Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lylandra" data-source="post: 7001028" data-attributes="member: 6816692">You're right. i'm totally not being deterministic here, and I generally like the idea of fate points etc. I'm just not 100% sure whether or not the drawbacks of such a system could influence my own group (or other groups that work like mine) in a negative way.  To some extend it does. At least for young-ish people. I don't remember exactly who did the reseach, but there was an oler psychological study on children who loved to draw. They painted every now and then and had fun doing it. Then their parents/supervisors started giving them rewards for painting, ranging from new paint to sweets to money. The painting frequency of these children increased and so did their art quality (of course, since they basically practised more), but their fun diminished and one day they would view painting as some "work" they did to earn a reward. Now of course, you cannot mirror this study 1:1 on roleplay systems who reward good roleplay in a mechanical fashion. But such a system has to be designed carefully or you may have effects that you don't intend to. Let's say, some imaginary system gives your character one "quirk" and one "flaw". Roleplaying one of these two (or both) will give you some benefit. I guess that some players, especially those who hunt for benefits anyway will play exactly those two manners over and over again. They don't have to invest in playing another manner or think about their character's emotional, social etc. background in a given situation. Such a character can quickly descend into stereotype territory if you, as a GM, are not cautious enough. Yep, it is. As I said previously, we're currently playing Pathfinder where you don't get rewards for playing *your* character, but for advancing the story. If I, as the GM, jacked on some half-baked roleplay reward system on top of that, my already systems-savvy players would become so powerful that I needed to throw unfair obstacles at them. I hand out bonus exp or in-character benefits though (having a befriended fire elemental be a runesmith that can be contacted for magic item creation, giving them precious information earlier than originally intended, expanding and building on strange ideas they have etc.)</blockquote>

Verification