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Message: <blockquote data-quote="covaithe" data-source="post: 4424674" data-attributes="member: 46559">Thanks for starting this discussion, Graf.  As I've hinted at elsewhere, I have fairly strong feelings about this.  I'll try to outline my objections as best I can, starting with the general and working towards the specific.  As far as general objections to the concept of in-game rewards for out-of-game events, two points.  First, playing the game is its own reward.  It's fun; that's why we're here.  As long as the game is fun, people will play it, and DM it, and judge it, without further incentives.  And if it's not fun, no incentives we can provide will get them to participate.  Second, it's really hard to provide targeted incentives in a productive way.  In software development, there are a million stories about managers who try to improve quality by offering $5 for every bug fixed, only to find that the software gets worse, because people create more bugs so that they can fix them for the bounty.  These things backfire.  People find ways to game the system.  Now for specific proposals:  DM credits as in LEW or LEB are well enough established that they are the unlikely to cause huge problems.  In LEW, they seem to be ignored most of the time, but there have been occasional excesses:  people spending 20 points at once to skip an entire level and that sort of thing.  I personally would prefer us to try not having DM points at all, but I suspect that won't be a popular opinion.  I think at the very least, we should put some kind of cap on the number of points that can be spent in a given calendar month.  Regarding changing DM points (or OOC points or whatever) to encourage DMs to push games forward instead of letting them drag:  I have some sympathy with this.  Letting games drag is the way to cheat the system if points are awarded by elapsed real time.  If we instead award points based on number of experience generating encounters, we need to think about how the system will get cheated in that case, because it will.  Lots of easy quick little encounters?  Awarding experience for every successful skill check?  Also, this system effectively penalizes DMs who run extended, difficult encounters.  Which are often the interesting ones.  Graf, your KK1 Grotto encounter wouldn't score nearly as well as the encounter I just ran in LEW against 8 tiny monstrous centipedes that blindly attacked and got killed in two rounds.  I think it took two days real time.  But the KK1 encounter is clearly better, in my opinion.  Also, what about roleplaying "encounters"?  When there's no skill challenge involved, but players overcome some obstacle through simple persuasion rather than killing everyone in sight and taking their stuff?  If DMs award experience for that -- which I prefer to do -- do they get a point for it?  Regarding allowing DMs to give points to players:  I'm not very comfortable with this, as stated.  Do they only get to give one point?  What if they've got two "good" players?  Or three or four?  What if they have none?  It puts the DM in the awkward position of having to declare that Player A is a better player than Player B.   I'd much rather simply leave this to the DM's discretion to award roleplaying experience as they see fit.  Regular participation seems pretty likely to be necessary to achieve good roleplaying.About rewarding other helpful ooc activity...  LEW has kicked the topic around a few times, and the only proposal that I know of that ever got implemented was to allow DMs one or two extra points for posting a detailed summary of their adventure to the wiki after it was finished, with judges to decide whether it was detailed enough.  Here are some links to existing summaries:  <a href="http://bluwiki.com/go/Living_ENWorld:Adventure:A_Teacher_for_Laynie" target="_blank">1</a> <a href="http://bluwiki.com/go/Living_ENWorld:Adventure:Notes_on_the_Aether" target="_blank">2</a>.  (I'm writing this from memory rather than looking for the thread, so I may have some details wrong.)  That was put in place to address the specific problem that a lot of the nice content put in place for specific adventures was getting overlooked and forgotten.  Has it worked?  Eh....  to some extent.  We've gotten some good summaries, but it's not clear whether the information is readily accessible.  What's really needed is some kind of secretary / historian / archivist who would pay attention to the adventures and maintain the wiki.  But that's a huge job.  The only way I can see it getting done is if everyone pitches in whenever they can.  LEW has several times rejected the notion of awarding points to judges.  I think that's wise.  It's not just the conflict of interest; judges need to avoid even the perception that there could be a conflict of interest between judging and playing.  So, bottom line, since I've spent too long typing this post already:  I think OOC points of any kind create more problems than they solve.  We're only just getting started with this living world, let's not create any more problems for ourselves.</blockquote>

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