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

 

[prosfilaes]

PS by 3rd level you've usually faced and beaten someone in plate, so you are wearing plate. The wealth by level was a guideline only for creation of PCs from scratch, and usually left that PC behind anyone who actually played to that level. Those guidelines, like many 3e rules(CR I'm looking at you!), were borked.

"Usually"? What evidence for this is there? I quickly looked at Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne, and the best either of them had by the end of the first book (half way to 5th level) was one +1 breastplate. Whether or not you get a plate mail, and not just plate mail but plate mail you can use, seems heavily dependent on what type of adventures you're running and whether or not your DM wants you to have plate mail or not.

 

[Hussar]

And let's not forget that [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] is actually mistaken. The wealth by level table is not for making higher level characters. It's a means to keep game balance.

Typically when people talk about how CR is borked, they have two things in common. Die rolled characters with much higher than standard stats and much higher wealth by level. And usually both.

 

[S'mon]

"Usually"? What evidence for this is there? I quickly looked at Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne, and the best either of them had by the end of the first book (half way to 5th level) was one +1 breastplate. Whether or not you get a plate mail, and not just plate mail but plate mail you can use, seems heavily dependent on what type of adventures you're running and whether or not your DM wants you to have plate mail or not.

Also I wouldn't let a PC just put on random non-magical platemail, it'd almost always need refitting at least.

 

[Maxperson]

And let's not forget that @Maxperson is actually mistaken. The wealth by level table is not for making higher level characters. It's a means to keep game balance.

Game balance? In 3e? Hahahahahaha! Wealth by level is as broken as CR is. So is game balance.

Typically when people talk about how CR is borked, they have two things in common. Die rolled characters with much higher than standard stats and much higher wealth by level. And usually both.

Typically, it's because game balance between classes is horrible. Add in horrible prestige class balance and it gets even worse. A creature in 3e is supposed to be a match for 4 PCs. Which 4 classes? 4 wizards? 4 fighters? A fighter, a ranger, a cleric and a rogue? A monk, a fighter, a wizard and a scout? 3 rogues and a monk? A beguiler, a spellthief, a scout and a warblade? CR can't work with the class mix of 3e. Period.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Typically when people talk about how CR is borked, they have two things in common. Die rolled characters with much higher than standard stats and much higher wealth by level. And usually both.

Dont forget shorter than recommended adventuring days...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm also wondering if this were about physical sport, if the implication would map to reward-based games being akin casual forays onto the basketball court with several disparately equipped and minimally (at best) invested participants. This would, in turn, produce a game where having a laugh, a bit of a sweat, and only very incidental/peripheral (at best) moments of something resembling "competition" would be the point.

If you want to take this analogy and run with it, then it's less the difference between professional basketball and a casual game for fun, and more the difference between either of those two and the sort of participation-trophy extreme where nobody is allowed to fail because they might feel bad (whether or not that's a real thing, it's an example for illustration).

It's not that the competition is slack because neither team is really invested too much, and more that one side is deliberately throwing the game by giving the other side so many get-out-of-jail-free cards that the conclusion is foregone.

Edit: I'm not saying that it's actually gone that far, but the analogy is better. It's a matter of perspective. How many extra lives do they need to give you, before winning becomes inevitable? Everyone is going to see that line in a different place. I probably could have beaten Super Mario Bros. when I was 8, if I'd had a hundred lives; but probably not if I'd only had ten lives.

 

[prosfilaes]

Typically, it's because game balance between classes is horrible. Add in horrible prestige class balance and it gets even worse. A creature in 3e is supposed to be a match for 4 PCs. Which 4 classes? 4 wizards? 4 fighters? A fighter, a ranger, a cleric and a rogue? A monk, a fighter, a wizard and a scout? 3 rogues and a monk? A beguiler, a spellthief, a scout and a warblade? CR can't work with the class mix of 3e. Period.

So "usually" the party will find plate mail, but the CR system is broken because it doesn't handle the case of 4 wizards or 4 fighters. Right.

When A4 says "An adventure for character levels 4-7", does that mean all parties of levels 4 through 7? CR means the exact same thing, just on a smaller scale. It's a tool to give a DM some direction, not constrain them or let them ignore the real properties of the party. Even as a tool for XP, there's no change from other editions; for certain parties, certain monsters will be trivial XP or incredibly hard XP.

 

[pemerton]

if I'm understanding things correctly, isn't this just another way of poo pooing other people's playstyle?

No. It's a way of trying to get a handle on it.

The rationale for playing Dragonlance is pretty different from the rationale for playing (say) Castle Amber.

Or, to move beyond D&D, the rationale for playing CoC is pretty different from the rationale for playing T&T. Sure, both involve declaring actions for your 3-to-18-statted player character, but beyond that the similarities start to end.

Apart from anything else, part of enjoying CoC is playing out your PC's descent into madness. Whereas in T&T going mad is a loss-condition.

No doubt there are individual RPGers who have drifted these games away from their defaults (and so play CoC to "beat the dungeon" and play T&T to explore the life and times of their delvers) but the basic gist of the games, as written and as played in acccordance with tehir default orienations, is pretty discernible and pretty different.

It never stops baffling me why gamers seem to have this need to draw lines around their version of the hobby and declare anything outside of that line as "something else".

What baffles me is the recurrent assumption that every RPGer is trying to do the same thing - roughly, play some sort of cross between Tomb of Horrors and Dead Gods. From this follows the assumption that differences in system don't make any difference to play experience, and that there is some single skill called "GMing" which is portable from Molvay Basic to DitV to Rise of the Runelords.

That assumption was false in the late 70s (as Lewise Pulsipher was aware of in his writings then) and is still false today.

Every hobby has hardcores that look down on wannabes, oddballs that scoff at conformists.

The difference between T&T and CoC has nothing to do with "hardcore" vs "wannabe". Or the difference between Moldvay Basic and 4e. If you try and play 4e using your Moldvay Basic premises and procedures (exploration, 10' poles, avoiding roles whenever possible, etc) your game will just break down. And vice versa - if you try and play Moldvay Basic using your 4e premises and procedures (bold engagement with situations, assumptions about the importance of PC mechanical abilities to action resolution, etc), you'll just lose.

They're different games that happen to be RPGs. Something like the way in which chess and backgammon are different games that happen to be boardgames.

get up on a soapbox and declare that we've strayed from the one true path? Go soak your head.

The only people doing that are those who want to put a ban on talking about different ways of RPGing, by insisting (aginst all the evidence) that all RPGers are really doing the same thing.

 

[Lanefan]

The difference between T&T and CoC has nothing to do with "hardcore" vs "wannabe". Or the difference between Moldvay Basic and 4e. If you try and play 4e using your Moldvay Basic premises and procedures (exploration, 10' poles, avoiding roles whenever possible, etc) your game will just break down. And vice versa - if you try and play Moldvay Basic using your 4e premises and procedures (bold engagement with situations, assumptions about the importance of PC mechanical abilities to action resolution, etc), you'll just lose.

They're different games that happen to be RPGs. Something like the way in which chess and backgammon are different games that happen to be boardgames.

Not quite.

Your chess-backgammon analogy holds up when comparing D&D with CoC or T&T or whatever other system you like. They're different games that happen to be RPGs. And that's fine.

But it utterly fails when comparing Basic to 4e, because at that point (despite what some might think) you're comparing D&D with D&D. In that light, I should be able to take my Basic or 1e premises and procedures and port them forward to any subsequent editon, because at least in theory it's the same bloody game.

Now if you're trying to say that 4e (or 5e?) isn't D&D as D&D was defined before their existence...well, let's not open that can o' worms, shall we?

Lanefan

 

[prosfilaes]

But it utterly fails when comparing Basic to 4e, because at that point (despite what some might think) you're comparing D&D with D&D. In that light, I should be able to take my Basic or 1e premises and procedures and port them forward to any subsequent editon, because at least in theory it's the same bloody game.

In whose theory? By what definition of "the same bloody game"? Virtually all major games have a large number of variations. There's dozens of variants on the game of checkers. There's huge historical differences on chess, and most best-selling board games have all sorts of varying expansions, which often demand that you use different strategies or even play the game completely different ways. WOTC owns the name D&D, and like Coca-Cola, Superman, and Microsoft Windows, there will be variations between versions and over time that you may not like and that aren't compatible with the way you want to do things.