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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7754332" data-attributes="member: 42582">I was referring to 2nd ed AD&D. I hoped the context made that clear.It's not a reward. No one thinks that playing the game is, per se, hard.If every week you turn up and get to eat chips with your friends while RPGing, does that make the chips a participation trophy?It's a device for ensuring that the campaing progresses, in a way that everyone knows in advance, through the tiers of play (Heroic, Paragon, Epic) culminating in the PCs realising their epic destinies. That these things will occur is a default assumption of 4e RPGing.The rewards for play are found elsewhere.All this tells me is that you've never played 4e, or thought seriously about how it works as a system. Nearly every mechanical feature of the game is designed to incentivise just this.And this suggests that there are a whole lot of games you haven't seriously thought about!For instance, when playing five hundred or bridge socially, partners win or lose together. But I've never played a hand of five hundred where my partner "hung back". I have played with partners who were not very good - if that's because of inexperience, then it's polite to let it pass; if that's because a good player is being careless or reckless, then it can be legitimate grounds for irritation! But one doesn't need a system of individual merit or demerit points to generate incentives to participate in a social activity one has volunteered to be part of.More generally, and building on that point: why would anyone turn up to play a game of 4e and then choose not to play (in your words, to "hang back")? The fun of the game is in playing one's PC and thereby impacting the fiction, whether in the combat or non-combat context. That's what every feature of the PC is set up to enable.Your whole set of assumptions and reasoning here is (i) ignoring the actual design of 4e, and (ii) ignoring the possibility that people might play a RPG as something other than a wargame, and that a game might be designed to help them do that.</blockquote>

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