Somehow I suspect that were there no levelling or mechanical advancement or other game-state rewards the player base would mostly evaporate.
There are games which work this way. Even video games. The incentive is other things. Cosmetics, new options, new experiences. Yes, it's often a slightly (and I do emphasize
slightly) smaller crowd. It's not dead, as you imply.
Characters do goodly heroic things and in return their players expect the game to reward them for doing so. They play to level up.
Nah. They play to find out what happens. This is like saying people eat a fine steak dinner solely because there's cheesecake at the end.
And I should note that in saying that I'm actually advocating a position I don't in fact hold. For me, levelling up is a pleasant side-effect of ongoing play but not the underlying reason for it. However, I believe I'm significantly in the minority in holding this view; and that for most players the carrot of levelling up and other advancements is a large reason why they continue to play in a campaign.
I never said it wasn't
a reason. Of course it is. I'm talking about it being so much larger that no other motive really has any significance. Just as you treat the randomness of D&D as being so overwhelming, so utterly hegemonic, that the game is always a roulette wheel no matter what.
I'm sure that these things are...grease in the wheels, you might say. But I've found the thing that actually keeps people coming back, consistently over long periods, is the weight of what they're doing.
If all they wanted was levelling up, they could get that far more easily, and in many cases
for free, or for only a minimal initial payment (comparable to buying a TTRPG book!), with something that offers much more reliable mechanical rewards.
That's a big part of why I consider values and the experience-of-story (not a hard forced plot, a story we weave together by the act of play) to be the most important things about the experience. That is precisely what you
cannot get any other way.
Sure. Not knowing jack about video games, I'll ask: in those games where the rewards for wicked/selfish deeds are greater, are those deeds also a viable path to winning or completing the game? Or is it more a choice between getting rewarded and winning; in which case I think most people will choose winning.
Well certainly sometimes it can be like that or even feel like that. One game called
Dishonored is about an ex-assassin, turned personal bodyguard of the Empress (and father of her child and heir), who gets framed for murdering her and then given supernatural power to get his revenge. If you go full bloody madboy, killing everyone you meet and ruthlessly exploiting the supernatural power given to you to just rack up the bodies, it directly hurts the city you live in. Fewer police officers really does mean more crime unpunished, and more dead bodies means the plague rats spread further and worse. Plus, the police beef up their presence later on because you cleaved through them like a hot knife through butter. By the end, you've
made a world that is dark and desperate through your own actions, so it's a harder, darker fight, and ends with a very bittersweet tone.
But that's usually uncommon. Most games that permit wicked choices alongside good ones allow all such approaches to still earn victory. Baldur's Gate 3 being a very recent example, though when I was speaking earlier I was thinking of Mass Effect (which is more "noble vs ruthless" than "good vs evil"), which does nothing to prevent either approach from succeeding
overall, it just makes 100% dedication to either side complicated.
I largely equate the two. The saying goes "money is the root of all evil" but I say it's more that ambition is the root of all evil, and money is just one symptom of many.
The saying is misquoted. It comes from the words of Jesus. "The
love of money is the root of all evil." And those two words are exactly the problem. Having, using, and even seeking money? All perfectly acceptable in the right contexts. But
loving money, in and of itself? That is the broken, harmful ideology that warps things.
Sure, someone can portray a character that way. Good luck with that, though, because the might-makes-right ethos of the setting (which is the basis of pretty much every D&D setting I've ever seen, be it published or homebrew) is then going to fight that character every step of the way and probably end up eating it alive. You advance, or you disappear.
But then it isn't an unbiased referee. It's a referee with an active bias in favor of the worst impulses, all the time, always.
It is very literally
enforcing the might-makes-right worldview, which, I hate to break it to you,
doesn't actually reflect reality. Like...at all. Yes, might makes
control. But control doesn't make you right. Oftentimes, all it does is delay your eventual doom. Turns out, things do actually get better some of the time, and one of the things that helps them get better is when people (a)
believe it can get better and (b)
take action to make it better.
Sometimes, truly following an irrational belief that people can choose to be good is
precisely the thing that builds a world where that belief
is perfectly rational.
We are not
homo economicus. We are more. Don't enforce a worldview where we are so limited.
I disagree with the bolded. I very much think it is not only possible but quite do-able.
Not at all. Any time there is interpretive freedom, you must either exert your force, at least
some of the time, because of one simple argument.
"You didn't say I couldn't".
It is the identical twin of "It's what my character would do". Theoretically fine. In practice, it is an excuse for
much wickedness.
The rules allow a lot of stuff. If-when a player breaks something (or if-when a DM sees it coming ahead of time) and the DM rules against it, that still mean the rules allow a lot of stuff minus one.
But it's "infinity" stuff. Remember? Tactical infinity? "Whatever is not forbidden is permitted"?
If someone finds a spell interaction that allows a 5th-level character to destroy a city and I-as-DM go in and tweak one of the spells such that, while still otherwise working as intended, that broken interaction is no longer possible, I hardly think that gets anywhere near the degree of "GM manipulation" you seem to be referring to. All I've done is reduced the infinite possibilities by one, and in the process achieved a more playable game.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about peasant railgun.
The thing where, because moving an object is a free action, you can accelerate things to light speed. It's permitted by the rules, it should work! It wasn't forbidden!
These aren't isolated cases. It's the same pattern of thought, over and over: "How can I break the rules by following them?" That is where this madness always tends. Invariably. Because that is the thought pattern which produces the most and highest success in such a gameplay style. Never, ever obey the rules if you can. Break whatever you can get away with. Cheat as often as possible if you won't get caught. Even if you do, just move on to pastures new and continue cheating.
That is what this hyper materialist perspective produces. Players who view the game as "what can I hoodwink my GM into allowing?" I don't want that. I don't want players trying to pull the wool over my eyes, I don't want to have to be
constantly "removing just one thing" from the infinity pile every goddamn session because the players found yet another irritating exploit that trivializes everything.
First off, I see a big difference between outright cheating (reading the module ahead of time in D&D, or bribing the referee in hockey) and simply pushing the rules (finding an exploit in D&D or M:tG, or committing fouls when the ref isn't looking). The former is outright bad. The latter is part of playing a judgment-based game, and IMO it's on the referee or DM to push back and enforce the rules that exist.
You haven't actually said how they're different though. Only that one is somehow bad and the other is somehow good. That can't be what differentiates them; if so then they really
are the same thing, you're just okay with it some of the time.
But more importantly, they are identical in the specific way I already said: they both see rules as tools to be exploited and, ideally,
broken whenever possible. Because when you break the rules, you are the one who gains control.
You want every game to always be a shoving match, except the GM
never gets knocked down. Ever. No matter what. How can that happen, unless you give the GM the tools to ensure that if things ever
look like they might get pushed over, they can just declare they block it? Which is precisely the same as saying that the GM manipulates things so they always decide how things end up. That they only use this power when the players might win doesn't mean they aren't manipulative. It just means they're in a situation of naturally high control to start with, so it takes unusual circumstances to potentially dislodge them.
Note that games like chess, where the rules are hard-coded with no judgment or interpretation involved, don't and can't have this occur.
Sure they can. Because the rules are not quite as hard as you think. Does the game permit
en passant? Not all do. Heck, you know how the queen is the most powerful piece? That wasn't always so! What we now call chess was called "mad queens" chess or the like, and was seen as a scandalously
feminist game when it was new, what with a powerful and destructive "queen" and the fact that
women could beat
men at the game!!! Now no one cares, of course, but it means that hard rules are never
quite as hard as you seem to think. And soft rules aren't protected, they just admit new kinds of nefarious behavior.
