“First, let me state one fundamental rule of game design that has emerged from the talk of various game professionals: If something’s important to your setting, you need to have rules that encourage it, provide benefits for it, or suggest rewards for it. Sure, you can play without such rules, but they’re often helpful to get new people on the same page and understand what’s expected of them, as well as reminding Keepers of what should be stressed with regard to the setting.”Actually, this rule works not only in games, but in real life, especially in a professional environment. I’ve worked at many companies that said they encourage sharing of resources, and collaboration, and efforts to improve the company culture, but I’ve never seen a anyone publicly acknowledged for their efforts, let alone a reward program in place to support these “play mechanics.” of the office. (thousand faced moon)
—Daniel Harms at the Yog-Sothoth.com forum
"I can see you happy in the shadows I despise..."
I find it amazing how seldom positive reinforcement's used in gaming. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of games that explicitly reward players for right thought and right action in addition to kicking monster ass. Strange, strange.
ReplyDelete- Sean
Right thought and right action? I personally enjoy the lack of an encoded moral compass in most games.
ReplyDeleteOr by "right" do you mean "what the designers intended"?
-T
Tim,
ReplyDeleteI'm not looking at morality per se, unless a game's supposed to work off of a definite moral compass, although that can work with some games (I'm thinking, in particular, of the latest incarnation of Ravenloft, where players can be great and still fail if they're not good.) I'm looking more at the style of play.
Prime example is White Wolf's "Adventure!" their wonderfully self-contained pulp game set in the Aeoniverse. The game's version of hero points are called Inspiration, and they allow the players to do big, impressive stuff. Inspiration allows the player to meta-game, creating amazing coincidences and hair's-breadth escapes. It allows the player to double hir dice pool, giving characters the ability to be the best in the world at something and have it stick.
The way Inspiration's doled out plays directly into my "rewarding right thought and right action" mold. If one makes a roll with more than five successes, one gets a point of Inspiration. One can wager a point of Inspiration on an action, get a dice pool boost and win the inspiration back if s/he's using that roll for a heroic purpose. One can get Inspiration by going to new, exciting and Inspiration-rich places (First person to crack the gates of the gilded subterranean city of Opak-Re since 500 B.C.? Inspiration for you!)
Many games punish players for risking their characters or, at best, simply reward them for success without providing an incentive to try outside of the demands of narrative ("I'm a hero, so I'd better do heroic stuff. I'll probably die, though. Le sigh.") The "Adventure!" game design acknowledges the fact that players aren't used to balls-to-the-wall High Pulp play and, thus, rewards players for putting their characters in harm's way by letting them look cool when they try and giving them a benny (which can, really, only be used for more High Pulp play) if they succeed. After two or three sessions of "Adventure!" my normally cautious group of players were having fistfights on the wings of planes and cheating death with impunity, partially because the rules rewarded them for that style of play.
Heady, heady stuff there, and the sort of thing that's thankfully popping up in more and more games.
- Sean