Just another one of my ideas that's influenced by Joss Whedon. Angel Season finale spoilers below, so quit now if you need to.

On a TV show, or even in most blockbuster movies, we're almost certain that the nemesis/threat will be defeated in the end. But that's not the stuff that we're worried about. It's the cost of winning.

Angel, on the season finale, slapped me sideways with it. The great evil was never the most important part of the story. Angel ends up having to sacrifice a bunch of things in the end, including his ethics (sort of), and his relationship with his son, and that's what stuck with me. The world wins, but he doesn't, not really.

Can anyone think of games that facilitate this kind of situation? I think I have to figure out how to incorporate it into what I'm working on.

I've found that this sort of situation is really a lot more dependent upon the group and the GM than upon the system. In fact i don't know that there is a System (numbers) in place that specifically encourages/facilitates this, and i don't know if one is possible. As for Worlds (setting and such), i have yet to see one in which this kind of outcome is specifically encouraged, though that might be possible and even interesting.

This is something that is good and needs to be explored. Unfortunately, i think that the vast majority of players want the game in which the good guys win and live happily ever after.

So, i guess what i'm saying is that not only can i not think of anything that faciliatates what you're talking about, i don't even know if it's possible to facilitate it. Of course that's just me and my defeatism at work, so please feel free to ignore me and develop something that works.

Thomas

Oh, I dunno about that. I was already thinking that the answer might be some cousin of how Trollbabe uses relationships to allow rerolls. Basically some kind of karma pool, where each point spent is a personal sacrifice that the character is making.

But that's just one approach. I bet there are plenty more.

I would work this into the reward system. Create a system of Achievements and Sacrifices. Players receive points for both. Both types of points are just a type of Story Point. Story Points are required to accomplish goals within a story. The player may spend the points to tweak the story in his favor.

For example, Bob McElf wants to find the Secret Elder Tree. The GM or players determine this to be a goal that requires 3 Story Points. He searches the forest and battles MacGoblins. His heroism nets 2 Achievement Points -- 1 short of the 3 Story Points he needs for his goal. The battle is tough, and the player decides that his magical sword is dropped into a deep ravine, lost. Because the sacrifice was in pursuit of the goal and because the sword is still technically retrievable, this earns Bob 1 Sacrifice Point. 2 Achievement Points + 1 Sacrifice Point equals 3 Story Points, enough for a basic victory.

A basic victory might mean simple success. In the example, Bob McElf finds a goblin who, under interrogation, gives rough directions to the Secret Elder Tree. More Story Points could mean finding a map, a wisened pixie guide, or even stumbling across the tree itself.

The system does not require the player to Commit to a goal at the start of the story, but it might help the other players.

Hey Matt,

Scott Knipe calls this my 'bomb under the desk' mechanic:

You've got a target number and a ten-sided die. Roll equal-to or under the target number for success. If you aren't successful you can give yourself a re-roll by attaching a consequence to one of the numbers above your target number. If you roll that number on your re-roll, you get the consequence. If you rolled another failure, you can give yourself another re-roll by attaching a more extreme consequence to one of the remaining numbers above your target number. And so on, and so on, until you decide to settle for failure, roll a success, or a consequence. Say your target number is five and it's gone so far that you've attached a full five consequences above it, so you're down to your last re-roll and the consequence you just attached is the grisly death of your character. Your subsequent die roll is still characterized by suspense, nail-biting suspense, because even on a failure there's hope to squeak by with a minor consequence.

I just haven't found the right game concept for it yet.

Paul

Matt Wilson wrote: Angel ends up having to sacrifice a bunch of things in the end...and that's what stuck with me. The world wins, but he doesn't, not really.

Can anyone think of games that facilitate this kind of situation?

Paul:

Ooohh, I like it. You've inspired me.

I'll be back...

Hi Matt,

After seeing the Xmen movie, I was inspired to write up a little something-something on superheroes. It works with the basic Sorcerer style dice pool vs. dice pool resolution, and one of the main mechanics is that you can choose to accept a complication in return for extra dice. The catch is that the GM(or opposing player) chooses what the nature of the Complication is, and yes, the complication happens whether you succeed or fail. Complications are divided into Complications, Major Complications, and Rewrite Complications.

The first two are generally categorized based on the level of "trouble", but the last basically facilitates the classic superhero rewrite, such as Jean Grey to Phoenix, Angel to Archangel, White Queen(bad) to White Queen(good), Green to Grey to Smart Green to Dumb Green Hulk, etc. This may or may not be useful to you depending on what the nature of your game is.

Chris

There are a lot of good ideas here, but i feel that none of the quite capture (for me anyway) what we're looking for here. Think about it this way: any mechanic is a choice at the meta level. I choose to undergo hardship at the Character level in order to gain a bonus at the Mechanic level. I think what we really want to achieve is something that encourages sacrifice on the Character level alone. There are no rewards, it's simply a matter of your character being willing to give it all up in order to accomplish his goals. If your character wants to save the world then it may require him to sacrifice his family... Is he willing to do it? That's what we're looking at here, it's the tension of decision at the Character level.

There are a lot of good ideas at the Numbers level already here, but these seems to detract from the feeling of sacrifice since you are getting something out of it. There may be some way to design a way to encourage this all on the Character level, but i can't think of one.

Thomas

You can use my Sacrifice Point idea but don't give them to the player. Just subtract points from the Goal. When the Goal gets to 0, the player accomplishes it.

It's a semantic twist but it may get away from feeling that giving the player something for his sacrifice makes it not a sacrifice at all.

In the end, I think there's a difference between a character sacrifice and a player sacrifice, and you should look more carefully at the framing of these things.

I totally agree that there is a major difference between Character sacrifice and Player sacrifice. For whatever reason, Player sacrifice isn't that compelling to me. I could care less that you're making a choice on the meta level to give something up. This is one of the reasons i don't really like the idea of merits/flaws, making major decisions outside the Character. What i do find compelling is the idea of Character sacrifice, and that's what i have trouble finding ways to encourage. Almost any Mechanic that encourages sacrifice will do so at the Player level as opposed to the Character level. That doesn't make it useless, it just doesn't endear the Mechanic to me personally. I'm looking for something that will encourage Character sacrifice... With the impetus being the character, not the player.

Thomas

I think that the problem you're having is inherent to the situation.

There are only three ways to encourage a certain kind of activity or play in a game:

• Provide a tangible reward for it;• Remove a tangible obstacle against it;• Ask players to play that way.


Most of the posts here are talking about how to reward the conduct. This becomes problematic, particularly in view of your preference on stance--you want characters to do it for character reasons. Definitionally, a sacrificial action is one that costs the character personally and does not benefit him personally to the same degree. If you provide a character reward for sacrifice, you turn it into a calculated purchase: if I sacrifice A I get B, and B is more valuable than A. If you split it so that the reward benefits the player, not the character, you might create the illusion of sacrifice within the story, but may tend to cause irrational ingame actions, as the character does things solely because they benefit the player.

My mention of Multiverser is the only one I saw that spoke of lowering the obstacle. Most Multiverser characters come to see that the sacrifice costs them less than it would cost another character; thus the altruism is increased by the fact that by comparison they aren't giving up as much. As I indicated, I see such sacrifices fairly frequently in play--there's one described on the back cover of The First Book of Worlds, in which the PC realizes he can't hold back the demons, but if the princess closes the portal they will fall to their death with him. Because death is not the end, sacrifice comes easier, and is made more often. That, incidentally, is an entirely in-game character motivation to sacrifice yourself to save the day.

The third is a social contract issue, and actually ties in to the trailblazing style thread that just ran (Does Module Play Equal Participationism?). If the players agree up front that this is the sort of game in which they're going to sacrifice their characters to save the world, it can happen without mechanical intervention. Similarly, in Legends of Alyria, because players are committed at the outset to making the best story which everyone will enjoy, there is implicit in that the possibility that a character will die because the player chooses that for the betterment of the story.

I don't really see any other way around it.

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

I've been doing some thinking on how to handle it in a game (mine specifically), and here's what I've got on the burner.

PTA isn't the kind of genre, to use that term loosely, where main characters die. It'd be like Xena dying and the studio still continuing the series. So the sacrifice I'm thinking of isn't the characters themselves. It's what they care about. Relationships, favorite shirts, whatever.

Remember what Buffy has to do in the finale of Season 2? That's probably the extreme example.

I'm thinking that what this kind of resource needs is related to what Clinton's doing with TSOY. You can invest in the resource as a smallish sort of bonus from time to time, but you can also sacrifice it for a major source of karma/whatever, as a one-time thing. So say you can use your favorite car as a perk in a game for a +1 or something. If you destroy it in a scene, you get a guaranteed something or other.

I do think there's something similar going on with Trollbabe, but I don't own a copy, so I can't refer to it.

Good point on removing the obstacle M.J. However, while this encourages sacrifice, the very fact that it does cost less cheapens the experience for me. That's not to say that a cheapened experience is not preferrable to no experience at all, sacrifice because it costs your character less than other characters doesn't make it bad. Anyway, even the social contract thing doesn't quite do what i want it to. If you come into the game expecting to sacrifice then it's not really a sacrifice. I guess in a sense i'm looking for something that is both a Character sacrifice and a Player sacrifice. I want the character to lose something important, and through the character the player to do the same. Maybe you really like this character, but there comes a point where that character may die in order to accomplish some goal. The character must choose to sacrifice himself, and the player must choose to sacrifice the character. This is what i would love to encourage, but i don't know if there's a way to do it. On a less extreme example, the character may have to give up the love of his life for the good of the realm, the player must be willing to set aside the Second Level goal of love and marriage for this character, for now at least, in order for this action to go through. The less extreme version may be more common in Multiverser, but that doesn't mean that it is encouraged.

I'll have to continue to mull things over, but if i could come up with something that worked...

Thomas

Thomas, I think you're spitting into the wind. That's not a bad thing--going against the grain is the way great new things are done. I just wonder how you can get around the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom is that if you want to encourage a certain kind of play in the game, you have to reward it. That goes directly in the face of what you're trying to do: you want players to make sacrifices that are real sacrifices both for them and for their characters. It's not really possible to create a rewards incentive that does this, because the moment you do you turn it into a pragmatic decision: the player does it because the reward outweighs the cost. If the reward doesn't outweigh the cost, he doesn't do it.

The first suggested alternative is to lower the cost; don't offer a reward, just make it less of a sacrifice. It works particularly well if from both the player and the character perspective the total sacrifice is less if they make it than if someone else makes it. There are no hero points, no experience bonuses, nothing to act as incentive; the balance has been tipped at the other end. I think you start to get altruistic conduct this way, but, as you note, it's because the cost of the sacrifice has been mitigated.

The other alternative is to get players to agree at the outset that the point of the game is for them to make such sacrifices. I'm reminded kind of obliquely of Jared's Squeam, in which players set out from the beginning to get their characters killed in the most ludicrous slasher movie ways. As mentioned, Alyria creates stories in which sometimes characters make sacrifices, because players driven by the desire to create a great story. In both games, you agreed up front to the idea that sacrificing your character was a good end.

Now, you've got good reasons to reject all three of these solutions. What I want to know is, what other solution might there be?

--M. J. Young

I don't understand why you'd want the players to make a sacrifice. The players want to have fun and want their characters to succeed (for their own definitions of "succeed," granted).

Really, I think it's sufficient to find a way to make characters sacrifice something, paying the player back with some kind of reward, driving the story forward. The players wink and nod at the terrible sacrifice their characters have made, and years later they recount the tale to perfect strangers in con registration lines.

I'm a little lost here. Let's suppose, as an example, that we're talking about a basically Narrativist game, and that the Premise is something along the lines of, "What will you give up for power?" Clearly the characters are going to drift, morally speaking; that's the whole point.

Now you are playing along, and you come to a situation in which it appears that the whole city is going to be eaten by some colossal demon or something, and the only thing to stop it is a PC who's made a deal with that very demon some time ago. The choice is clear:

A. Give up all humanity and let it eat Manhattan; you will become the ruler of the new Demon Kingdom of North America.

B. Save Manhattan, but die horribly and be tortured for all eternity.

With this setup, surely it's generally cooler and more intense to make choice B?

If the stakes are much lower, as in

A. Let the demon eat that annoying guy who flipped you off, and get some extra power;
B. Refuse to let it, and have the demon start getting really pissy and dangerous

then there's a lot more chance that the choice will be A, right?

In a pure Sim game, it depends what we're exploring.

In a Gamist game, it depends on what the victory conditions are.

If you want cool sacrifices, you have to make it worthwhile to the players to have the characters make sacrifices. The characters don't make them; they're fictional beings. So how do you reward the player?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but aren't we going back over the oldest GNS ground, very very slowly? I really think that if we put this into the context of GNS, much of it becomes rather obvious.

I keep bumping into problems with the GNS outlook. Maybe because it seems to be applied in a mutually exclusive way. Why can't you have a Narrative and Simulationist system? Why can't players play for both reasons within a single game?

Let's try it this way using the Manhattan being eaten by a demon example. Here's the background. You as a player have a goal for your character, that goal is to become a demon of incredible authority. At this stage in the Narration the character is only to the point of wishing to rule North America. Your two choices are:

A. Let the demon eat Manhattan, which allows the character to rule North America and makes him a buddy of the demon in question which furthers the player goal of becoming a powerful demon.

B. Stop the demon. This will cost your character his chance at power inot his life and ticks of a powerful demon so that even if you survive you only make it harder to accomplish the player goal.

Does that make sense? Even in a mostly narrativist game, there is some carry over of the Player's desire for the character. I think that ideally you get things set up so that the Player cares about the World and it's fictional people such that he is willing to sacrifice his Second Level goals in order to save it.

Let's try modifying the example, in choice A everything is the same, but in choice B the character could easily stop the Demon without getting hurt and could still rule North America. However, stopping the demon would put a real damper on the Second Level goal of becoming a powerful demon. Is the sacrifice made or not?

Thomas

Yeah, basically what Smerf seems to want is Abashed Vanilla Narrativism if you will. That is, he wants the players to make certain sorts of Narrativist decisions without the system providing incentive to do so.

What he's said is that he realizes that he's posed a contradiction. He wants a system that doesn't reward players for making these sorts of decisions, yet causes them to make these sorts of decisions. Which he understands, as does everyone else, is impossible.

What you can make is a system with no special mechanics (vanilla), that doesn't reward Narrativism (abashed), and hope that players make "the right decision" when it comes to situations where you might be able to make a sacrifice.

Um, Over the Edge is a good example.

Mike

Yeah, basically what Smerf seems to want is Abashed Vanilla Narrativism if you will. That is, he wants the players to make certain sorts of Narrativist decisions without the system providing incentive to do so.

Matt Wilson wrote: So getting back to my original question, are there systems that do provide incentive, Mike, that you can think of?

Matt Wilson wrote:
So getting back to my original question, are there systems that do provide incentive, Mike, that you can think of?

To the best of my knowledge The Riddle of Steel has one of the better "reduce the penalty" systems for sacrifice. The more experienced a character is when he dies, the more experience the next character a player creates within the campaign will have.

That's what I'm trying to get at with my example, Matt. Precisely.

As far as death is concerned, consider it from the HW POV again. To extend it, if you sacrifice your character, you would get all his hero points back, and get to create a new character with all those points. Ron mentioned something to me the othe day that makes me think that he's already thinking in these terms.

Basically you're dissociating the points from the character entirely, and making them player property. They're merely "invested" in the game. When the character loses something, or dies, the player loses their interface with the game, and gets his points back.

In Universalis, this dissociation is explicit. The main difference here being that there are no rules for "cashing in" a character or anything else. Interestingly, there were such rules in one of the playtest versions, but they never made it all the way to the final result. I'm starting to think that we really missed the boat on that one.

Mike

It seems to me that Ron mentioned a game (Violence Future?) where a character has an Endgame phase.

During this the character becomes quite powerful, while heading to death. This allows achieving really important goals, so important that dying is worth it for the Player/character.

Matt, i see what you're saying. Unfortunately the types of sacrifices you are talking about are a little hard to predict. I mean you must actively choose to crash your car into the limo. There's no way to give you a generic bonus for sacrificing the car that makes sense, so you can't get some sort of better chance in terms of rolling. So once again we're brought to the idea that the sacrifice can not be covered by the system. We can however make the thing sacrifice important. When driving this car you get bonus of X, if you lose the car you don't get the bonus. But this isn't a systemic solution. Though i do think that mike has a good point about resource investment, it doesn't seem to be covering what you're talking about. From what i understand you're looking for some system that allows the sacrificing of a Numbers bonus in order to progress the Narrative. I'm giving up the negotiation bonus provided by Chuck in order to further the story.

Unfortunately, i can't think of a system, or even a way to develop one, that integrates that well. If you steal money from Chuck then the deal is guaranteed to succedd (for example) so it's not like your getting a Numbers bonus here. The "burning" of resources is a good idea, but i can't see a good way to integrate the Numbers side with the Narrativist side.

Wow. That wasn't even remotely helpful was it? I just keep restating ignorance...

Thomas

LordSmerf wrote: Matt, i see what you're saying. Unfortunately the types of sacrifices you are talking about are a little hard to predict. I mean you must actively choose to crash your car into the limo. There's no way to give you a generic bonus for sacrificing the car that makes sense, so you can't get some sort of better chance in terms of rolling. So once again we're brought to the idea that the sacrifice can not be covered by the system.

In terms of one that rewards the player to make a sacrifice?

In EPICS, a player character starts out sketchy, and gets defined through assertions the player makes during play. The GM manages the "deserve to survive" mechanics, allocating Survival Points to players for their decisions. So, for instance, when the last jet engine fails and the GM turns to a player and asks if the character has any situationally relevant skills, an answer of "Lieutenant Steve has never had pilot training" is worth more Survival Points.

Paul

Matt Wilson wrote: Hey Thomas:

I'm going to disagree with you there, quite strongly. I think you can provide a generic bonus, if the system also allows interpretive narration of success, and no strict limits on "rounds" and things of that nature. If you roll, and the points aren't there, you can choose to burn the resource, and you succeed. It's up to you to explain why the burn helps you succeed, but hey, that's the fun of good ol' storytellin'.

LordSmerf wrote: Anyway, i've found that usually the groups that can come up with decent explainations would be able to do the same thing without a written mechanic.

What Jeff said.

First, I'd say that I do trust the players to make decisions when they have to. That is, if the system is, "When the GM sees a sacrifice that he thinks is appropriate, he gives bonus points," that's fine with me. It can and will work.

I fail to see how having a system that has a GM do this is less reliable than just hoping that the GM will figure it out on his own.

Now, that all said, I don't like making the GM make judgement calls on stuff like that. If your bad reaction is based on that, I can sympathize. But what you're missing is that one can make this all much less subjective. That is, one can rate the car that's being sacrificed, or the money, or the person, or whatever. In games like Story Engine, Hero Wars, Donjon, Universalis, and many more, you can rate absolutely anything you want.

So in Hero Wars, for instance, the player would have an ability like "Grovnar 19" which represents the PCs relationship with Grovnar. If the player sacrifices his relationship with Grovnar, he loses some serious in-game potential. Thus the "investment" idea I have above can cover absolutely anything. In fact, what such mechanics do is to make the players aware that this is exactly the point of play.

Hell, to be very explicit, in the game Sorcerer, you get a one die bonus for each significant thing that the player sacrifices in summonning a demon (and gaining the attendant power). How's that for an explicit mechanic that does exactly what we're describing in an already existant game. And I can tell you it works just fine.

This is all very easy.

Mike

LordSmerf wrote: I keep bumping into problems with the GNS outlook. Maybe because it seems to be applied in a mutually exclusive way. Why can't you have a Narrative and Simulationist system? Why can't players play for both reasons within a single game?

Man... I need to look into Universalis in a serious way. The little i've been able to glean has been really intriguing and all these references to investment of resources in everything makes me want it bad... But there are so many other systems i want to explore, and i have no money... I'm sure i'll think of something, eventually.

I guess that i'm hesitant to specify a mechanic for sacrifice since it seems so open to abuse. Of course i guess abuse is a relative term and stems from my preference for Narrative play. I guess there is no way to abuse a system unless the specific group you are with decides that it is abuse...

M.J. Thanks. I have slowly been reaching the same conclusion, that any given instance is governed by one of the three. The only caveat i make is that sometimes the overlying Social issues step in and intercede such that you make a decision based primarily on the real world social relationships of the players. You could look over at the Three Levels thread for more on that.

Thomas

The other thing to consider with GNS decisions.

Its often hard to define what type of decision you are making , when, like the above example of the Holy Warrior, any of them fit what you are doing.

The big spotlight comes on when you hit a decision that would go quite different ways depending on your GNS inclination... kind of like the Thief. That's the instances of play to look for, if you want to know GNS leaning.

LordSmerf wrote: I guess that i'm hesitant to specify a mechanic for sacrifice since it seems so open to abuse. Of course i guess abuse is a relative term and stems from my preference for Narrative play. I guess there is no way to abuse a system unless the specific group you are with decides that it is abuse...

Let's be careful on terms here. Thomas said, "narrative" which I have no idea as to what that is. Narrativist I know, but I'm not sure that's what Thomas is saying.

But it does beg the question, I'd agree. How would one "abuse" such a mechanic?

Mike

Sorry, i was a bit unclear there. I mean "narrative" in the "Narrativist" sense. The "abuse" is actually derived from Gamist players who are screwing up the "right" way to play (Narrativism) by min/maxing. A specific mechanic for sacrifice, even if it is intended to increase the Narrative or Simulational gameplay, may be "misused" by the Gamists.

Of course, as i said, there is no "wrong way" to play. The "problems" i see with the idea of systemizing sacrifice simply allows a new way to play. Whether that is used in Narrativist or in Gamist ways is besides the point. So, i guess what i'm saying is that there is no abuse since as long as everyone is having fun it's all good.

I guess i need to continue to remind myself that just because i think that Narrativist play is the "right" way to play, that doesn't mean that it actually is...

I hope that's at least a little clearer than my previous statement and that you can understand what i'm getting at. It's not really something profound, it's just something new for me...

Thomas

I think that the problems which stem from a system encouraging sacrifice which might be abused by gamists (in the eyes of narrativists) lie more in the design of the system than in the players. That is, if you build a system that rewards a particular kind of action in play, it will encourage that kind of play, even if it's gamist play in an otherwise narrativist context.

In an earlier thread, GNS and Player Rewards, I suggested that rewards systems had to be two-pronged. (I've actually fallen in love with this idea; I have since expanded it into Gam Ideas Unlimited: Rewards over at Gaming Outpost, and briefed the idea in a recent issue of Roleplaying Tips.) A reward encourages a particular type of play in two ways. One is that it encourages the kind of play for which the reward is given; the other is that it encourages the kind of play to which the reward leads.

An ideal example is the simple reward system of Dungeons & Dragons, where you gain experience points for killing monsters and collecting treasure. Everyone recognizes that the game encourages these activities by giving you experience points for them. However, they miss the other side: what do these experience points do? They make you better at killing monsters and getting treasure. Thus when people tweak the rewards system, it usually results in an incoherent rewards system, one in which good role playing or right action or story advancement is rewarded with experience points which make you better at killing monsters and getting treasure.

The aforementioned thread (my post is November 1, 2002) and the article go into more detail, including some ideas on what kinds of rewards work for narrativist and simulationist systems.

In this context, if you're looking for a way to reward sacrifice as a narrativist function, you need to find something to give the players that doesn't advance gamist play.

Does that help?

--M. J. Young

MJ Young wrote: In this context, if you're looking for a way to reward sacrifice as a narrativist function, you need to find something to give the players that doesn't advance gamist play.

Matt Wilson wrote: Say there's a resource you can sacrifice when necessary to provide a mechanical bonus above and beyond what the resource would normally provide.

I'm relatively new here, having wandered over from rpg.net, but I have to say that I find the discussions very interesting. Please forgive me if I retread over mechanics ideas or things that have been discussed ad nauseam in the past. Although I have read this thread from start to finish, I haven't had time to read everything here at the Forge yet.

An idea that occured to me on this topic was to make advancement contingent upon achieving certain goals. I can hear people saying "Oooo... big revelation" now, but give me a second to explore this and I think you'll see where I'm going with it.

A system that I like at the moment is the modified Castle Falkenstein proposed by Christopher Kubasik, so I'll use it as an example. Say your character has three traits (akin to those found in Over the Edge). To advance those traits he/she needs character points. Now, typically, character points would be earned from attending a game session or performing tasks that are pretty standard in a typical game session (kill monsters, make progress in stopping the bad guys).

What I would propose is eliminating ALL of that and make advancement contingent upon achieving specific goals within the game itself. All players want their characters to advance. It is one of their stronger desires in game and I have many a helpless, dead kobold infant to support that statement.

So, say you have Buffy at the end of Season 3. She has the Slayer trait at Good (6) and 2 Character Points saved up by the time of the season finale. Her listed goals are "Cure Angel so she can be in love with him again" which the GM has valued at 2 points, "Stop Akathla and save the world" which the GM has valued at 4 points. The complication emerges when Buffy realizes that she must "kill" Angel to stop Akathla. In game terms, Buffy's player chose to save the world even though Angel was "cured" and she could love him again. In predictable gamer form, the player went where the points were and at the end of the season Buffy had enough Character Points to advance her "Slayer" trait to Great (6).

None of this is new, but I'm surprised it hasn't been explored in this thread just yet. Inherent within this idea is the capability of the GM to manipulate the player's goals to support further plot threads. If the GM had wanted a post-apocalyptic "Wish" style campaign to follow Buffy Season 2, then he/she could have just offered 4 points for curing Angel and 2 for saving the world. If the GM really didn't care, he/she could have offered 3 points for either one and left it completely at the player's whim.

In the case of Bruce Willis and his watch ("Pulp Fiction"), the character could have just taken a flaw of some sort that caused him to lose a character point every game that he didn't have his watch.

Personally, I think ditching the idea of "everytime you come to the game you get 500 XP" notion and using advancement as a means to drive a character's story is the way to go.