What games reward

[Glyfair]

I was contemplating recently the experience system in D&D and what it rewards you for while reading comments about D&D being about "killing things and taking their stuff."

I was thinkiing that you can look at a game and see what it is "about" by looking at what it rewards you for. Even if the developers had a different plan, if they reward you for something you'll see an emphasis on that in gameplay.

Now, D&D is complex. At the heart, it rewards you for overcoming adversaries, traps and other challenges. Of the three, overcoming adversaries is the most straightforward when it involves combat. So, it should be no suprise that most D&D games have a focus on combat. That doesn't necessarily mean they all revolve around combat, but they have a strong focus.

D&D, does however, attempt to be the flexible game system by recommending you tweak the experience system by rewarding it for other things. So, D&D games certainly allow groups to vary from the norm and you see a lot of variations between D&D games of those willing to tweak their games.

Runequest, on the other hand, rewarded you for using your abilities. If you succeeded with an ability during an adventure during a stressful moment, you had a chance to increase that skill. So, you saw a lot of players trying to be as versatile as possible. Fighters, for example, would hit with their sword and then use their mace for the next combat. You also were able to train those skills, so you saw a lot of focus on training (and earning the money to train, or favors that gave you free training).

The Dying Earth RPG rewards you for inserting certain phrases (drawn from Jack Vance's books) into your roleplaying in the most appropriate and fun way. Thus games tend to focus on a lot of conversation and interactions to gain the most opportunity to use that phrase.

Just because a system doesn't directly reward a certain behavior doesn't mean it won't be emphasised. For example, most roleplaying campaigns reward roleplaying with in character benefits. If you make friends with the royal guard, you may be able to get troops to help you assault an enemies lair. So, you'll see roleplaying in most games, but won't necessarily see a strong emphasis on it overall in certain games. It depends on a groups overall preferences.

Do you think this holds true across most RPGs? Have you noticed a tendancy for campaigns to focus on the things that the RPG system rewards? (Not just one campaign, but over several campaigns and several groups)

 

[Hussar]

I would say that that's a perfectly fair assessment. Players, by and large, want to "win" for a given value of winning. Granted, in an RPG, you can't really win, but, you can lose and no one likes to lose.

So, we do the stuff that makes us "not lose". In D&D, in whatever incarnation, that meant killing stuff and taking their treasure. That was the fastest, simplest way to rewards - going up levels and having cool stuff. In games where there are no kill xp, then combat tends to get moved back a bit. Vampire comes to mind - where amateur theatrics are rewarded readily. Dying Earth makes an excellent example as well (and a bloody fun game). Since you get rewards for doing X, it makes sense that the majority of players will do X.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

To be fair, I've seen several Vampire games that involved killing things and taking their stuff, and read about a great many more. I've never actually seen a NWoD game, though; perhaps they've been more successful in driving play away from that?

An interesting case to me is HERO. The default genre (Champions/superheroes) implies a strong combat focus, as do the complex combat rules, but there's not much killing things (outside the iron age, anyway), no taking of their stuff, and the XP system, such as it is, pretty much ignores combat or non-combat.

Nonetheless, most Champions games I've played and pretty much all I've watched stayed close to genre, with lots of big, boisterous four-color battles. As much from the players as the GM.

I suspect the reason is thus:

What the available rewards are is every bit as important as how you acquire them, if not moreso. If you have a D&D character who gains a fighter level (acquiring +1 BAB and a fighter bonus feat, say), you want to go out there and try out your new feat on the nearest monster - even if you might get as much or more XP for talking or sneaking past that monster.

Similarly, in HERO (where you would almost certainly get as much or more XP for talking or sneaking past), you fight the monster because you have a newly enhanced energy blast power to put to the test.

 

[Hussar]

And, too there is the satisfaction of stomping all over something, even vicariously.