Consequence and Reward in RPGs

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I like to compare trends in the game industry as a whole with individual segments, such as RPGs. Often what’s happening “out there” will turn up in the individual segments, if it hasn’t already.



The most striking trends in hobby games is the movement from games of consequence to games of reward. Players in hobby games in the past have been expected to earn what they received, but more and more in hobby games we’re seeing games that reward players for participation. This is a general trend in our society, where schoolkids expect rewards for participation rather than for achieving excellence, and in fact excellence is sometimes not allowed!

Reward-based games have always been with us via party games, and to a lesser extent family games. Virtually no one cares who wins a party game, and all of these games tend to be very simple and fully accessible to non-gamers. Mass-market games are much more reward-based then consequence-based. Hobby gamers might call them “not serious”.

A reward-based game is more like a playground than an organized competition, and the opposition in reward-based games tends to be weak/inconsequential/nonexistent.

Home video “save games” have always tended to make video games a “you can’t lose” proposition. We’re moving beyond that.

With free-to-play video games dominating the mobile market and a strong influence in other markets, designers reward players so that they’ll play the game long enough to decide to spend money in it. We see players who blame the game if they fail, who expect to be led around by the hand, even in games that people purchase.

Tabletop RPGs generally involve an unspoken pact between the players and the GM, so that the players can have fun and not have to worry too much about losing. But the game tends to be more enjoyable when there’s a possibility of failure - the triumphs are sweeter. The co-creator of D&D (Gary Gygax) put it this way in one of his last publications (Hall of Many Panes) "...a good campaign must have an element of danger and real risk or else it is meaningless - death walks at the shoulder of all adventurers, and that is the true appeal of the game."

Classic games involve conflict. Many so-called games nowadays do not involve conflict, and there are role-playing "games" that are storytelling exercises without much opposition.

Reflections of this trend in RPGs often involve abundant healing and ways to save characters from death, such as the ridiculous Revivify spell, usable by a mere fifth level cleric in D&D Fifth Edition, that brings back the dead on the field of battle.

35 years ago, a young player GMed his first game for our shared-characters campaign. He really wanted to ensure the players had a good time - so he gave out lots of magic items. We wanted players to earn what they received, so myself and the other lead GM waved our hands after the adventure and most of those items disappeared.

I’m a senior citizen, in my roots a wargamer, and I prefer games of consequence. But that's not where the world is headed.

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher

 

[Sunseeker]

This stuck in my head a bit and I thought I'd pull this out for a bit of extra examination.

How is this not pure gamism? You are making decisions base on what will give you greater chances of success. It has nothing to do with the story of the game nor does it try to simulate anything. It's a purely gamist decision. Now, you might not like it since it makes the game "easier" than you feel is necessary. Fair enough. But, it's no different than someone watching Texas Hold'em tournaments to learn better ways of playing. Or reading strategy guides to make them a better poker player.

Are you saying that someone who takes the time out of the game to learn how to be a "better player" (in the sense of increasing their odds of success) is somehow an inferior player? That they aren't "playing right"? That the only real way of being a better player is making all the mistakes yourself? I'd argue that while there's nothing wrong with "learning from your mistakes", learning from other people's mistakes is also perfectly valid from a gamist perspective.

Personally, I don't see the point in not doing your research on a game before playing. While people's degree of research into a game may vary from "Does it have the races and classes I like?" to "Does it have a million splat books with a bunch of trap feats?", I really just don't see the point in not "reading up" on a game. I mean, I wouldn't know how to do a LOT of the cool stuff in D&D if I had never read the CharOp forums. Sure, some of that is "How to break the game in 3 easy steps." But some of them are also good advice on what choices may seem good at first glance but are really bad in practice. A lot of DMs do not allow "retraining" even for noobs, which can lead to players quitting because they're stuck with a character they don't like, "suiciding" so that they can reroll something better, and so on. A lot of those stressful, un-fun moments of gameplay can be easily avoided with 5-10 minutes of research.

As a long-time MTG player, I despise netdecking, because there's a certain level of arrogance that netdeckers gain from basically not creating something of their own and just playing what "wins". But at the same time, I can't blame people for wanting to know what is, and what isn't good to play, because lets face it, in more robust RPGs (games with lots of books and splat and 3PP) there's a LOT of bad stuff that sounds cool, but actually isn't. And that's something I'll advice any player to avoid.

 

[Lorithen]

My character's lover was another PC, not an NPC. All the DM had to do was hit the curveballs thrown at him, which he did very well.

Lanefan

That he did.

 

[Maxperson]

Funny thing is, you're STILL ignoring a lot of factors. That 3e PC you are talking about, has at best (since you've given him a 16 strength and 14 Con, a what, 12 Dex? So, +1 AC to his Scalemail armor of 14 (no shield since you've given him a two handed weapon). So, he's got a 15 AC. Mr. Orc has a +4 attack bonus (and crits 15% of the time) meaning he hits 50% of the time for 2d4+4 damage.

1d12+4. The orc is using a greataxe, not a falchion. You are still ignoring the combat section. Crits 5% of the time.

Now, our 1e fighter has banded and shield (since you gave him a longsword) and, let's be honest here, likely at least a 14 Dex (since you gimped his Str and Con, 6 shots gives him a pretty decent chance of at least that), giving him an AC of 2. Mr. Orc has a THAC0 of 19. He hits on a 17 or better for a d8 damage.

I gave the orc a longsword. I gave the fighter a two handed sword to match the 3e fighter's greatsword. Also, banded mail and shield is AC 3, but since gold is rolled randomly, an average roll would leave him unable to afford it. Most likely he had chain mail and no shield for an AC of 5. I played tons of fighters and while I occasionally rolled well enough to afford better than chain, chain was what the vast majority of them started with.

So, 1e orc hits half as often for half as much damage. While it's true that the 3e fighter likely has more HP, he doesn't have FOUR TIMES as many HP. True, the 1e orc can drop the fighter in one round. But, that orc has to get incredibly lucky. He's got a 20% chance of hitting and he's only got a 50% chance after he hits (presuming our fighter only has average HP). Our 3e orc is hitting 50% of the time, with a 15% chance of critting. And, his crit deals 4d4+8 points of damage - more than enough to drop our 1st level 3e fighter.

The 1e orc is hiting that AC of 5 35% of the time and it's far easier for that orc to knock out the fighter who has an average of 5 hit points, than the one with the for sure 12 hit points.

IOW, the 3e orc has just about the same chances of one shotting our 3e fighter, and a MUCH greater chance of dropping the fighter over time.

Blatantly false. The 1e orc only has to roll a hair better than average on damage to one shot the 1e fighter. The 3e orc with the falchion has to roll max damage, and the one with the greataxe has to roll an 8 or better on the d12.

Put it this way. Over ten rounds of combat, the 1e orc hits twice, pretty much guaranteeing dropping the fighter but only just. Over the same period of time, the 3e orc hits 5 times, once with a crit - meaning our 3e orc, has effectively hit six times. Not only killing the fighter but probably killing his buddy too.

You played a very different 3e than the rest of us. Combats were over in 1-3 rounds typically, ending in 4-5 if the combat was a slow one. Meanwhile, that 3e orc was dead by round 2 if it was lucky. The 3e fighter hits it on an 8 or better and auto kills on a hit.

 

[Lanefan]

As a long-time MTG player, I despise netdecking, because there's a certain level of arrogance that netdeckers gain from basically not creating something of their own and just playing what "wins". But at the same time, I can't blame people for wanting to know what is, and what isn't good to play, because lets face it, in more robust RPGs (games with lots of books and splat and 3PP) there's a LOT of bad stuff that sounds cool, but actually isn't. And that's something I'll advice any player to avoid.

I think it all depends how seriously one wants to take it.

Take MtG. There's people who take it uber-seriously, spending days and weeks and months tweaking a deck to the peak of perfection and then losing sleep when it doesn't win every game...and then there's guys like me, who take ten minutes to slap a deck together that looks like fun and just play for the hell of it.

D&D is the same. What might be "bad stuff" to the serious player could be really cool for the not-so-serious player. And I'll take cool-but-suboptimal over optimal-but-boring every single time.

Lan-"once in a rare while I'll stumble onto a winning idea for a MtG deck...then promptly forget what it was by the time I next play"-efan

 

[Maxperson]

I think it all depends how seriously one wants to take it.

Take MtG. There's people who take it uber-seriously, spending days and weeks and months tweaking a deck to the peak of perfection and then losing sleep when it doesn't win every game...and then there's guys like me, who take ten minutes to slap a deck together that looks like fun and just play for the hell of it.

D&D is the same. What might be "bad stuff" to the serious player could be really cool for the not-so-serious player. And I'll take cool-but-suboptimal over optimal-but-boring every single time.

Lan-"once in a rare while I'll stumble onto a winning idea for a MtG deck...then promptly forget what it was by the time I next play"-efan

This. Especially since the large drop in difficulty after 2e made it so that you could be very suboptimal and still do very well. As far as I'm concerned, so what if your group can kill the monster 1 round sooner than I can.

 

[prosfilaes]

You (and [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] and [MENTION=40166]prosfilaes[/MENTION]) were in several posts pursuing the claim that classic gamist D&D doesn't exist as an internally consistent and functional way to play.

That's rather unlikely, considering that rather specific thesis has never been presented above nor are we part of a group that pushes that specific thesis.

D&D of any edition is less internally consistent than many other RPGs, for several reasons; other RPGs started by a look at the preexisting RPGs, which D&D couldn't do, being the mass-market RPG meant that it had to target a wide audience, and the long history of material that can't be just ignored if you want to keep your main audience. And somehow, yet, it is most definitely played in many editions.

As I said earlier classic D&D has many interesting analogies with the game of poker, which I hope you agree has a significant skill component. The skills stressed can broadly be called risk management and adaptability. If you turtle, you're jeered by the other players and you get fewer XPs and magic items. ... Random chargen is like being dealt a hand in poker.

I certainly believe you play it that way, and enjoy it. Personally, I don't enjoy poker, and the board games I most enjoy don't have this type of individualized luck, like Power Grid and the 18xx series (which has no randomization at all).

With a complicated, deterministic chargen system, most gamist players just look up the good builds online (that's certainly what I do).

Or they're the ones putting the good builds online. I suspect that the best players, just like in M:tG, are looking online, but they're analyzing it and rebuilding it and tweaking it to fit their play style and skills.

The purpose of randomness in D&D is just as it is in other games, to present the players with unexpected situations so they have to pay attention and adapt rather than get into a rut of using the same strategy over and over.

One purpose of randomness in games is to dilute the effect of skill. If if you were Bruce Almighty and flipped a switch to make poker fully a game of skill, the poker tables in Vegas would be empty in a week; all the guppies who draw to an inside straight and annoy the skilled players by lucking out would quickly realize the tables were no place for them, and shortly after the smaller sharks would get eaten by the bigger sharks. Randomness in poker has little to do with varying strategy in poker, since it's a mathematically simple game where good players differ not by how well they know the game, but by how well they know their opponents. Nonrandom games tend to have steeply stratified skill levels, which tend to drive away new players.

Moreover, D&D has a huge advantage in varying strategy, in that you have a human moderator who can provide endless variety. The first levels of Zeitgeist look little like the first levels of Mummy's Mask, and reward different things.

I think usually players who want to reduce randomness really just want a situation where if they win,

I think players who want to reduce randomness often don't box the situation as winning and losing. Certainly D&D is not the game I turn to when I'm interested in winning. And I think the fact that, when you try and analyze why other people do something, your analysis is derogatory towards those people, makes it hard to calmly discuss playing with you.

 

[Hussar]

1d12+4. The orc is using a greataxe, not a falchion. You are still ignoring the combat section. Crits 5% of the time.

Read the 3.5 SRD - it's a Falchion. They dropped the Greataxe because of the X3 crit modifier.

I gave the orc a longsword. I gave the fighter a two handed sword to match the 3e fighter's greatsword. Also, banded mail and shield is AC 3, but since gold is rolled randomly, an average roll would leave him unable to afford it. Most likely he had chain mail and no shield for an AC of 5. I played tons of fighters and while I occasionally rolled well enough to afford better than chain, chain was what the vast majority of them started with.

Banded is 90 gp, Chain is 75. The odds that you can afford chain and not banded are very, very slight. 5d4x10 gp averages over 100 gp (120 to be exact). Most likely, the fighter has banded.

The 1e orc is hiting that AC of 5 35% of the time and it's far easier for that orc to knock out the fighter who has an average of 5 hit points, than the one with the for sure 12 hit points.

Yuppers. Only thing is, that fighter almost guaranteed has an AC of 2. Considering you gave him a 16 for Str, many gamers would simply put something else in Str and get that 16 in Dex for a -2 AC bonus, giving him a 1 AC. Now our orc hits 10% of the time.

Blatantly false. The 1e orc only has to roll a hair better than average on damage to one shot the 1e fighter. The 3e orc with the falchion has to roll max damage, and the one with the greataxe has to roll an 8 or better on the d12.

Only when you insist on ignoring what's actually in the game. Our 3e orc with a falchion has a 15% chance of dealing a crit - which will pretty much automatically drop the fighter with a decent chance of outright killing him. IOW, our 3e orc has a better chance of dropping the fighter. Even with a greataxe, his chances of outright killing the fighter are only 5% less. 3d12+12 damage will obliterate any 1st level fighter.

You played a very different 3e than the rest of us. Combats were over in 1-3 rounds typically, ending in 4-5 if the combat was a slow one. Meanwhile, that 3e orc was dead by round 2 if it was lucky. The 3e fighter hits it on an 8 or better and auto kills on a hit.

Let's be honest here. In any edition, fighter vs orc, smart money is on the fighter. The 1e orc only hits about 20% of the time and needs (typically) two hits to drop the fighter. Meanwhile, our 1e fighter (ignoring Unearthed Arcana which dramatically ups the fighter's damage output, never minding what 2e did), hits about 45% of the time and drops the orc a bit better than 50%. The idea that a single orc is likely to drop that fighter isn't very realistic.

 

[Hussar]

Look, at the end of the day, the argument over the "sweet spot" of lethality in gaming is as old as gaming. This exact argument has been hashed and rehashed in the pages of Dragon and whatnot since the 1970's. This is not anything new.

The thing is, the sweet spot is going to vary greatly depending on the play styles and preferences of a given table. If you want to do really old school style gaming, where you have the Town at X and the Dungeon at Y and your weekly play consists of forays into that dungeon, then, yup, you want high lethality. It's part and parcel to what makes that type of game fun.

Only problem is, that's not the only game in town and that was recognized, again, virtually from day 1. In a Hexploration game (which is about as old school as you can get), there becomes very pragmatic issues regarding lethality. In a Mega-Dungeon game, when your PC dies, your group heads back to town, and you get a new PC. No problems, it's fairly plausible. However, in a hexploration game, where you're in the middle of the Isle of Dread, it becomes a bit implausible when the fifth stranger you've met, just happens to be yet another wandering PC who joins your group to replace your latest casualty. It makes that game less fun for the participants if death is frequent and random.

Never minding that more plotzy games have been part of the hobby since very early. I loved playing the old James Bond 007 RPG. Tons of fun. But, it makes zero sense to play that as an old style meat grinder. Completely doesn't fit with the tone or genre and makes the game very unfun. Thus, in the 007 game, you have Action Points (Bond Points? It's been a long time, I forget the exact term) where you, as the player, have a great deal of narrative control over the game. And this came out in about 1983, so, I'm thinking it counts as pretty "old school".

Rolling back to fantasy, there's also the issue of fantasy genre expectations. Fantasy fiction really doesn't fit (at least of the time) with the idea of a revolving door of dead characters. It's not until pretty recently with George R.R. Martin and others where you see fantasy fiction with strings of dead characters. Going back to Tolkien (I hate Godwinning this thread), of the original Fellowship, there's only one death. That's it. Rolling even further back to the pulps, your main characters almost never die. Sure, various red-shirt side characters pop up and get ganked, but, the main guys? Nope, they suffer and then keep right on rolling. ((Of course, this makes a lot more sense when you realize that those serial pulp authors wanted to keep making money, so, killing their main bread winner was just NOT going to happen)).

But, when you look at D&D's wargaming roots, frequent death makes perfect sense. No one cares when their three meeple on the Ukraine in Risk get munched. You pick up the pieces, and put them right back on the board next round. Given that all the pieces are identical, who cares if you lose one? However, that wargaming root ran smack dab into the impulse for theatricalism that is part and parcel to the hobby as well. Lots of people play RPG's to create a story. Which means that revolving door PC's don't work very well.

I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here. Which is why I've had a real problem wrapping my head around the notion that this is something new. That there's been some sort of change in the way D&D has been played since virtually day one. Every single one of the issues we've talked about here can be found in the first twenty or thirty issues of The Dragon. This is not a new thing.

 

[Sunseeker]

I think it all depends how seriously one wants to take it.

Take MtG. There's people who take it uber-seriously, spending days and weeks and months tweaking a deck to the peak of perfection and then losing sleep when it doesn't win every game...and then there's guys like me, who take ten minutes to slap a deck together that looks like fun and just play for the hell of it.

D&D is the same. What might be "bad stuff" to the serious player could be really cool for the not-so-serious player. And I'll take cool-but-suboptimal over optimal-but-boring every single time.

Lan-"once in a rare while I'll stumble onto a winning idea for a MtG deck...then promptly forget what it was by the time I next play"-efan

But it really isn't that cut and dry. Like, for example I love fighters but by-the-book, fighters are pretty dry. They hit things with a stick and then do it again. So I went through some CharOp boards to find out "What can I do with a fighter to make my gameplay more interesting?" And I found several guides on how to do some slick stuff (like charge, knockback, and so forth). I had no idea that this form of playing a fighter even existed. To put that back into MTG terms, these are cards I didn't even own, much less even knew were part of the game.

In a robust game like most editions of D&D and MTG its really not hard to be good and creative at the same time. It's more like one of those 2-dimensional grids where "creative" is up and down and "effective at the table" is left and right. For example I'm running a very OP Cleric in a game, she's very op and of course, a little downtime and I can completely switch out all my spells and I know which ones are the "best spells" but for the most part I choose spells that I find interesting, thematic, and flavorful. Sometimes I can't break the world even when I need to for no other reason than I don't want to.

And I think it's important to remember that breaking the game is not something that automatically happens when you create a powerful character. It's always a choice you make as part of play.

Lastly though I would say that being creative doesn't come from the game. That comes from the player. Without the imagination of the player to detail in the appearance, attitude, hopes, dreams, fears, desires and general taste in clothing, it doesn't matter which feats you take or how many classes you dip into. That is where the creativity of a character really happens.

 

[pemerton]

ith a complicated, deterministic chargen system, most gamist players just look up the good builds online (that's certainly what I do). Totally boring from a gamist perspective.

This stuck in my head a bit and I thought I'd pull this out for a bit of extra examination.

How is this not pure gamism? You are making decisions base on what will give you greater chances of success. It has nothing to do with the story of the game nor does it try to simulate anything. It's a purely gamist decision. Now, you might not like it since it makes the game "easier" than you feel is necessary. Fair enough. But, it's no different than someone watching Texas Hold'em tournaments to learn better ways of playing. Or reading strategy guides to make them a better poker player.

Are you saying that someone who takes the time out of the game to learn how to be a "better player" (in the sense of increasing their odds of success) is somehow an inferior player?

I took the claim at face value - that, in the context of D&D, "winning" by faithfully implementing a strategy you read about online is boring.

In the context of the "classic" playstyle, I would relate this back to the importance of fictional positioning. The more that resolution depends solely on engaging the fictional positioning (eg surfing unhinged doors down the frictionless corridor in White Plume Mountain), then the less significant "build" becomes and hence the more the gamist "pressure point" becomes not pre-reading and pre-learning but cleverness in the moment with respect to the fiction (hence, also, the reason that reading the module - let alone someone else's play report about it - is, in effect, cheating).

The OP is claiming that players are "earning their awards" in old school play. What, exactly, did your player do to "earn" that fighter with an 18/54 strength and it's attendant 10% XP bonus?

My take on the XP bonus for good prime requisites is that it is meant to enforce a modest degree of genre fidelity (stronger characters are more likely to be turned into fighters). Once you have AD&D-style allocation of stats rather than stats rolled in order, this function becomes largely redundant (because if you want to play a MU you can stick you good stat into INT, and if you really want to play a strong wizard what's the harm?) and probably the rule should be dropped - an early case of D&D cargo cult-ism about rules, where the rule lingers on even though its rationale has faded.

more plotzy games have been part of the hobby since very early.

<snip>

when you look at D&D's wargaming roots, frequent death makes perfect sense. No one cares when their three meeple on the Ukraine in Risk get munched. You pick up the pieces, and put them right back on the board next round. Given that all the pieces are identical, who cares if you lose one? However, that wargaming root ran smack dab into the impulse for theatricalism that is part and parcel to the hobby as well. Lots of people play RPG's to create a story. Which means that revolving door PC's don't work very well.

I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here. Which is why I've had a real problem wrapping my head around the notion that this is something new.

It's not new. The OP knows it's not new, because - as [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has pointed out - he was advocating against that sort of "story" play back in the late 70s and early 80s.

I think the OP is making a claim about trends - that more contemporary gaming has the "participationary" rather than "challenge" focus. I don't know enough about contemporary games to have a view. I barely know enough about contemporary RPGing to have a view about the little niche of gaming. But - following on from my recent exchanges in this thread with [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] and [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] - I would tentatively assert that one feature of 5e might be argued to be a rather low degree of lethality (comparable, let's say, to 4e, and not, say, to Moldvay Basic) packaged in such a way as to make the game feel more like the classic experience than 4e is ever going to (for instance, by packing that non-lethality into targeted class abilities like Spare the Dying, Revivify, etc rather than making it overt in each PC via the Second Wind/other healing surge/death-and-dying rules).

Which probably makes it better suited for the AP-type experience of a combo of "tourism" and "challenge" than 3E/PF, which has the continual rocket-tag threat of high lethality. Clever design by WotC.