I actually think the Pavlovian system can be made to work well, but the trick is to do it without it becoming the GM and all his dogs. A trick I'd like to see done more is to have the player group assign rewards at the end of session.

In my own game, Shadows in the Fog, each session ends with the players voting on a series of "bests": best scene, best action, best player. The GM should try to establish pretty early what he or she has in mind, and make them fit the style of the game. For example, "best action" might be the action which best moved things forward, or saved everyone's bacon, or was simply too cool, or whatever; best scene might be anything from the funniest to the one in which a character was most clearly and powerfully expressed as a person, depending on group priorities. I have proposed that (1) you can't vote for yourself, and also (2) you don't have to vote for anyone for each of these things, meaning that not every session will have every one of these rewards handed out --- a really dull session might have none. The reward for a "best" is something fairly important in game terms: experience, privileges, money, beer, whatever. Ideally, what happens in a great session is that the voting is obvious: everyone immediately agrees, "Oh yeah, Frank's crosstalk number with the big spider was awesome, he gets best scene, no question about it."

The idea is that the players will start competing to be the best, and will also think back across each session's play in terms of "highs." This encourages them to strive for "highs." To take the converse, the Blorg example, this player isn't likely to get voted "best" much, because he's annoying the other players. But in terms of positive thinking, a system like this really works on social rewards: you may get some experience points or whatever, but what you really get is the adulation of your friends. In order to get that, you have to make the game good for everyone.

One additional point to make here is that I think this system would be helpful for GMs struggling with their player groups. If the group is adamant about rewarding things the GM thinks are stupid or annoying, and they do not want to reward the things the GM likes, then the GM has to accept that this group has different priorities from his or her own. I think Simulationist play especially can be quite tricky to figure out, in the sense that it's not always clear exactly what the players really want. Once you know, you can give it to them, and by this system you will quickly find out what they like in very specific terms.

Hey Chris,

The idea is that the players will start competing to be the best, and will also think back across each session's play in terms of "highs."....what you really get is the adulation of your friends. In order to get that, you have to make the game good for everyone.

Unless you proscribe OOC conversation, players will quickly learn that their personal receptiveness to input from other players will have a big positive impact on the post-session voting. Someone taking your suggestion creates an investment by you in their character.

And people in general have very sophisticated story intuitions; whether they can articulate them or not, whether they can tell a story well or not, most people appreciate characters who struggle with meaningful issues, rather than merely stylish or well-characterized characters.

What I'm saying is, expect your voting system to provoke Narrativist play.

Paul

What I'm saying is, expect your voting system to provoke Narrativist play.

Personally, I skip Pavlov and go right to Skinner.

Like Collectible Card Games, lots of 'rares' at first; Skinner says it makes high learning curve more palatable. High numbers of rewards later on causes the learning to fail to be 'steady.' As your set increases, the frequency of 'rares' you don't already have goes down; Skinner says infrequent rewards benefit 'later learning' stages. I'm super-generalizing, but if you're going to use behavioural psychology (is that what it's called?) Skinner's work is probably a better model.

So think "Rats!" not "You dogs!"

Fang Langford

I think Paul's Narrativist bias is showing. People have a razor sharp sense of simulation as well, donchaknow. And what about all of our inner gamists?

In not defining "best" players will assume that this means whatever they want it to mean. Thus a player who kills the most monsters in one scene could be considered to have had the best scene by Gamist players. Further, the rewards seem to be malleable as well, meaning that they can promote any style based on what the players select.

I think that what C has is a really interesting transitional reward system.

The problem becomes incoherecy amongst players. If three are playing Sim, and another want's to play Gamist, then that player isn't going to ever get rewarded, and feel left out. This will teach him to play the way the other players play, certainly, but may make him unhappy in doing so. Which may cause a player to drop out.

I can't decide if this is a bug or a flaw. It would make the game the first to have a self-correcting mechanism for incoherence. But at the risk of alienating players. Perhaps if there were a priority bitch sessoin before the game, players could decide if they could survive the given group. One could suggest what he'd vote for, and what sort of rewards would be given.

BTW, how are the rewards chosen? By whom?

Mike

Hey Mike,

People have a razor sharp sense of simulation as well, donchaknow. And what about all of our inner gamists?

I completely agree. But I think it's irrelevant to the conversation we're having. Outside the context of explicit guidelines about what a "best scene" might be, people are going to rely on their instincts to inform their voting, the same instincts responsible for whether they even pay attention to the scene at all. Dramatic, emotionally resonant, Narrativist play will capture votes at the expense of otherwise well executed Gamist or Simulationist play.

Paul

Paul Czege wrote: Outside the context of explicit guidelines about what a "best scene" might be, people are going to rely on their instincts to inform their voting, the same instincts responsible for whether they even pay attention to the scene at all. Dramatic, emotionally resonant, Narrativist play will capture votes at the expense of otherwise well executed Gamist or Simulationist play.

Couple of thoughts here,

John wrote:

My observation was that it tended to make players compete more for spotlight time, and emphasized many of the more obvious acting bits like doing accents or mannerisms.

I think that what C has is a really interesting transitional reward system.

The problem becomes incoherecy amongst players. If three are playing Sim, and another want's to play Gamist, then that player isn't going to ever get rewarded, and feel left out. This will teach him to play the way the other players play, certainly, but may make him unhappy in doing so. Which may cause a player to drop out. I can't decide if this is a bug or a flaw.

Hi Chris,

I'm glad to see that you're considering the pitfalls of a voting or other interpersonal reward mechanic. In my experience, or from my perspective, such things don't fly well unless everyone already agrees - the same reason why voting often a poor way to decide things in small groups, because it doesn't handle disagreement. "So what if you three think we two are wrong?" is a pretty justifiable statement.

I'm a little puzzled about the goal of your proposed approach - is it to smooth out existing hassles about goals of play? Is it to reflect an already-existing set of goals in the absence of an EP/skill-increase system? Is it to accomodate a variety of goals at once? Or ...?

Best,
Ron

In case anyone's confused, I split the above posts from the "Likely" characters thread.

Best,
Ron

I have a datapoint. Some time ago, in our long-running mage game, we started compiling a list of "quotable lines", the kind of things you find in .sigs (which is what it was inspired by). At the end of each session, people would try to recall the one-liners of particular humour or other interest into a list which appeared on a web-page since deceased. It also partly arose becuase we knew we had laughed at prior sessions but not necessarily what about. You coldn;t be nominated by yourself and anything that went on the list would need broad if informal consent.

Anyway, to the point. This was not done for in game rewards of any sort, but did provoke a certain somewhat attention to what was said and by whom; people took notes sometimes. This occasisonally intruded in play but was not too disturbing. Overall I liked the result and wish I still had the list now, but unfortunately it was lost. Overall, I think it did, certainly at first, add a certain spice to play, and perhaps a certain confidence in it as entertainment (rather than just wish fulfillment). It should also be noted that there was a massive imbalance in who got recorded, in that some people are just plain funnier than others. I also felt it helped improve IC play becuase none of these could be taken from OOC statements. But I didn't feel, as I feared I might, that play had become stilted, probably because it was not geared to some sort of in-game benefit, and therefore could not be exploited for tactical benefit.

I'm not sure how I feel about the voting aspect, but I definitely see a value in creating a system that allows the players to give in-game rewards for metagame values. I think the best example of this to date is Fang's Scattershot experience dice, when folks just start handing them to the player that's doing good.

One option if you do consider going with the voting system is to save the final vote to the end of the session, but give each player a set of chips with their initials, perhaps with different colors to represent best scene, action, and player, and as someone does something cool, people put their chip over to that person, with the right to move them if someone else does something better. What it causes is for folks to actively look and see "who's got the most chips?" and try to out do whatever that person last did.

Chris

Most of the games I play have something like Hero Points, Drama Dice, etc. (Silhouette games, Unisystem games, Hero Wars). I have been considering (basically in fact I decided, but I haven't GM-ed since then) that I will be handing these out for anything that gets a round of applause, a good laugh, a cheer, etc.

By handing out Hero Points/Drama Dice rather than experience, I hope to encourage more drama and heroics, and to show that such action is rewarded (pretty Pavlovian, I think...). The same character may get extra experience as well, but that will necessitate a good game as a whole, rather than just one great moment.

I'd start doing this myself, but indicate that players should call for a similar award to be given to others when THEY thought suitable.

Wulf

One of the half written games on my idea pile at them moment has in it an attempt to reward color by encouraging players to describe their actions and various setting details. Since this was for a western game a certain amount of overblown purple prose is encouraged ("a gust of wind blows a lonely tumbleweed across the street. The air is so clear I can see the wind blown lines of age etched across his face as he sweeps his long leather duster clear of the silver plated handle of his smoke wagon"...that sort of thing).

The idea was that each session the GM would award some form of bennie to a player who fashioned a decent color statement during the game. In addition to the bennie, the player would also get a token of some kind. That token would allow him to award another player with a bennie for something he thought was good (the idea being that once a player did something the GM liked, than the GM could assume he'd be able to identify similar "good" statements by other players.) That player would get a bennie and then take the token.

Basically, every time the GM awarded a bennie a token entered play, and players who held a token could pass that token to another player who would then recieve a bennie and the token to pass to someone else. Each session would start with 0 tokens in play.

That was about as far as I got, and its certainly wide open to abusive players taking advantage and just passing the token back and forth a bunch of times, but the idea was to not only allow the GM to reward players but allow other players to award players.

Bankuei wrote:

One option if you do consider going with the voting system is to save the final vote to the end of the session, but give each player a set of chips with their initials, perhaps with different colors to represent best scene, action, and player, and as someone does something cool, people put their chip over to that person, with the right to move them if someone else does something better. What it causes is for folks to actively look and see "who's got the most chips?" and try to out do whatever that person last did.

I'm a little puzzled about the goal of your proposed approach - is it to smooth out existing hassles about goals of play? Is it to reflect an already-existing set of goals in the absence of an EP/skill-increase system? Is it to accomodate a variety of goals at once? Or ...?