NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8837211" data-attributes="member: 70468">But that’s what a reward structure does. That’s the point. If a group wants to play a game about delving into dungeons and hauling back treasure, a reward structure like XP for gold will reinforce or encourage that. If we want to play a game that foregrounds the relationships between characters, then getting to mark XP when our history reaches its peak or its lowest should do likewise. These games are about something, and the rewards relate to and reinforce that.Even the goals structure in my game works like that. The game is supposed to be player-driven, and the rewards are set up to encourage them to drive (after having seen players with good ideas pre-game forget about and neglect them during the game). My application was absolutely psychological hacking, using my experience practicing GTD. There’s a brief discussion of the cognitive science research discussed in chapter 14 of the second edition of the namesake book.I know that for some, the game aspect of RPGs should be minimized (for immersion, to avoid perceptions of rollplay versus roleplay, etc), which is a perfectly fine way to approach RPGs. And foregrounding the reasoning for certain design choices and how they effect certain types of play may come across as a violation of that spirit, or it could be that one prefers play to seem organic and does not want such considerations to be foregrounded. I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand the nature of the objection.To use another example from video games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild uses power ups and treasure as a way to incentivize exploration. Is that problematic? Or is it the decision-making that says, “I am doing this (placing treasure, heart containers, new powers, etc) for the reason of inducing certain behaviors (exploration) in players?”I mean, to each their own. I’m just trying to explore the topic and understand the objection.</blockquote>

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