rewards

Shift on the Fly

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Orc-5e

Gruumsh rarely has someone else’s interests in mind.

Saturday’s session went well. It was a fairly standard rout-the-baddies scenario, with an extra layer of justice on top, as the head baddie had purloined a valuable piece of party treasure a few sessions before. Said baddie then holed up in a mountain stronghold with some surly flunkies. But the party was having none of it, and took it upon themselves to right the wrong.

This session concluded a chapter of the campaign, which I had planned beforehand. As a special reward, I had intended to offer the party its choice from a few benefits, to help frame their accomplishments in the terms of the campaign. You know how it goes — rewards are good and endogenous rewards are best. A little reskinning of some backgrounds shaped up as the following options:

Book One Conclusion: Marks of Prestige

Marque of Jandamere: As the bearer of a Marque of Jandamere, you inspire people to think the best of you. You are welcome in high society, and people assume you have the right to be wherever you are. The common folk make every effort to accommodate you and avoid your displeasure, and other people of high birth treat you as a member of the same social sphere. You can secure an audience with a local noble if you need to.

An Eye for the Land: Having liaised with the original folk of the region, you have earned an excellent intuition for the land, and you can always recall the general layout of terrain, settlements, and other features around you. In addition, you can find food and fresh water for yourself and up to five other people each day, provided that the land offers berries, small game, water, and so forth.

Prince-Bishop’s Sigil: You receive shelter and succor from members of the Church Militant and those who are sympathetic to their aims. You can gain aid from temples and other religious communities in the Prince-Bishop’s service. This help comes in the form of shelter and meals, and healing when appropriate, as well as occasionally risky assistance, such as a band of monks rallying to your side in a fight, or the residents of a cloister helping to hide you when you are being hunted unjustly.

(The middle one is struck through because the players never got around to meeting that faction. But the remaining two still offered a choice, and you can see that they’re all modeled on the backgrounds system.)

Responding to Feedback

As good players do, however, they threw a subtle but excellent monkeywrench into my plans. As they were scourging the mountain stronghold, one of the players casually commented that not only were they getting their treasure back, they were going to get the whole damned mountain fortress as well.

Touchdown!

So at the end of the session, I tossed that into the mix. The players could have one of the previous benefits, or, hell yeah, they could have the stronghold. It would be (at least initially) a non-revenue-generating territory, but it would be a “home base” nonetheless and one that they could develop to reflect their ownership.

Belogradchik_fortress_2009

Welcome home!

What that meant for me was that I needed to rework how I would present the ongoing campaign. Previously, it had been constructed as a political thriller, in which the players’ characters moved as agents of influence from location to location in pursuit of artifacts and evidence. A secret faction of rebel nobility had been active, and the players had exposed them, making for the “blow up the Death Star” arc of chapter one. All very cool and satisfying, but now, with the players having a home base, I’ll have to retool much of the campaign and bring relevant events to the players, instead of moving the players to the events. I’ll have to change some of the events proper, too, but that’s fine, because overall, I get a lot out of the deal (assuming they choose to take ownership of the stronghold as their reward).

  • I get to keep reusing the same map. My group is geographically scattered and plays via roll20, so getting more use out of the same virtual tabletop map helps me control my production costs. Maybe I’m secretly a producer at heart….
  • A “home base” creates relatedness, as it gives the players a place in the world they can genuinely call their own.
  • It’s a location that can create rewards but also conflicts. That is, it should generate some ongoing benefits and positive relationships, but those relationships can also inspire new things for players to do and problems to solve.
  • It remains tied to the politics of the region, so the main campaign themes and antagonists remain intact. I have to adjust how the players come in contact with them, but none of the planning needs to be discarded.

But most importantly

  • It was a player suggestion, and a really good one, so the players are even more invested in the progress of the campaign.

So that’s the case for improvising and a willingness to change campaign direction based on player input. We’ll see how it shapes up from here.

Rewards are Beginnings, Not Ends

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Here’s a simple encounter model: You have an objective. You undertake a challenge to accomplish that objective. You receive a reward.

ocr1.001

Congratulations! You overcame the obstacle and got the goody!

…Now what?

In a games context, a reward should most often serve as a beginning, not an end. That simple encounter model above is one cycle of a loop, a repeating sequence. Which is to say, that reward can very effectively be used to engage players in what happens next, to encourage them to participate in the next cycle of the objective-challenge-reward loop.

ocr2.001

Let’s look at it in the terms of my favorite toolbox, self-determination theory.

Mastery

This is the big one. In tabletop RPGs, rewards often heighten the sense of heroic competence. The player obtains a better sword, new spells, improvement to a skill, a new Discipline, or better resources. Rewards often take the form of new or improved tools — which players then bring to bear against future challenges. They’re endogenous rewards: They serve to reinforce and improve the function of game systems the players have already demonstrated an interest in using. You like fighting orcs, so you fight orcs, and as your reward for fighting orcs you get a sword that makes you better at fighting orcs. Fighting orcs is intrinsically rewarding, and you just got better at it.

In additional to the improvements to character, players also gain an increasing understanding of their ability to act upon the world. Level-based systems used to take a lot of stick, but their increasing palette of options in fact works very well for keeping players from feeling paralyzed by a breadth of options. As player mastery increases, so does the significance and competence of their interaction with the world, because they learn to manage more options and they develop an understanding of combinations of options. Few players thrive when having everything available to them at once.

Autonomy

Wisely used, rewards open additional options to the player, or otherwise reinforce their volitional decisions. In a timeworn example, the players rescue the princess (objective) by slaying the dragon (challenge) and then gain access to the realm (reward)… where they find a host of new objectives to pursue. This is sometimes referred to as “gating content” (especially in video games), but it serves a greater function as a reward mechanism, and is also often used in onboarding players to new options, which is especially frequent in level-based systems. As the player grows increasingly familiar with their character’s abilities, their understanding of how they can use those abilities expands, increasing autonomy. Now that the realm is open to you, bold adventurers, what next? Now that you’ve deposed the tyrannical Prince, ambitious Kindred, what will you do in the domain? Now that you have the plans to the orbital battle station, you unintentionally noble space pirates, what will you do with them?

Relatedness

I often like to describe relatedness in terms of “the rewards of rewards.” Going back to our example of saving the princess, the players were granted access to the realm — but that’s not all. As they traverse the realm, NPCs they interact with greet them as “the dragonslayers!” and they see firsthand how their efforts have aided the realm: A scorched field showing signs of growth, burned villages being rebuilt, the sanctuary once again opens its doors. One of the intangible benefits of their actions is seeing the meaning of those actions, and understanding the improvement or aspiration that they’ve made possible.

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You find a jar with parts of Stevie Nicks inside it.

Rewards that suggest more to the world satisfy relateness very well. Finding a key suggests there’s a lock somewhere begging to be opened. Finding a map suggests a destination, or perhaps a journey.

Relatedness can also take the form of reputation systems, for example, which lead to future opportunities. This can scale up to a sense of kingdom-building or the expansion of domain, development of “tech trees,” or access to portions of the coterie chart that were closed. Relatedness is part of what makes communities function, so a sense of ongoing betterment of the home base is a very satisfying reward, even if it confers no mechanical benefits. And as that community betters, new objective opportunities open up for it, which feed the players back into the loop.

Inverting the Expectation

One of the default assumptions with rewards is that they’re all rainbows and sunshine for the recipient. That doesn’t have to be true. As a GM, consider over-rewarding the players every now and then… but with certain strings attached, especially if those strings aren’t immediately evident. Sure, you’ve found Excalibur, but now Modred and Morgan La Fay are after you.

The_One_Ring

A reward can be a burden more than a boon, or invite new responsibility.

This is a reward technique to be used sparingly, but it’s compelling. In doing this, you must design the reward to be worth the extra trouble, but you don’t want to train your players to dread rewards. In this case, the players are gaining outsized mastery rewards as well as some additional relatedness rewards. Interestingly, there’s some amount of curtailing of their free will (autonomy) at this point, but it may actually increase their sense of volition, as they opt into being the caretakers of this particular artifact. Consequences are interesting after all. And what if the players decide that having Excalibur isn’t worth the added responsibility? How do they get rid of the damned thing?

As a Player

Constructing rewards typically falls under the purview of the GM in tabletop RPGs, but players can use their rewards to stimulate the process, as well. The simplest way to do this is in outlook: The very act of understanding rewards as a staging point rather than a conclusion is important for players to not only take satisfaction in their progress, but to project future goals. (See the previous post for more on goal-setting.)

Rewards can also send clear messages to the GM. If the party chooses to sell the Armor of Fire Resistance, that’s a pretty definitive statement that they won’t be interested in the journey to the City of Brass where they’d have to dance at the whim of the ifrit lord. Readily yielding the identity of the rogue ghoul to the Tremere Primogen is a fairly declarative that the coterie is more interested in the political story then they mystery subplot.

Home Base: PC Property

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Early D&D assumes that the players were eventually trying to clear an area in which to construct a stronghold. Classic Traveller assumes that the players owned some percentage of shares in a ship that could be used to travel the stars. Vampire often concerns itself with the ever-upscaling struggle to claim domain and then protect domain once claimed. Regardless of genre, the concept of an earned “home” is common to many RPGs.

Property makes for a strong reward in roleplaying games because doing so opens a host of additional endogenous rewards to the players who own it. That is, property is its own reward, and it can create more opportunities for encounters involving that property. Used wisely, property can bring an adventure to the players instead of requiring that players go to the adventure.

Illustration by DudQuitter

An Investment in a Place

Many settings assume that the characters have some personal stake in the wellbeing of a community, whether it’s Chicago or Sandpoint, and one good way to impart this to the players is to have the characters own property and be responsible for it in that community. In game terms, having the property confer a benefit is a good way to do this, as it invests the players in being able to call upon that benefit. In game terms, the property can be expressed in a variety of forms, and in fact multiple forms, and in so doing, the property acquires meaning to the players.

Property provides context for other rewards, as well. Land ownership can carry with it titles, incomes, or other benefits, as described below. Many fantasy games’ default medieval feudal arrangements are the obvious setting assumptions here, but
different campaigns can impart land with different titles and benefits. For example, the property is question may be a bridge allowing access to an isolated area, and the title may grant the players the right to charge a toll at the bridge. The property may be privateer vessel, and the charter for operating it may allow the players to claim territory in the name of their patron in exchange for a share of whatever incomes or resources the territory generates. A claim of Domain in Vampire, say, might allow the claimants to exact a “tithe” on all vitae claimed in the domain.

Note that the property need not be a static location. A pirate frigate, starship, or floating island are all examples of property that aren’t tied to a specific place, but that expand on the characteristics of places.

Currency Benefits

The property may generate money or other valuables that the players can use to acquire gear, consumables, or other goods. Currency can obviously be exchanged for character needs, whether in terms of satisfying basic upkeep (like D&D 5e’s Lifestyle Expenses or the nightly Blood Point cost for Vampire) or allowing improvements to starting gear.

A steady flow of currency doesn’t have to be large, especially at low levels of play, but it does provide a convenient way to incrementally improve character competency. As well, having an early currency stream can help strengthen the players’ connection to the home community that likewise increases over time. Players won’t necessarily care if their default starting location is threatened, but they will care if some amount of their livelihood is at stake. Across multiple game
sessions, this steady stream of income can build the sense of “home” that property intends to communicate. Even if the income value never increases, and that value becomes ever more negligible in terms of the power scope of the campaign, it will have contributed in the past, and that can create a powerful foundation with which the players can identify through the sense of campaign history it creates.

Examples: A copper mine, a store or business, a recognized region or domain, a title, stock in a for-hire vehicle, a Werewolf caern or a Mage node.

Systemic Benefits

The property grants a special ability or other benefit. This is some sort of mechanical boon or rules-based perk that allows the characters to exercise greater prowess when taking advantage of it. According to your game and group’s style, this can be a soft or a hard benefit — that is, something that relies on GM fiat to provide the details of the benefit, or something that has a specific, codified effect that the players can depend on every time. Tastes vary, but the latter, because they are by design reliable, generally cultivate more valuation in players’ regard.

A systemic benefit shouldn’t break the game or allow players to negate challenges, but it should create enough initial advantage that the players cultivate their own sense of valued relationship to “home.”

Again, over time, this historical value creates a sense of emotional attachment, and “home” can be imperiled, seasonal events or festivals at “home” become more meaningful, etc. Players may eventually acquire enough significance to steer the policy of “home,” and if so, more’s the better — there are the mastery, relatedness, and autonomy needs that all players have, being addressed directly.

Examples: A fashionable estate that offers a bonus to social challenges while entertaining there, a healing spring, a magical nexus conferring oracular powers, a site offering more efficient travel than is normal for the setting

Narrative Progression
Illustration by Nicolas Ferrand

The property has significance to the characters’ story. This is the stronghold that the warlord character builds as a testament to his own greatness, the hideout that the characters renovate to store their loot, or even the humble hearth where the character settles down with her significant other or kids. Narrative rewards work best with personal, character-driven ambitions behind them.

You can’t simply tell a player, “You care about VillageTown” and have that statement carry any weight, but many published settings or adventures assume that they will. Players will either care about VillageTown or they won’t, and it’ll be on their terms. Players’ emotional attachment to property grows, however, over time and at their pace. Pairing narrative rewards with one of the other reward types or having the emotional resonance grow out of those benefits will cultivate a natural attachment. If the players have (and, even better, can improve) those other benefits of property, they’ll be demonstrably satisfying the universal set of player needs in relatedness, autonomy, and mastery, and their emotional attachment to that property will grow in tandem.

Examples: A humble homestead, a craggy castle overlooking the village below, a renovated wing of the space station, a penthouse haven just outside the Rack

Reactive Encounters

Illustration by Dylan ColeCharacters’ investment in property makes for opportunities to bring the adventure to them, as opposed to seeking it out. This may work well with certain groups’ playstyles, but it can also provide a change of pace from more proactive groups’ standard methodologies. Some players prefer setting their own agendas while others wait for a challenge to come their way.

A good action vocabulary can frame these sorts of conflicts with appropriate drama: Defend the ship’s gangway. Retake the keep. Turn back the boarders. Liberate the village. These are all scenarios that bring the action directly to the players.

Loss Aversion

Players, being human, are prone to loss aversion, and one expression of this is that people more greatly feel the exigencies of loss than they do the benefits of gain. It’s great to acquire the deed to the old mine outside of town, but once it starts producing, it’s downright terrible when the mine is threatened by bandits, collapsed by sappers, or overrun by bat-faced devil-horned fire-spiders. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use the players’ property as a dramatic focal point, only that you should do it wisely and sparingly. The “lone wolf” stereotype, the character who’s an orphan and has no social connections and practices sunrise to sundown with his katana is an expression of loss aversion: Without any emotional connections for a GM to hold against him, he retains much more control of his own fate. The same is true of property. If “home” is threatened in every game session, it won’t belong before the players pack up and move away from home, if only to have more control over their own destinies.