On Behavioral Realism

[Ovinomancer]

Unless you talk to them and let them know what direction you would like the game to go, and they agree to do it that way. People aren't dogs. You don't have to give them treats to get them to do something.

Right, if you talk to them and they want to do it, they are self-incentivizing, and your job is super easy. We aren't talking about times where the players already want to do it, but the times where the structure of the game either doesn't incentivize play that they players might engage or disincentivizes play they would but now the cost is too high.

And, sure, people aren't dogs. Thank you for the strawman that you've so deftly gnawed and destuffed in a furious shaking. Now that's done, I'm sure we can agree that people tend to like treats and also tend to dislike rolled up newspapers to the nose. Granted, treats are usually more complex for people than a Milkbone, and you really shouldn't be hitting your players with rolled up newspaper, no matter how fun it is to do so.

 

[Reynard]

I think you've arrived at looking for a solution before you've identified the problem. The problem isn't 'my players aren't playing their PCs as if they are "real" people' where "real" means acting in specific ways that you think they should. It's actually "what is my game's incentive structure, and how does that encourage play?"

I think, if you'll look, that you may be running a game with a reasonable amount of difficulty and with relatively low resource flow to the PCs. This means they don't get treasure as often as they want to be confident in their ability to overcome presented challenges, and so they are acting in ways to minimize outflow of treasure because that's the game -- get enough treasure to get the gear to be able to overcome the challenges. I futher think that you, based on some statement earlier in the thread, have many ways you attempt to separate PCs from treasure through costs for things, like baths and inns. So, again, you're disincentivizing this behavior. This reinforces and you end up with PCs that camp in the woods outside of town because they want to minimize their interaction with the treasure suck of the town outside of the gear merchants and possibly the occasional quest giver.

If you modify your incentive structure such that the cost of gearing after a certain tier is social approval of the town, then you make being clean and engaging socially with the townsfolk (and patronizing their businesses) a step in the path to getting more gear. You might also need to slightly bump up treasure accumulation or reduce costs for inns and baths and clothing.

I'm running a Sigil game right now, and I built in downtime activities to increase favor with the various factions. And I have lifestyle expenses. These two things both gate what gear levels you can buy in Sigil -- a city where everything is for sale at some price. If you want more than uncommon goods, you need a patron (a faction or other organization) and must maintain a minimum lifestyle. No purveyor of rare goods in Sigil will deal with a nobody or a street rat -- no matter how connected they appear. For that matter, you can't progress in your patron favor if you're a filthy street rat -- they have standards (although, for some, those standards are... odd). So, I've created an incentive structure where players are heavily incentivized to engage in the social aspects of the city -- to see and be seen -- because this directly affect their ability to acquire gear they want to go do the things they want to do on adventures.

What are you doing in your game to make taking a bath something the players care about? If you don't get the players interested, the PCs will continue to avoid baths (using baths generically, as it was a topic).

You are completely missing, or avoiding, the point as it relates to what my goal is in my game or with this thread.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You are completely missing, or avoiding, the point as it relates to what my goal is in my game or with this thread.

I do not think I am. You want the players to have their PCs engage in more 'normal' actions, one of which is sleeping in inns when available rather than saving cash by sleeping in the wilderness. "Baths" is a general euphemism I was using to shorthand this, not a literal one.

If you're having this problem, it's because your incentive structure is not working the way you expect it to. Looking for more tools before fully understanding how your current structure works is more likely to push the behavior into different areas or cause animosity with the players as they feel 'forced' to do things they don't want to do and they double down on the refusing to go to inns (or whatever) and make the issue more of a sticking point.

I don't say this in a vacuum -- I've had this exact problem and tried all kinds of ways to fix it that backfired before I realized, quite some time later, that it was my fault for having the incentives in my game not align with the game I wanted. Can you articulate the incentive structure in your game? It's not easy to do, and requires an honest and sometimes unflattering look at how we actually play versus how we think we're playing versus how we want to play.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I think you've arrived at looking for a solution before you've identified the problem. The problem isn't 'my players aren't playing their PCs as if they are "real" people' where "real" means acting in specific ways that you think they should. It's actually "what is my game's incentive structure, and how does that encourage play?"

I think, if you'll look, that you may be running a game with a reasonable amount of difficulty and with relatively low resource flow to the PCs. This means they don't get treasure as often as they want to be confident in their ability to overcome presented challenges, and so they are acting in ways to minimize outflow of treasure because that's the game -- get enough treasure to get the gear to be able to overcome the challenges. I futher think that you, based on some statement earlier in the thread, have many ways you attempt to separate PCs from treasure through costs for things, like baths and inns. So, again, you're disincentivizing this behavior. This reinforces and you end up with PCs that camp in the woods outside of town because they want to minimize their interaction with the treasure suck of the town outside of the gear merchants and possibly the occasional quest giver.

If you modify your incentive structure such that the cost of gearing after a certain tier is social approval of the town, then you make being clean and engaging socially with the townsfolk (and patronizing their businesses) a step in the path to getting more gear. You might also need to slightly bump up treasure accumulation or reduce costs for inns and baths and clothing.

I'm running a Sigil game right now, and I built in downtime activities to increase favor with the various factions. And I have lifestyle expenses. These two things both gate what gear levels you can buy in Sigil -- a city where everything is for sale at some price. If you want more than uncommon goods, you need a patron (a faction or other organization) and must maintain a minimum lifestyle. No purveyor of rare goods in Sigil will deal with a nobody or a street rat -- no matter how connected they appear. For that matter, you can't progress in your patron favor if you're a filthy street rat -- they have standards (although, for some, those standards are... odd). So, I've created an incentive structure where players are heavily incentivized to engage in the social aspects of the city -- to see and be seen -- because this directly affect their ability to acquire gear they want to go do the things they want to do on adventures.

What are you doing in your game to make taking a bath something the players care about? If you don't get the players interested, the PCs will continue to avoid baths (using baths generically, as it was a topic).

Good post.

@Reynard: So here's an experiment: tell your players that their fame as adventurers is spreading, and that innkeepers start offering them free room & board.

Now do they stay in inns and take baths?

Maybe that will solve your problem.

(Unless, of course, it's important to you for some reason that they are willing to spend their gold to do this.)

 

[Reynard]

I do not think I am. You want the players to have their PCs engage in more 'normal' actions, one of which is sleeping in inns when available rather than saving cash by sleeping in the wilderness. "Baths" is a general euphemism I was using to shorthand this, not a literal one.

If you're having this problem, it's because your incentive structure is not working the way you expect it to. Looking for more tools before fully understanding how your current structure works is more likely to push the behavior into different areas or cause animosity with the players as they feel 'forced' to do things they don't want to do and they double down on the refusing to go to inns (or whatever) and make the issue more of a sticking point.

I don't say this in a vacuum -- I've had this exact problem and tried all kinds of ways to fix it that backfired before I realized, quite some time later, that it was my fault for having the incentives in my game not align with the game I wanted. Can you articulate the incentive structure in your game? It's not easy to do, and requires an honest and sometimes unflattering look at how we actually play versus how we think we're playing versus how we want to play.

So here's a question: is it the GM's duty to provide incentives (whether they are mechanical or narrative)? Or can a GM say "I want a grounded world with grounded characters, despite all the dragons and whatnot."?

I'm not saying I did that. Clearly I did not in the incident that inspired the post. But going forward, is there a requirement on the GM to incentivize players to engage the game that way beyond simply asking them to do so?

 

[pemerton]

So here's a question: is it the GM's duty to provide incentives (whether they are mechanical or narrative)? Or can a GM say "I want a grounded world with grounded characters, despite all the dragons and whatnot."?

I'm not saying I did that. Clearly I did not in the incident that inspired the post. But going forward, is there a requirement on the GM to incentivize players to engage the game that way beyond simply asking them to do so?

I've highlighted a couple of key phrases in your post.

I think the notion of duty is not apposite in this context. No one is talking about a GM's obligations. The discussion is about various techniques that a GM might use to shift the gameplay in some direction or other. It's about instrumental rationality.

I think @Ovinomancer's posts are relevant to you but I don't think they provide the only angle into this issue. An alternative to thinking about incentives - at least in some narrow sense of that word - is to think about what actually matters in your game? What is the game about? What sort of fiction is it concerned with?

To give a really crude example, which is not meant to be an attempt to characterise any actual posters game: if friends and family only ever figure in the fiction of a game as either (i) "quest-givers" or (ii) hostages or similar objects of NPCs' threats, then it makes sense to me that players will not play their PCs as real people with real emotional connections and relationships, because that clearly does no work in the fiction of the game. After all, the GM will always conjure up other quest-givers if needed. And there will always be other objects of NPCs' threats.

In the OP you referred to a game "focused on treasure hunting". The Indiana Jones films are focused on treasure hunting. But Indiana Jones acts like a real person, because real person stuff - like friendships, old allies and enemies, familiarity with places and getting on well with the people who live in them, etc - are all prominent parts of the fiction.

What is your game about? What do you want it to be about? If those are different things, how might you move it from A to B?

 

[FrogReaver]

So here's a question: is it the GM's duty to provide incentives (whether they are mechanical or narrative)? Or can a GM say "I want a grounded world with grounded characters, despite all the dragons and whatnot."?

I'm not saying I did that. Clearly I did not in the incident that inspired the post. But going forward, is there a requirement on the GM to incentivize players to engage the game that way beyond simply asking them to do so?

I'm still stuck at the first thought - what's unreasonable/unrealistic about having adventures be penny pinchers who would rather camp outside than sleep in the Inn?

Seems like a perfectly legit story to me.

I think too often we let our views of what is typically normal sway our opinions on what we call realistic. There's plenty of realistic things some people do that aren't typical of the vast majority of the population.

 

[macd21]

So here's a question: is it the GM's duty to provide incentives (whether they are mechanical or narrative)? Or can a GM say "I want a grounded world with grounded characters, despite all the dragons and whatnot."?

I'm not saying I did that. Clearly I did not in the incident that inspired the post. But going forward, is there a requirement on the GM to incentivize players to engage the game that way beyond simply asking them to do so?

‘Requirement’ and ‘duty’ probably aren’t the right words. The GM doesn’t have to do it. But it would be advisable for him to do so, if that’s the outcome he wants.

If this type of play isn’t something the players have been doing on their own (sans incentives), then it’s probably something they’re not particularly interested in. Simply insisting that they do it anyway is probably just going to annoy them.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So here's a question: is it the GM's duty to provide incentives (whether they are mechanical or narrative)? Or can a GM say "I want a grounded world with grounded characters, despite all the dragons and whatnot."?

I'm not saying I did that. Clearly I did not in the incident that inspired the post. But going forward, is there a requirement on the GM to incentivize players to engage the game that way beyond simply asking them to do so?

If you want a behavior, yes, you have to incentivize it. If you're lucky, your players will prioritize that themselves, and self-incentivize, and you don't have to worry about it. If not, well, you have to build in incentives or disincentives. The game you play also has a set of built in incentives that you should be aware of, as going against these incentives will be unrewarding.

What I strongly recommend to you is to look at how your current game has structured the incentives for play. It appears, given what you've posted, that your players are acting very rationally in their choices because there's no benefit to go to the inn or have a bath or be otherwise 'normal' outside of a vague aesthetic. There are disincentives for doing so, though, in that these things cost coin that they feel they need to save towards better gear. There's strong incentive to get better gear. You put these things together and it's entirely rational to avoid expenses that have no benefit in game and only a slight benefit in aesthetics, especially if the cost avoidance increases the rate at which you can acquire actual benefit in terms of kewl lewt.

If you use a new tool to address this without addressing the underlying incentive structure might work, you might stumble onto a new layer of incentives that causes players to engage in the fiction in a more aesthetically pleasing way, but you might also pick a way that further disrupts that aesthetic. If you're picking things blind to the existing structure, odds are better on the latter than the accidentally fortunate former.

 

[FrogReaver]

If you want a behavior, yes, you have to incentivize it. If you're lucky, your players will prioritize that themselves, and self-incentivize, and you don't have to worry about it. If not, well, you have to build in incentives or disincentives. The game you play also has a set of built in incentives that you should be aware of, as going against these incentives will be unrewarding.

What I strongly recommend to you is to look at how your current game has structured the incentives for play. It appears, given what you've posted, that your players are acting very rationally in their choices because there's no benefit to go to the inn or have a bath or be otherwise 'normal' outside of a vague aesthetic. There are disincentives for doing so, though, in that these things cost coin that they feel they need to save towards better gear. There's strong incentive to get better gear. You put these things together and it's entirely rational to avoid expenses that have no benefit in game and only a slight benefit in aesthetics, especially if the cost avoidance increases the rate at which you can acquire actual benefit in terms of kewl lewt.

If you use a new tool to address this without addressing the underlying incentive structure might work, you might stumble onto a new layer of incentives that causes players to engage in the fiction in a more aesthetically pleasing way, but you might also pick a way that further disrupts that aesthetic. If you're picking things blind to the existing structure, odds are better on the latter than the accidentally fortunate former.

Fully agree. Just wanted to add that sometimes that incentive/disincentive can be social pressure to have the player have the character act more "typical" even without an underlying game mechanic