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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 9026103" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I'm not sure what you mean by &quot;like&quot;, but my takeaway is that RPGs are not gamelike by default, and it's worth investing mental energy into the design of gamelike scenarios that you can embed inside of play for your players. This explains for example why many players like being given &quot;quests&quot;, or missions on a bounty board: successful completion becomes something they can choose to measure themselves against. Ditto treasure and XP. You can't necessarily predict which game structures players will want to engage with (and they might make up their own, like tacitly competing with other players for highest damage output or most treasure clandestinely found) but it's worth some explicit design attention from the GM/world designer because it's not there automatically. This includes designing OOC activities like when and how often to award XP, and when and whether to have post-adventure Q&amp;A.It also puts some really unsatisfying past experiences into perspective, like when a certain DM was focused primarily on lore and world building and NPC personalities and not on giving us gamelike challenges to engage with.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 9026103, member: 6787650"] I'm not sure what you mean by "like", but my takeaway is that RPGs are not gamelike by default, and it's worth investing mental energy into the design of gamelike scenarios that you can embed inside of play for your players. This explains for example why many players like being given "quests", or missions on a bounty board: successful completion becomes something they can choose to measure themselves against. Ditto treasure and XP. You can't necessarily predict which game structures players will want to engage with (and they might make up their own, like tacitly competing with other players for highest damage output or most treasure clandestinely found) but it's worth some explicit design attention from the GM/world designer because it's not there automatically. This includes designing OOC activities like when and how often to award XP, and when and whether to have post-adventure Q&A. It also puts some really unsatisfying past experiences into perspective, like when a certain DM was focused primarily on lore and world building and NPC personalities and not on giving us gamelike challenges to engage with. [/QUOTE]

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