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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5528236" data-attributes="member: 54877">Right.&nbsp; OTOH, negative reinforcement by itself starts to look stale after awhile, and people get their backs up.&nbsp; You whack a stubborn mule with a stick a couple of times, it might go.&nbsp; You whack it over and over again, eventually it just endures the whacking and does what it wants anyway.&nbsp;This is why ideally you have both postive and negative reinforcement built into the same thing.&nbsp; The negative reinforcement knocks them out of their comfort zone and gets them to pay attention.&nbsp; The postive reinforcement makes them feel good about it, and means you need less reinforcement (of either kind) going forward.&nbsp; &nbsp;It is true that for the truly habitual turtlers, they'll not even notice the carrots at first.&nbsp; You can get away with not using it.&nbsp; But the DM needs to get into the habit of including both, and when enticing turtles out of their shell, you really never know when something will click.&nbsp; You want that carrot already in place when they decide to go after it.&nbsp;I think the main problem with changing player behavior of this nature is being too subtle.&nbsp; Me, confronted with extreme turtles, I'd just flat out tell them what I'm going to do:&nbsp; I'm going to set up situations where I can whack you with the +5 Stick of Turtle Slaying and at the same time tempt you with that Wonderous Rushing Ahead Magic Carrot.&nbsp; And then I'd do that.&nbsp; You can always back off and be subtle later. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5528236, member: 54877"] Right. OTOH, negative reinforcement by itself starts to look stale after awhile, and people get their backs up. You whack a stubborn mule with a stick a couple of times, it might go. You whack it over and over again, eventually it just endures the whacking and does what it wants anyway. This is why ideally you have both postive and negative reinforcement built into the same thing. The negative reinforcement knocks them out of their comfort zone and gets them to pay attention. The postive reinforcement makes them feel good about it, and means you need less reinforcement (of either kind) going forward. It is true that for the truly habitual turtlers, they'll not even notice the carrots at first. You can get away with not using it. But the DM needs to get into the habit of including both, and when enticing turtles out of their shell, you really never know when something will click. You want that carrot already in place when they decide to go after it. I think the main problem with changing player behavior of this nature is being too subtle. Me, confronted with extreme turtles, I'd just flat out tell them what I'm going to do: I'm going to set up situations where I can whack you with the +5 Stick of Turtle Slaying and at the same time tempt you with that Wonderous Rushing Ahead Magic Carrot. And then I'd do that. You can always back off and be subtle later. ;) [/QUOTE]

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