Communicating the social contract

[Bob McNamee]

I have a whole list of those sorts of rewards for Universalis on the website. Either sporadic rewards, or for "jobs". That is, the host should be reimbursed for hosting, etc.

In the game online, at the end of last session, I Gimmicked in a payment schedule for Bob McNamee who does all the session recording. At the beginning of each session that he's done his job, he'll get 5 more Coins.

Mike

Hey!

Thanks! I didn't notice that Gimmick!
I do like spending my Coins!

[clehrich]

Seems to me that the best thing one could do, really, is take the whole text Harlequin has written, condense it a bit, and ask all the players to read it.  Then everybody discusses a bit, then you get cracking on your game, whatever it may be and whatever its mechanics may be.  Once you've got everyone aware of the issues, in a clear, simple form, you're a long way toward solving the problems.  

Mechanizing isn't going to help, IMO, because as Harlequin pointed out, it's going to seem intrusive.  I really like grouped reward systems, such that everyone decides together whom to reward, but keeping the rewards pretty limited in number.  This will fail horribly if the group is really dysfunctional socially, but so will just about everything else.

As a final note, I do think that any form of punishment system is a very bad idea.  The punishment for being late should be peer-constructed shame.  If that doesn't bother the person, then taking points or dice away isn't going to help matters.  What you've got to get is player consensus that punctuality matters.  If everyone agrees on this, then the one guy who's always late is going to get the hairy eyeball from everyone else.