I’ll start today by talking about what I’m not going to talk about: Fitness. I was going to discuss fitness but then I had a better idea and figured I’d wait until next week and also it would give me a chance to issue this big call to action: If you’re not already doing regular exercise then you have a whole week to get started so you can talk about it next week when I discuss fitness. Also my editor is on a business trip so I can type as many run-on sentences as I want and nobody can do a thing about it. Nyah!
So with the fitness discussion on hold until next week, today I want to talk about what motivates us in gaming and other areas of our life. Last night I ran my 13th Age game, and it went fantastic. The reason why it went great owed very little to my GMing and a whole lot to my players’ genius.
This latest session was the culmination of a plotline which had been set up in the two sessions prior. Both those sessions involved large amounts of information gathering and diplomacy. They were rather light on action, which was not terrible, but I was definitely looking forward to having a bit more combat focus than there has been recently. However, when I sat down to try to plan how this combat was going to unfold, I found it hard to come up with anything tremendously inspiring. In the end, I managed to keep it reasonably interesting, but my players totally ran with what I put in front of them and made it amazing.
I got to thinking about why they are so great in this way. Am I doing something to incentivize this excellence? In short, is there some way I can still take credit for their awesomeness?
Let me introduce you to one of my absolute favorite videos on Youtube (it’s safe for work):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
If you happen to be in a situation where you can’t watch the video or if you simply don’t want to invest the ten minutes, I’ll boil it down for you: Money doesn’t motivate people very well when doing tasks that require even rudimentary levels of cognitive engagement. Instead the three primary motivating factors are Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
It turns out the best way to use money as a motivator is to pay people enough so they can stop worrying about the money and focus on the work. Then you get out of their way (Autonomy), let them demonstrate and hone their excellence (Mastery), and do it all for a bigger cause (Purpose). I began to consider whether XP was a good proxy for Money when it comes to role-playing games.
This is a little ironic because I was recently cleaning out my private messages here at ENWorld and came across quite a few referencing XP systems I developed years ago in the 3E era. There was a time when this was something I regularly posted about and gained a small bit of notoriety by developing XP systems attempting to incentivize certain behaviors in D&D. Gradually, we dropped those methods and basically quit tracking XP altogether. Turns out that was exactly what we should have been doing.
For most of the last four years or so I have simply had the PCs advance a level every X number of game sessions. Usually about every three or four sessions gives me the kind of pace I like. This isn’t even attached to attendance. Even if you have to miss one or more sessions, you still get to level up when everybody else does.
Conventional wisdom would suggest if the players don’t have to perform in any way in order for their characters to advance, they should take it kind of easy. They can gain levels without even showing up, so there is little reason to stick their necks out. And yet I’m seeing the sort of inspired play which brought me the likes of last night’s session when they pressed forward into what turned into a huge running battle. They came up with inspired, outside-the-box thinking. They won in an unexpected way and then spun victory into what are likely to be game-defining plots which will make coming up with further adventures a breeze.
I guess I’m finding that when I don’t tell them how to play by incentivizing any particular playstyle via XP, they are playing in the most awesome ways they know how. I’m wondering how widespread this phenomenon is, and I’d like to hear back from you about how XP is being used or not used in your games to get the sort of play experience you want.
Do you use XP? If not then what alternatives are you using? What effect is it having on game play?
And don’t forget next week we’re totally doing that Fitness thing so get out there and get some exercise!
So with the fitness discussion on hold until next week, today I want to talk about what motivates us in gaming and other areas of our life. Last night I ran my 13th Age game, and it went fantastic. The reason why it went great owed very little to my GMing and a whole lot to my players’ genius.
This latest session was the culmination of a plotline which had been set up in the two sessions prior. Both those sessions involved large amounts of information gathering and diplomacy. They were rather light on action, which was not terrible, but I was definitely looking forward to having a bit more combat focus than there has been recently. However, when I sat down to try to plan how this combat was going to unfold, I found it hard to come up with anything tremendously inspiring. In the end, I managed to keep it reasonably interesting, but my players totally ran with what I put in front of them and made it amazing.
I got to thinking about why they are so great in this way. Am I doing something to incentivize this excellence? In short, is there some way I can still take credit for their awesomeness?
Let me introduce you to one of my absolute favorite videos on Youtube (it’s safe for work):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
If you happen to be in a situation where you can’t watch the video or if you simply don’t want to invest the ten minutes, I’ll boil it down for you: Money doesn’t motivate people very well when doing tasks that require even rudimentary levels of cognitive engagement. Instead the three primary motivating factors are Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
It turns out the best way to use money as a motivator is to pay people enough so they can stop worrying about the money and focus on the work. Then you get out of their way (Autonomy), let them demonstrate and hone their excellence (Mastery), and do it all for a bigger cause (Purpose). I began to consider whether XP was a good proxy for Money when it comes to role-playing games.
This is a little ironic because I was recently cleaning out my private messages here at ENWorld and came across quite a few referencing XP systems I developed years ago in the 3E era. There was a time when this was something I regularly posted about and gained a small bit of notoriety by developing XP systems attempting to incentivize certain behaviors in D&D. Gradually, we dropped those methods and basically quit tracking XP altogether. Turns out that was exactly what we should have been doing.
For most of the last four years or so I have simply had the PCs advance a level every X number of game sessions. Usually about every three or four sessions gives me the kind of pace I like. This isn’t even attached to attendance. Even if you have to miss one or more sessions, you still get to level up when everybody else does.
Conventional wisdom would suggest if the players don’t have to perform in any way in order for their characters to advance, they should take it kind of easy. They can gain levels without even showing up, so there is little reason to stick their necks out. And yet I’m seeing the sort of inspired play which brought me the likes of last night’s session when they pressed forward into what turned into a huge running battle. They came up with inspired, outside-the-box thinking. They won in an unexpected way and then spun victory into what are likely to be game-defining plots which will make coming up with further adventures a breeze.
I guess I’m finding that when I don’t tell them how to play by incentivizing any particular playstyle via XP, they are playing in the most awesome ways they know how. I’m wondering how widespread this phenomenon is, and I’d like to hear back from you about how XP is being used or not used in your games to get the sort of play experience you want.
Do you use XP? If not then what alternatives are you using? What effect is it having on game play?
And don’t forget next week we’re totally doing that Fitness thing so get out there and get some exercise!
