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Message: <blockquote data-quote="swrushing" data-source="post: 2555114" data-attributes="member: 14140">Well, the response was to the question of punishing, or rather offering a deterrent, not rewarding, so this seems an odd take on it.However, while in many areas there is a clear difference between lack of reward and punishment, its not as clear in RPGs.IRl if i get my christmas bonus and bob doesn't, i have more money to spend and bob doesn't. bob is not however negatively impacted by my move up economically. he still gets the same bang for his buck. The "challenges" placed on his money do not get tougher.In an RPG setting, when this equates to me being a higher level than bob, the difference is he IS negatively impacted. The challenge is based on partly level and bob is now below average. he is fighting tougher opposition and with less than the rest, which puts him at a disadvantage when it comes to what tools he has to use when trying to be the guy doing the cool stuff.Consider an exaggerated but not extreme case. Three roleplayers and a combat guy play DND. Th Gm is heavy into Rp awards and, naturally, those more inclined to roleplay get more of those awards and so pretty much routninely they get more xp than the combat guy. Everyone is doing what they enjoy but one is simply getting less "credit" and slowly becoming less capable of meeting the increasing threats. In the spending money example, the "benchmark" is an objective thing. The price of milk wont go up for bob because of my bonus. So the value of bob's money remains the same and he doesn't really lose anything. In the DND thing, since the challenges are increased as the other player's capability increases, the value of the combat guys stuff effectively goes down.From his perspective, he is getting punished.Or look at it this way, if you sat down with four other people to play DND and the Gm said "Ok you three will get full xp and joey will only get 75% of the xp?" would you say  joey was "not being punished" since he wasn't losing xp and was merely gaining less?</blockquote>

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