Hello, all, :)

I've been away from this place for almost two years, but now I have something which I think is worth sharing, so, I return.

For the past four and a half years, I've been running a fairly successful 3.5 campaign. It started with everyone at level 1 and rather recently, the last character in the party just reached level 14. (I described the structure of the campaign elsewhere. You can go read it if you want, but it's not central to my point.)

Lately, I've also being playing in a 4e campaign, where we have just reached 6th level, and I've been running another 4e campaign where I ran the mini-scenario at the back of the DMG and am now running Keep on the Shadowfell. The purpose of this other mini-campaign is to familiarize myself with the structure of a 4e game, so that I can put together my own campaign when the 3.5 one draws to a halt.

Most if not all of you already know that, in a 3.x/4e game, or, in fact, in any game, rewards are threefold:

• First and foremost, there are social rewards. All three of these campaigns are unabashedly Gamist in mode. I can tell because of the way social reinforcement works around the whole of the table, in all three of the campaigns. The cheers and the hooplas go to the high d20 rolls. The nods of approval go to the good plans and good ideas. Everyone is most engaged in the game when the challenges are the thickest.
• Secondly, there are rewards in the fiction. Regardless of the motives of the players, for virtually every fight, the characters have a reason to be there, and for them, winning is its own reward. For the players, there's the satisfaction of seeing the storyline advance because of their efforts and success. (In some but not all cases, this falls under Positioning rewards.)
• Lastly, there are the mechanical rewards, namely, XPs, levelling and treasure. It's about this last one I want to talk some about.

From all this playing, I've had a chance to observe up close how XPs come by and how levelling affects the game, in general. The one thing I have noticed across the board is that, win or lose, sooner or later, the XPs always come. They don't really reinforce anything, and because encounter difficulties are supposed to scale up with the characters, they don't make the characters any better at facing challenges, either. As such, they're really not a reward.

(Aside: those of you that don't agree with me might like this proposition better: you can look at group XPs as actually a reward for the GM. The more difficult the encounter, the more XPs you get to give, but you run the risk of having the PCs fail, as well. So, encounter XPs reinforce creating tough but fair challenges.)

By the same token, levelling isn't a reward in and of itself. In all three of these campaigns, all the players are looking forward to levelling, not because it's a reward, but because levelling is what frames the next strategic challenge of how to continue the character build.

Also, if the GM goes strictly by the book, treasure isn't a reward either. It's true that treasure is really only good for acquiring more magical goodies, thus contributing to character Effectiveness. However, treasure is supposed to be given out on successful completion of encounters. As such, it goes hand in hand with XP, and we're right back at having magical goodies scaling in proportion to level. (In fact, in 3.x, XPs are actually Currency, in that they can be traded for magical items, which further reinforces my view that treasure is not independent from XPs and levelling.)

XPs and levelling work really well as a campaign pacing mechanism, though. As the characters come to each new level, the players must come to terms with how to best use their newly found capabilities. This means they are all the more likely to fail encounters at the beginning of the level than at the end. As they begin to consistently succeed at a given level, it's time for them to advance to the next one. Likewise, it's the for the GM to advance to the next level of critters.

So, whether it's XPs, levelling or treasure, we're left with rather solid campaign pacing mechanisms but virtually no mechanical rewards.

(Actually, this is not strictly 100% true. Characters that die get ressurected, and this comes with a cost, either a level and XP cost in 3.x or a temporary Effectiveness cost in 4e. So, one might say that there's mechanical rewards for "not dying", but because the players really play as a group, those particular rewards aren't really leading to any particular behavior, and as such, can probably be discounted from this discussion.)

Now, because social rewards and fiction rewards are so strong and coherent at all three tables, the lack of mechanical rewards isn't really a critical issue per se, and all three games are perfectly functional without them. However, for my upcoming 4e campaign, I'd like to go further and house rule mechanical rewards into the game.

There's two major routes I might take down this road:

• The soft route: detach treasure from XPs. There's many ways to do this. For instance, I might give the players the encounter XPs whether they win or lose the fight, but only give them the treasure if they win.
• The hard route: detach encounter level from character level. Again, there's many ways to do this. For instance, I might give the players XPs and treasure as per the rules, but track the total XPs at stake in every encounter, and scale up the encouters as if the players had won all of them, thus letting the relative difficulty inch upward.

Naturally, the exact details would need to be worked out. Also, either of these routes would probably require some sort of catch-up mechanism to counter-balance streaks of bad luck.

So, while I'd love some suggestions of house rules along either route (or any other route, for that matter), I'd also like to hear your thoughts on the concept of XPs being pacing rather than reward.

Cheers,
J.

I agree with you 150% on this one! I've been saying the same thing for years, that really matches my own experiences with D&D. Of course there might be other groups with different play, but in my play xp has always been a pacing device that controls how the game moves through different crunch environments. I think it's just intellectually easy (and lazy) to equate experience points with the theoretical concept of "reward mechanics", even while xp in many games has little to do with rewards.

The way I play D&D myself, it's really important to lose all the mechanical constraints that limit the mechanical strength of encounters; I all but despise the encounter guidelines in 3rd and 4th edition, as well as the determined wealth-by-level guidelines. It's an important part of the challenge at my table to judge the rewards and dangers for yourself and play accordingly; it's socially rewarded to play heroically, as it's not mandated and definitely not protected in any way. So pulling off a daring strategy makes for the most memorable characters and the biggest applause.

Speaking of rewards, I think that it works quite fine to have money be an in-fiction reward that is used to gauge social reward as well. In other words, characters in my D&D last winter were constantly seeking to get rich, which was in the fiction tied up with the typical mid-eastern fantasy oligarchic society - your social class was basically dependent on how rich you were, as were your challenges in the world, so players found it quite rewarding to gain and lose riches alongside social benefits such as contacts, allies and so on. It was one of many possible "victory conditions", essentially. Wealth thus was certainly part of the reward mechanics in a way that xp wasn't, but this also meant that it was not a mechanical issue in the same way: wealth could buy you advantages in the game, sure, but for the most part the characters didn't reinvest their wealth into their adventuring in the way modern D&D assumes.

It's an interesting question how xp could be a reward mechanism. In some games it is used to reward good roleplaying in a separate after-game judgment phase; perhaps that qualifies.

I would agree about XP in a certain way. Basically players acrue XP...and more XP...and more...how can you lose? Even if your PC dies, that just means going back a bit in an inevitable accumulation. Dying is just slowing the accumulation, it's not losing. And I'd say without losing there is no winning and thus it's not gamist. It may as well be a pacing mechanism. It's easiest if you imagine there was actually some other 'evil' points that add up whenever the players get XP and whoever gets X amount of points first, wins. That way you'd be competing with something and you could lose. But without that competition, even if it's just some evil points that rise on a random dice roll - it's just accumulation and yeah, I'd agree, essentially a pacing mechanic.

I almost wonder, as it's the largest 'reward' cycle there is, whether it can crush gamist impulses out of people regularly exposed to it...except for stubborn ones....*cough*

Slight headscratch here, as I thought that this insight was included in the principle of "reward mechanism": The reward mechanism changes the game in a way that keeps the players interest, and encourages them to stay invested, for example by unlocking new gameplay, so that the person who levels up their character is actually enjoying the change from "fighting goblins" to "fighting dragons".

Increased ability to succeed is no reward, as it just nullifies the challenge, the reward is succeeding at better stuff!

Now this definition can only cover one kind of reward mechanism, but I think it is one; the unlocking of new conflicts as legitimate challenges. Also xp is a reward because it allows players to continue to flesh out their characters with the full force of the rules behind them, by making choices that are appropriate to their character within the class system.

There are many games where winning is a matter of time; almost every computer game in fact, where at no time does the game disk melt because you have failed at something, and not let you retry! In such cases the fact that you can get back up when you trip is less important than the direction you are walking in. 4e seems to get this reasonably well, with the idea of the different tiers and the epic destiny, creating a basic narrative about the character within the level/class system.

Now I should mention that I'm not claiming any dictionary powers here, just thought this stuff was part of the basic assumptions. Rewards/failures being temporary is fine, because they only need to operate on a level that is sufficient for reinforcement. You don't tell your dog off today for what he did a week ago, you forgive and move on, and bizarre though the analogy might be, it is quite similar to the "behaviour altering" component of a reward mechanism.

I also believe that any system that tries to teach players a lesson (in either the aggressive or instructive sense) should really have a lesson to teach, rather than just being a slap on the wrist for not meeting expectations: If you are trying to encourage something with such mechanisms, then you should also put in some work making the thing at the end of it in some sense a reward in itself, so they feel justified in playing your little pavlov game. Make treasure/beating stuff/quest completion matter to the player in their own way.

Now I suspect that last bit is actually very well known, but I thought I'd stick it in anyway.

Ahey, :)

Cool, guys, thanks for your thoughts so far. :)

Eero, on the easy/lazy front, I don't know about that. In early D&D, the dungeons had their levels and encounter difficulty was keyed to dungeon level, not party level. In those circumstances, players had a sense of selecting the "difficulty level" they wanted, and were thus rewarded with XPs for selecting encounters that were tough, but feasible.

You should have no trouble recognizing what I'm talking about, as it's sort of implied here:

Eero wrote: The way I play D&D myself, it's really important to lose all the mechanical constraints that limit the mechanical strength of encounters; [...] It's an important part of the challenge at my table to judge the rewards and dangers for yourself and play accordingly.

JoyWriter wrote: The reward mechanism changes the game in a way that keeps the players interest, and encourages them to stay invested, for example by unlocking new gameplay

JoyWriter wrote: There are many games where winning is a matter of time; almost every computer game in fact, where at no time does the game disk melt because you have failed at something, and not let you retry!

JoyWriter wrote: Make treasure/beating stuff/quest completion matter to the player in their own way.

JMendes wrote: Callan, you may or may not be conflating winning and losing with success and failure, but I'm definitely, emphatically not trying to inject "competition" into the games. You can have strong, solid, functional gamist play without it being competitive.

Ahoy, :)

Callan wrote: at the end of each session the player group got a D6 points plus one for certain objectives met, and 'evil' got a D6 points

Wow, do I really want to get into this conversation. Yeah, I guess so.

J. I agree with you that XP in 3rd+ edition is a pacing mechanism and not a reward mechanism.  I don’t know if this was the original design goal, but that’s how it functions. A reward mechanism in an RPG will encourage/promote the type of behavior that will provide the reward.  3.x/4e play has no real gamist reward save for the subjective fist-pumping and back-patting your group gets from “playing heroically” whether 1st level characters against goblins or 10th level characters against giants.

Yay.

You asked for our thoughts, so here are mine: to me this is pretty lukewarm gamism. In the end you’re not challenging much more than your ability to create an optimal stat-block to run through a formula encounter and earn a set amount of XP to facilitate a formula encounter at a higher level.  Hey, if I wanted to do this kind of thing I’d pay for a World of Warcraft account.

Recently I’ve been going back to my RPG roots…real Old School D&D of the pre-2nd edition variety. The interesting thing about it is that here XP accumulation IS a reward mechanism, not a pacing mechanism, and good play is mechanically rewarded IN PLAY.  Let me just two examples to illustrate:

- XP is gained for actual treasure accumulated.  In general, XP for treasure is present at a much higher frequency than XP for monsters.  What does this mean? Players (not characters) will develop optimal ways of overcoming encounters (sometimes avoiding monsters all together…through stealth, trickery, negotiation) to get the most points (GPs = XPs) for their time and effort. You don’t have to hack, slash, and blow-up every encountered monster simply to “move to the next level of challenge” (3.x/4e play puts monster fights on a premium if you want to “open the new content” of the game).

- Presence of an actual end game. When players accumulate enough XP they can become land owners and rulers…basically becoming kings by their own hand.  Here’s the use for all that XP laden treasure: building castles and hiring retainers. To my mind, this is the ultimate chest-thumping, one-upsmanship of gamist play: MY character’s a duke with acres of land-holdings and hundreds of servants that die for my armies and pay me taxes…what have YOU got?  PCs become actual movers and shakers in the game world, rather than simply wandering soldiers-of-fortune.

So, yeah…I think you’re right on about XP being pacing. My thoughts are that the concept is kind of lame for folks who have a gamist creative agenda. But if that’s what the kids want these days….

Hey, Jonathan, :)

Coolness. We agree on the basics of the nature of XP. :)

By the way, in preparing for this reply, I went back and (re)read your whole "challenge the player" thread... :)

Also, I pretty much have different goals and preferences than you regarding the basics of where the challenge is or should be in any given session of adventure gaming. In our 3.x/4e games, we actually are looking for tactical gamism, and I can pretty much tell you it's there. In 4e, in particular, when we fight, it's not about seeing who wins. It's pretty much foregone that, unless something goes incredibly awry, the PCs are going to win. What I'm interested in is how much is it going to cost them. How many healing surges, and did they use their daily powers or not.

So, let's debate the non-basics, then, and see what sort of dialogue develops from this...

LandonSuffered wrote: You asked for our thoughts, so here are mine: to me this is pretty lukewarm gamism. In the end you’re not challenging much more than your ability to create an optimal stat-block to run through a formula encounter and earn a set amount of XP to facilitate a formula encounter at a higher level.  Hey, if I wanted to do this kind of thing I’d pay for a World of Warcraft account.

LandonSuffered wrote: XP is gained for actual treasure accumulated.  In general, XP for treasure is present at a much higher frequency than XP for monsters.  What does this mean? Players (not characters) will develop optimal ways of overcoming encounters (sometimes avoiding monsters all together…through stealth, trickery, negotiation) to get the most points (GPs = XPs) for their time and effort. You don’t have to hack, slash, and blow-up every encountered monster simply to “move to the next level of challenge” (3.x/4e play puts monster fights on a premium if you want to “open the new content” of the game).

LandonSuffered wrote: Presence of an actual end game. When players accumulate enough XP they can become land owners and rulers…basically becoming kings by their own hand.  Here’s the use for all that XP laden treasure: building castles and hiring retainers. To my mind, this is the ultimate chest-thumping, one-upsmanship of gamist play: MY character’s a duke with acres of land-holdings and hundreds of servants that die for my armies and pay me taxes…what have YOU got?  PCs become actual movers and shakers in the game world, rather than simply wandering soldiers-of-fortune.

Tactics in D&D 3/4 is a matter of efficiency. You said it yourself.

How many spells or daily abilities/powers did you use up? How many items? How many hit points?

The reward is starting the next encounter with above-average resources if you've been efficient or lucky.

This kind of reward falls completely flat if encounters aren't mandatory. If the party can go through a full recovery after every encounter, then efficiency doesn't matter, all that's left if winning the encounter itself, which is practially guaranteed if you're fresh for each fight. The only way to lose is a complete party kill due to an impossible challenge, recognized too late.
I believe that this kind of play isn't step-on-up at all. There's no challenge, just the illusion of challenge.
Recognizing the impossible encounter isn't functional play, it's a GM desperate to introduce real challenge and failing because it's impossible in this context. (Hold on, I'm not saying impossible challenges aren't fair in general, just that they're a possible result of challenge-less play gone wrong. I think a lot of disfunctional party kills are caused by this.)

So what I'm saying is that in D&D, the reward for efficiency manifests from the insistence on a sequence of encounters. It's the last encounter of the day that's the real test. Suviving that last fight, when all becomes desperate, is the reward. When I play D&D, this is what I'm looking for.

There is more to it, though. There are plenty of opportunities to make efficiency and tactics matter in different ways in a single combat. Just pick a criteria and reward it in some way. In fact, players do it all the time without prompting:
I didn't lose any hp!
I got the first kill!
I killed the most baddies!
We didn't use any daily powers!

As GM, you can insert stuff that has more teeth, like:
Finish the encounter within four rounds, or the ship departs without you!
If you damage anything in the room you invoke the duke's wrath!
If anyone gets bloodied in this fight, you're met with scron.

Hey, :)

Jasper, you and I, totally aligned. Totally. :) You'd have fun in my upcoming 4e thingie.

Jasper wrote: This kind of reward falls completely flat if encounters aren't mandatory.

[...]

in D&D, the reward for efficiency manifests from the insistence on a sequence of encounters. It's the last encounter of the day that's the real test. Suviving that last fight, when all becomes desperate, is the reward.

Jasper wrote: As GM, you can insert stuff that has more teeth, like:
Finish the encounter within four rounds, or the ship departs without you!
If you damage anything in the room you invoke the duke's wrath!
If anyone gets bloodied in this fight, you're met with scorn.

:) Well then you better write some AP posts about it when it happens!

JMendes wrote: I plan to hold a tight grip on the daily pacing, for exactly this reason. The trick is finding the balance. The 4e DMG is very explicit about how many encounters you need to face per level and about the encounter difficulty mix, but then, there's this whole array of daily effects and the significance of the extended rest is monumental, and yet, the DMG is eerily silent on a recommended number of encounters per day... :| It's one of the major flaws in the game balance as written, AFAICT...

Im having difficulty squaring the following circle:

i)  D&D - in any incarnation - needs the PCs in a party to be relatively equal level
ii) Meaningful xp rewards would mean having PCs at different levels

The more i think about it, the more i feel that "increased character effectiveness" isnt much of  a "Reward".

For the group, effectiveness brings on more powerful foes. But, while new challenges may be fun, is bringing them on quicker more fun? Why not take the scenic route to power?

And then, within the party, different character effectiveness opens a whole can of worms.

JMendes wrote: Indeed. I plan to hold a tight grip on the daily pacing, for exactly this reason. The trick is finding the balance. The 4e DMG is very explicit about how many encounters you need to face per level and about the encounter difficulty mix, but then, there's this whole array of daily effects and the significance of the extended rest is monumental, and yet, the DMG is eerily silent on a recommended number of encounters per day... :| It's one of the major flaws in the game balance as written, AFAICT...

Hey, guys, :)

Jasper, sounds wicked! :)

NN, here's the squaring of your circle: while individual rewards are certainly significant when it comes to reinforcing behavior, I could do with group rewards as well. As for your second post, well, ten encounters per level is the scenic route. ;)

Callan, no, I can't seem to wrap my brain around that concept. Structurally, resting as a tool for dealing with challenges is a part of normal gamist play. (As such, limiting those rests is a part of normal gamist challenge framing.) However, resting as an "authorship tool" in a gamist game is perhaps swimming too close to Czege Principle waters.

Cheers,
J.

P.S. For those not familiar with it, the Czege Principle states that when the same person is responsible for authoring the challenge and adressing it, play is not fun.

Well, I've constructed duke nukem 3D levels for myself, and they were fun. The thing was, I built a challenge inside of the aim and shoot in three dimensions challenge that was duke nukem. It was a blend of the game engines challenge plus the challenge I built, rather than addressing only the challenge I had made. That's basically how I've always seen RPG's - what you make, mid play even, blends with the challenge present in the mechanics. Except that yeah, most RPGs present a half arsed challenge, so it's mostly what you make and yeah, Czerge principle in effect (that or they take so much book work that you hardly get to the challenge for all the handling time)

Resting can be used an an authorship tool, in that regard, to design challenge - ie, this much health when we go in, not that much. As much as I could click and drop a health pack in a duke nukem level. Or maybe I saw too much in the whole thing, even if it could be used that way.

(As such, limiting those rests is a part of normal gamist challenge framing.)

Hi, :)

Callan wrote: it can be the players (playing out an authorship of challenge role) that can limit the rests as part of challenging themselves. It doesn't have to default to always just being the GM challenging everyone. It's not just the narrativists who can distribute GM duties.

Well, to be honest it could be more explicit - like the conducts in nethack (which you don't have to do, but you can aim for as extra challenge), like vegetarian, used no wishes, no genocides, etc. Here you could have it if you only use X amount of rests it keeps to a certain conduct (and using no rests at all an even better conduct). Makes it a bit more explicit ... okay, I'll stop now ;)

Hi João and thanks for posting this AP, which made a lot of sense to me in lights of a hack for 3.0 I had implemented some two years ago.

The idea was to play D&D almost by the book, but I wanted to add more weight to XP. So, in addition to gaining XP by overcoming encounters, each player would have about 10% of the total XP necessary to level up which he had to give out in as many chunks as he wanted and in any distribution he deemed fit amongst the other players, for any reason whatsoever. In effect, this was almost always tied to the social rewards. The GM also had to give out a bonus chunk of XP to the party if the adventure was completed with less than a predetermined number of rests. In this way, the party could decide if they wanted to risk dying to get the bonus or just rest some more (we didn't use wandering monsters).
Resurrection was not a big topic: a character could be brought back at the expense of a certain percentage of the XP necessary to level up. Spells would then work as a more convenient way to get characters back fighting, much as in World of Warcraft. Also, resting gave back more HP, so that the priest would not waste too many spells in boring healing to avoid resting three days in a row..
Another important aspect was that the GM had to bring in strategic choices in his adventure design: sometimes the party would be face with mutually exclusive choices, which would be weighed out in terms of risk and profit. Coupled with the bonus XP for finishing the adventure "rapidly", this was supposed to give some interesting risk management.
This last point worked out okay-ish, but the others worked rather well.

Would this be an interesting use of XP as reward mechanic (in addition to the pacing mechanic it anyway is as you have shown) or do you see problematic points we hadn't had the chance to stumble upon during the five or six sessions we played (characters went from level 1 to level 4: we had agreed on fast leveling)?

Ahey, :)

Yeah, that sounds solid for 3.0. Would work even better for 4E, as characters simply recover all their hit points and healing surges after resting.

Christoph wrote: Spells would then work as a more convenient way to get characters back fighting

Christoph wrote: Another important aspect was that the GM had to bring in strategic choices in his adventure design: sometimes the party would be face with mutually exclusive choices, which would be weighed out in terms of risk and profit.

Hi João

I really need to play some D&D 4.0 (and Tunnels & Trolls à la sauce Eero) then!

Yeah, what I was saying regarding the spells, was that in other incarnations of D&D, the priest would spend whole days just healing people... with this tweak, healing was rather used for gaining an edge in combat (and D&D 4.0 seems to go farther still, which is cool in my opinion).

An example of a strategic choice given by adventure design! Two paths: one dangerous because of monsters (combat!), the other because of the bad conditions of the path itself (find a good idea to pass the chasm!) The party has to assess it's strength and weaknesses before going ahead. Kind of. In practice, it wasn't that revolutionary: in the end, it all came down to HP anyway. It was very basic, but interesting nonetheless. It doubles the prep though, so to speak.
Most dungeons I had used before would go along the lines of "go in, visit all the rooms, clean them out and don't leave a single thing behind." This design brings in some strategical dilemma.

But I don't want to derail from the central idea of the thread! I'm really interested to read more about your experiences on this topic, to better understand to which extent XPs are a pacing mechanism and/or a reward mechanism.

Hoy, :)

Christoph wrote: Two paths: one dangerous because of monsters (combat!), the other because of the bad conditions of the path itself (find a good idea to pass the chasm!)

Christoph wrote: I'm really interested to read more about your experiences on this topic, to better understand to which extent XPs are a pacing mechanism and/or a reward mechanism.

First of all, excellent post.

The hard route: detach encounter level from character level.

I guess I should also add that, in my experience, when the PCs died and I had them remake characters more than 1 level below the rest of the group, they were unusually fragile and ineffective compared with other game systems. They hardly contributed to combat compared to the others and had to go to lengths to avoid dying in simple fights... after a few weeks of this, I made sure the PCs were within a level of each other, since the system became dysfunctional when they split apart. Again, if someone was 3 levels higher, which happened once, they were a relative god compared to the others, and it either became boring for them, or sucky for the others being who seemed unnecessary at times.

Using xp as a reward system may cause problems with the party in this system, since the scaling is so particular.