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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8238306" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Ah. I think I see the confusion. No, I am advocating for experience-based advancement generally, as a means of creating desired play incentives. What you award XP for depends on what you want to incentivize. My personal default is giving XP for encounters overcome (by whatever means) and for objectives successfully completed, with more XP given for more complex encounters than for simpler ones, and for primary objectives than for side-quests. The intent is to encourage players to take on quests and see them through to completion, and to overcome rather than avoid encounters, but to not favor any particular means of resolving them over another. However, for a grim dark sword-and-sorcery campaign it might be more appropriate to grant XP for treasure acquired, encouraging players to seek out paid jobs and to prioritize avoiding conflict. For a hexcrawl, it might be appropriate to award XP for points of interest discovered, or areas mapped. Etc.As a player, I like knowing what I can earn XP for, so I can pursue that thing effectively.I mean, Ideally you would want to put yourself in the emotional state you’re making believe the character is experiencing. But it’s pretty reciprocal. You imagine yourself as the character, in the fictional scenario, you try to imagine how you would feel if you were that person in that scenario, and you try to put yourself in that emotional state.I mean, if you’re having fun, you’re doing it right. But I say I think attempting to compartmentalize between your perspective and the character’s perspective is misguided because it’s impossible. That’s just not a thing our brains can do. Your perspective always influences your decisions - in fact, it’s the only perspective that can. You can try to imagine having a different perspective and make decisions as you imagine you would with that perspective. But you can’t remove yourself from the equation. Better, then, in my opinion, to try to align your perspective with the imagined perspective, than to try to remove your perspective from the process. Does that make sense?<img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♀️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2640.png" title="Woman shrugging    :woman_shrugging:" data-shortname=":woman_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /> I mean, you do you, but I believe you’re leaving a powerful tool on the table.Right, so I would describe those things as what your character wants for themselves.No, that’s what you want for yourself, and for your fellow players. It’s a purely meta-game desire. I’m talking about what you want for your character. Presumably you want your character to succeed in their goals. Maybe you don’t, that’s also possible (e.g. “I want my CoC character to go insane.”) But at least in the case of D&D, I think the experience works best when what the player wants for the character and what the character wants for themselves are aligned.Sure, I mean, being put into situations where the character is forced to choose between mutually exclusive things they want (or choosing to accept something they don’t want to avoid something else they don’t want) is one of the most enjoyable parts of roleplaying. It reveals what the character truly values most, when it matters most. And I believe those moments are at their most powerful when the player also wants what the character wants.Right, on a meta-level, you want the game to be enjoyable, and usually that means facing meaningful adversity and sometimes, yes, failing in your (character’s) goals. There must be a possibility of failure for success to have meaning. But moment to moment you strive for success, yes? And while in the grand scheme you want both success and failure, in the moment success is preferable to failure, yes?Fun is a very limiting way to measure enjoyment. Catharsis isn’t necessarily fun, but it is usually enjoyable. Failure drives us to strive harder, and makes eventual success more rewarding. This is the flip side of what I was saying in the other paragraph. Yes, moment to moment you want to succeed in your goals. But experiencing the occasional failure along the way is an important element of making that success actually enjoyable.</blockquote>

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