Late at night, worked for too long because on Saturday we’re leaving for Sardinia. Tomorrow is our day off so that’s when we’ll do all the packing.
The other day I did a podcast episode on elephants in my games. Or on the ideas I have for elephants even though I don’t use them in my games. I was thinking of war elephants and then I remembered the ivory, and how elephants are being exterminated for their ivory, and I started wondering about my intentions.
The rules in my games – in most old school D&D-like games where you get experience points for gold, I guess? – award doing evil: killing, looting and stealing in order to level up. My expectation, however, is that players want to do good and that this is the struggle one enjoys. Evil is tempting but we want to do good. This thing about elephants made we wonder: what if player characters start acting like poachers? Yikes.
@phf reminded me of the fact that “it’s much more important to do things for *actual* elephants than for virtual ones.” Good point. And yet, I can’t shake that feeling: if the players and their characters don’t entertain me, I don’t want to spend the evening with them. A party of hard boiled criminals doing evil? I don’t know. I think I’d start losing interest. So it’s not just about the morality. It’s not the case that better morals automatically means I enjoy it more. My favourite story is not a paladin story. But there are fictional acts that I find repellent. That sounds like a fair reaction to me, probably just empathy by another word.
@bwebster said he wouldn’t be interested “in a game that mechanically incentivizes players to do evil.” I think a very basic example in the classic D&D context would be experience for monsters killed. Killing is incentivised over clemency, for example. The players fight orcs and kill half of them and the other half falls asleep due to a spell. Do you kill the sleeping orcs? Experience points are awarded for it. Now, one could argue that perhaps experience points should only be handed out for good deeds? Ugh, that really spoils it for me.
The discussion reminds me of “rewards for heroic” behaviour, which also doesn’t work for me:
Is it possible to encourage awesome, heroic scenes in role-playing games? I don’t think so: either it is dangerous and the people play suicidal characters or it is not in which case it is empty embellishments. – 2017-07-17 Heroic Scenes
A more subtle example is that helping somebody doesn’t grant experience points. Good deeds aren’t rewarded via experience points. It’s up to the referee to reward good deeds in the setting. Some referees might hand out story experience points to still do it, or hide a big gem somewhere along the way where the party goes through if it helps somebody. Both of these are weird. They turn the good deed into a mercenary deed. We do it because it looks good and we get experience points.
This is in fact our world in a sentence. It’s not what I want in my games.
So there’s my problem: Incentives for evil behaviour exist, incentives for good or heroic behaviour doesn’t really work for me for philosophical reasons.
In my D&D-like games, I use experience points for gold spent and my default offer is a list of public buildings so players can be like rich people in Ancient Greece and Rome: statues, houses, villas, roads, bridges, aqueducts, gymnasiums, that kind of thing. It costs money, so being a sponsor gets you experience points. In a way that “incentivizes good” in a small way. 😄
Brandon reminded me of this note in Lorn Song of the Bachlor:
Any text inspired by Southeast Asia has to reckon with colonialism. It is too much a feature of the region to ignore. This text presents a difficult situation; there are no easy solutions. … Lorn Song of the Bachelor tries not to prompt players one way or the other. If I offered a mechanical incentive for you to fight colonial invaders, you wouldn’t be making a moral decision, but a mercenary one. – Zedeck Siew, Lorn Song of the Bachlor
In the following discussion, @zedecksiew said:
RPGs tend to follow real life in that it is often easier to incentivise evil (more specifically greed). This has to do with the things we can easily assign an abstract numerical value—ie: money, xp, stats. These are all things that accumulate: you take abstract units from the world and hoard them in your character sheet. Even “prosocial” mechanics follow the logic of accumulation: how many Ally Points have you got with this barbarian tribe? How many building slots have you paid to build up back at the Keep on the Borderlands?
It’s tricky. Zedeck suggested going back to the question of what “success” actually means in the game? Why should levelling up and more power even be considered success?
Perhaps this is why I enjoy Traveller-like games without advancement. It’s all about making do with what you have. In a way, however, it has an absence of accumulation without offering a different vision of success. That leaves you free to set yourselves goals like “see the world” or “revolution” or – accumulation remains a possibility – buy a bigger ship.
Since alternatives aren’t mentioned, it’s of course easy to say that the game gives you the freedom to do what you want. An alternative way of looking at it would be that the game provides no guidance at all.
I’m wondering how one would write a rule book such that it starts with a Traveller-style character creation and then it offers clear advice on campaign structures that implicitly define success, each one being different than the next. I wrote a few pages in my game Knives, but I fear it’s a bit incoherent and not quite what I was looking for.
Things that would work for me are maybe more adventure ideas. I think that’s what I want to work more on. Like Traveller itself where the early adventures where not so much adventures but types of adventures that provided the framework for more adventures just like them. Traveller needed only one “Prison Planet” adventure and then it had you covered for all prison breaks, ever. Or so it seems to me.
Perhaps this is what I’m trying to achieve with my mini-setting generators. The Alpine Mini-Setting Generator, the Lake Land Mini-Setting Generator and now the Myrkheim Mini-Setting Generator all generate a setup that’s hopefully interesting enough to play and that encourages tinkering.
Lake Land Mini-Setting Generator
Myrkheim Mini-Setting Generator
Some ideas: The Ultra Violet Grasslands by Luka Rejec make me think of caravan adventures. Travel across the map. Just making it there is all there is. Crime solving is also a campaign task that needs no level-up and no accumulation. Discovery is similar to crime solving but it can also be more about the landscape than about the suspects. A bit like the caravan adventure. The campaign goal is to discover the answer to the disappearance of the ancients.
I think that if you squint at some games in a certain way, you can see these alternatives. I already mentioned that Classic Traveller has no advancement. You can accumulate money and buy better gear and ships, but in the games I played the only use of money was forever paying for jumps and other trivial stuff. Consequently, making money was nowhere as important as finding treasure in “experience points for gold” games.
Another such game is King Arthur Pendragon and The Great Campaign where your knight does earn experience and does improve in stats, but actually, without saying much about it, the campaign is about surviving it all with your descendants. Thus, it doesn’t matter how good your knight gets, eventually knights die and hopefully you have raised some children to continue the line and the campaign.
I’m sure Fate would be a similar game. You can rearrange the skill pyramid but you don’t really get more skill points. At least not in the versions of Fate I read back in the days. So I guess a good campaign automatically has to leave behind the logic of accumulation.
Perhaps D&D-like games are the outlier, here!
As a player, I do like the feeling of having achieved a difficult thing. Perhaps D&D-like games offer this in small doses. Every level is a difficult thing that you achieved. Perhaps this logic of “achievement” is just the logic of accumulation by another name.
I think I want to go back to no-advancement games. I want to take Halberts, the Fantasy Traveller variant, and the referee advice I wrote for Knives, and drop the achievement stuff again.
In Knives, advancement happens by consensus.
With every year that passes, you get to gain new talents. Pick an appropriate table to roll on during the winter phase and gain the talent or increase the talent if you already have it. When exactly does a year pass? It’s up to the people playing the game. If you all agree that the rest of the year is calm and uneventful, it’s time for the winter phase.
I think @bwebster is thinking along the same lines. Sure, at first his proposal sounded a bit like “experience points for showing up”. I think I don’t like that. He did mention that “a full campaign would play through the lifespan of a character” – which gives me that King Arthur Pendragon + The Great Campaign vibe. I liked that.
#RPG #Halberts
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Even if you remove overt advancement mechanics, there will still advancement (diagetic advancement) in the game as players acquire useful resources, make allies and enemies etc. This diagetic advancement will ultimately have a similar effect to regular advancement, for the same reason that evil seems to very pernicious in the real world. But, despite that, the world is not only full of evil people, but lots of good as well. I think even real life however, people are not concerned about doing good for goodness’ sake, but there are lots of benefits to doing good, even if they are not always direct: a clean harmonious environment, kindness, generosity, and peace.
If players do good in the game, they should be rewarded. But not with a magic sword, or lots of treasure. Instead they should gain status as heroes to the villagers they know. They might make powerful allies, who would give them quests, etc.
This doesn’t really solve your ultimate quandary though, which is how to avoid having evil doers in your game. I think this is a stylistic preference you need to establish in the meta game, whether that’s session zero, or something else. Let the players know that your kind of game is a game where, perhaps sometimes tough decisions must be made, but ultimately the players are forces of good, or at least not forces of evil. This can be reinforced with setting elements, and perhaps mechanically as well, but those won’t be as effective as just saying to them “hey, we are playing *this* kind of game...”.
Myself I enjoy a game with deviant murderhobos, but of course my players aren’t bad people in real life, even still they find the horror and absurdity of such to be a good way to let off steam. If my own players were to start harvesting ivory, I would find that behavior interesting, but also think about besides the wealth, what other consequences might be inline. A gold-rush of ivory may bring competition and unsavory characters to the region, and it might also invoke the wrath of a druid.
– smitty 2023-05-15 18:44 UTC
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That is a good point. I think I’ll have to address this outside the game. And I think you are correct about the in-game rewards for good deeds. Thanks for your reply! Food for thought.
– Alex 2023-05-15 22:47 UTC
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I’ve seen a number of games lately where the GM uses some form of plot advancement. You finish the quest you get x experience points. This seems to take away a lot of the questionable bits.
– ruprecht 2023-05-19 12:09 UTC
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True, but it also forces you to have a plot in mind ahead of time? Or does the GM decide after the fact?
– Alex 2023-05-19 18:09 UTC
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Yes it would seem to assume less of a sandbox and more of every adventure/quest planned out but it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to decide when they’d completed something.
The other way is by sessions. Openquest does this. Finish 2 sessions you go up to 2nd level, Finish 5 sessions (previous 2 +3 for third level) and you go to 3rd level. The game doesn’t actually use levels but you get your Advancement points at these junctures. It removes figuring out XP and emphasizes theft and slaughter.
I haven’t tried either way, just pointing out options.
– ruprecht 2023-05-22 13:11 UTC
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The only alternative I have tried is “getting experience per session” – whether I’m present or not. I find that not very exciting but I guess it satisfies the minimal requirement of guaranteeing a changing gameplay over time.
– Alex 2023-05-22 15:33 UTC