What's my motivation?!

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!

 

[Argyle King]

Many of the games I play don't have levels or XP in the same way that D&D does, so I'm not entirely sure how to answer.

GURPS does have character points, and I suppose that would be something akin the XP. The Dungeon Fantasy series does give a general guideline about rewarding CP based on challenges faced. Though, with it being a point buy system, it's hard to say "ok, just level up." I suppose I could say "ok, everybody add 20 points worth of abilities to your character."

In a few GURPS campaigns I've run, I've played without CP at all, and the way characters gained things was by seeking out those things in play. For example, if you wanted to gain the Ally Advantage, you would do so by engaging the in-game world; choices you'd make could gain you allies (or enemies.) Likewise, if you wanted to learn a secret martial arts technique, you'd have to seek out someone who knew that and spend time learning it. That doesn't mean the group would necessarily play out all the downtime; it simply means there were times when I'd say something like "ok, you guys have two months before you need to go visit the king, what do you do until then?" Alternatively, it may be the PCs who choose to take some downtime and hone their skills instead of charging right into the next dungeon crawl.

In a similar fashion, Star Wars Edge of The Empire is also a point buy system. Points aren't tied to level and combat encounter in the same way they are for D&D. The system is built in such a way that the story tends to be where your points do come from. Certainly there are times when the story involves combat, and there are rewards for that, but, in general, I find the system seems to flow very smoothly.

Why I mention both of those first is because I find that many of the times when I have played D&D and have done so without XP, it was done in an effort to make things appear more story appropriate rather than feeling so beholden to XP, levels, and the various other elements of D&D's metagame. It helped to fix some of the problems I had with D&D and play expectations of D&D, but, after playing D&D, I've found that those problems were somewhat unique to D&D. I didn't need to drop character points and other forms of advancement in other games because they already seemed to be built in such a way to help facilitate what I was trying to do.

What exactly I do when I run a D&D game depends upon the group and what manner of game I want to run. If it's with a group who expects D&D style advancement or if I'm running an off the cuff game, I usually keep XP and the normal way of doing things. I keep it because there is a subset of D&D players who prefer a tangible amount of "money" to measure character power, success, and progress with. In an "off the cuff" game, I keep it because it's a shared baseline to help me get an impromptu game moving in a direction which is easily recognizable by everyone in the group. I'll also say that I tend to use XP in a D&D game when I don't have a solid story in mind; in those cases, I use the structure of the game to guide me toward what elements to use (appropriate challenges for the PCs) and then make an attempt to extract a story from those choices to string everything together.

In general, I find D&D style XP to be a form of linear measurement. In a game which is expected to be somewhat linear, it helps and makes sense. If the group or GM wants something less linear, it helps to break away from XP as an important part of the game. In systems which are built around different ideals, D&D style XP doesn't really make sense at all, and, usually, the points or whatever those games use are built in such a way to reflect different needs.

Anyway, to answer the OP: Yes, I play without XP quite often.

 

[WayneLigon]

The last few times I've done Pathfinder, I've stopped bothering with XP and use the kind of rough estimates you see in the Paizo adventure paths (by the time the PC's are ready to tackle x, they should be y level).

In the past, I've noticed a much decreased emphasis on combat once the older players (as in, how long they've played games) stop doing a rough mental tally of where they are, XP-wise.