miss player J - his atmospheric posturing was what immediately made me want him in my games, and actually, where the young couple does come out is in this atmospheric banter).

Oh, and why use D20? Because it really is easier to recruit players for D20. If I had my druthers, I'd be playing Cold Iron (though I will admit that I'm not sure Cold Iron cuts it any more - perhaps it does need a rewrite), or Rune Quest, though I also have to admit that I enjoy building characters in D20. Maybe some other time I'll look into some of the newer games.

I think I'm coming to the conclusion that things aren't all that broke, or at least aren't very far from being fixed. I'm thinking a little "we need to talk about how this hero point reward system is really going to work, and what we're trying to do with it so we're all on the same page" will help things. It's possible the answer is just return to standard D&D XP, but my gut feeling is the players do like the idea (and part of the problem may just be that they've never had the power to define what things they get rewarded for in the past).

Frank

[Bankuei]

Hi Frank,

That's pretty close to what I'm talking about.  What I would do (take, leave, use parts as you see fit):

1) Reward the whole group for the actions of any individual, but divide the points up (reward right away, scene by scene, also).
2) Multiply the Sweet20 xp by 100 and run it through the normal D&D xp progression
-Because 100 xp is easier to divide 3 ways than 1 point
-Because D20 players like to see big numbers
-And finally, it slows progression at higher levels, which is something a lot of D&D/D20 players actually prefer... they like to work for it
3) Change their Keys from rewarding an activity to rewarding address of theme or emotion...

That is, rewarding Scary, Healing, or Bloodlust really doesn't do much than simply lock players into repeating activities for their characters.  Rewarding stuff like, "Compassion", "Vow of Revenge", or "Vow to never turn my back on my friends", is a lot more meaningful.  That is, if that's what you really want with this. 

4) Change Keys to ones that better fit the module (and remind players that they CAN change Keys during play if necessary).

Chris

PS- I would still reward monster mashing as well, otherwise, just play TSOY.