[3.x/4e] Encounter XPs are not a reward, they are a pacing mechanism
JMendes:
Hello, all, :)
I've been away from this place for almost two years, but now I have something which I think is worth sharing, so, I return.
For the past four and a half years, I've been running a fairly successful 3.5 campaign. It started with everyone at level 1 and rather recently, the last character in the party just reached level 14. (I described the structure of the campaign elsewhere. You can go read it if you want, but it's not central to my point.)
Lately, I've also being playing in a 4e campaign, where we have just reached 6th level, and I've been running another 4e campaign where I ran the mini-scenario at the back of the DMG and am now running Keep on the Shadowfell. The purpose of this other mini-campaign is to familiarize myself with the structure of a 4e game, so that I can put together my own campaign when the 3.5 one draws to a halt.
Most if not all of you already know that, in a 3.x/4e game, or, in fact, in any game, rewards are threefold:
First and foremost, there are social rewards. All three of these campaigns are unabashedly Gamist in mode. I can tell because of the way social reinforcement works around the whole of the table, in all three of the campaigns. The cheers and the hooplas go to the high d20 rolls. The nods of approval go to the good plans and good ideas. Everyone is most engaged in the game when the challenges are the thickest.Secondly, there are rewards in the fiction. Regardless of the motives of the players, for virtually every fight, the characters have a reason to be there, and for them, winning is its own reward. For the players, there's the satisfaction of seeing the storyline advance because of their efforts and success. (In some but not all cases, this falls under Positioning rewards.)Lastly, there are the mechanical rewards, namely, XPs, levelling and treasure. It's about this last one I want to talk some about.
From all this playing, I've had a chance to observe up close how XPs come by and how levelling affects the game, in general. The one thing I have noticed across the board is that, win or lose, sooner or later, the XPs always come. They don't really reinforce anything, and because encounter difficulties are supposed to scale up with the characters, they don't make the characters any better at facing challenges, either. As such, they're really not a reward.
(Aside: those of you that don't agree with me might like this proposition better: you can look at group XPs as actually a reward for the GM. The more difficult the encounter, the more XPs you get to give, but you run the risk of having the PCs fail, as well. So, encounter XPs reinforce creating tough but fair challenges.)
By the same token, levelling isn't a reward in and of itself. In all three of these campaigns, all the players are looking forward to levelling, not because it's a reward, but because levelling is what frames the next strategic challenge of how to continue the character build.
Also, if the GM goes strictly by the book, treasure isn't a reward either. It's true that treasure is really only good for acquiring more magical goodies, thus contributing to character Effectiveness. However, treasure is supposed to be given out on successful completion of encounters. As such, it goes hand in hand with XP, and we're right back at having magical goodies scaling in proportion to level. (In fact, in 3.x, XPs are actually Currency, in that they can be traded for magical items, which further reinforces my view that treasure is not independent from XPs and levelling.)
XPs and levelling work really well as a campaign pacing mechanism, though. As the characters come to each new level, the players must come to terms with how to best use their newly found capabilities. This means they are all the more likely to fail encounters at the beginning of the level than at the end. As they begin to consistently succeed at a given level, it's time for them to advance to the next one. Likewise, it's the for the GM to advance to the next level of critters.
So, whether it's XPs, levelling or treasure, we're left with rather solid campaign pacing mechanisms but virtually no mechanical rewards.
(Actually, this is not strictly 100% true. Characters that die get ressurected, and this comes with a cost, either a level and XP cost in 3.x or a temporary Effectiveness cost in 4e. So, one might say that there's mechanical rewards for "not dying", but because the players really play as a group, those particular rewards aren't really leading to any particular behavior, and as such, can probably be discounted from this discussion.)
Now, because social rewards and fiction rewards are so strong and coherent at all three tables, the lack of mechanical rewards isn't really a critical issue per se, and all three games are perfectly functional without them. However, for my upcoming 4e campaign, I'd like to go further and house rule mechanical rewards into the game.
There's two major routes I might take down this road:
The soft route: detach treasure from XPs. There's many ways to do this. For instance, I might give the players the encounter XPs whether they win or lose the fight, but only give them the treasure if they win.The hard route: detach encounter level from character level. Again, there's many ways to do this. For instance, I might give the players XPs and treasure as per the rules, but track the total XPs at stake in every encounter, and scale up the encouters as if the players had won all of them, thus letting the relative difficulty inch upward.
Naturally, the exact details would need to be worked out. Also, either of these routes would probably require some sort of catch-up mechanism to counter-balance streaks of bad luck.
So, while I'd love some suggestions of house rules along either route (or any other route, for that matter), I'd also like to hear your thoughts on the concept of XPs being pacing rather than reward.
Cheers,
J.
Eero Tuovinen:
I agree with you 150% on this one! I've been saying the same thing for years, that really matches my own experiences with D&D. Of course there might be other groups with different play, but in my play xp has always been a pacing device that controls how the game moves through different crunch environments. I think it's just intellectually easy (and lazy) to equate experience points with the theoretical concept of "reward mechanics", even while xp in many games has little to do with rewards.
The way I play D&D myself, it's really important to lose all the mechanical constraints that limit the mechanical strength of encounters; I all but despise the encounter guidelines in 3rd and 4th edition, as well as the determined wealth-by-level guidelines. It's an important part of the challenge at my table to judge the rewards and dangers for yourself and play accordingly; it's socially rewarded to play heroically, as it's not mandated and definitely not protected in any way. So pulling off a daring strategy makes for the most memorable characters and the biggest applause.
Speaking of rewards, I think that it works quite fine to have money be an in-fiction reward that is used to gauge social reward as well. In other words, characters in my D&D last winter were constantly seeking to get rich, which was in the fiction tied up with the typical mid-eastern fantasy oligarchic society - your social class was basically dependent on how rich you were, as were your challenges in the world, so players found it quite rewarding to gain and lose riches alongside social benefits such as contacts, allies and so on. It was one of many possible "victory conditions", essentially. Wealth thus was certainly part of the reward mechanics in a way that xp wasn't, but this also meant that it was not a mechanical issue in the same way: wealth could buy you advantages in the game, sure, but for the most part the characters didn't reinvest their wealth into their adventuring in the way modern D&D assumes.
It's an interesting question how xp could be a reward mechanism. In some games it is used to reward good roleplaying in a separate after-game judgment phase; perhaps that qualifies.
Callan S.:
I would agree about XP in a certain way. Basically players acrue XP...and more XP...and more...how can you lose? Even if your PC dies, that just means going back a bit in an inevitable accumulation. Dying is just slowing the accumulation, it's not losing. And I'd say without losing there is no winning and thus it's not gamist. It may as well be a pacing mechanism. It's easiest if you imagine there was actually some other 'evil' points that add up whenever the players get XP and whoever gets X amount of points first, wins. That way you'd be competing with something and you could lose. But without that competition, even if it's just some evil points that rise on a random dice roll - it's just accumulation and yeah, I'd agree, essentially a pacing mechanic.
I almost wonder, as it's the largest 'reward' cycle there is, whether it can crush gamist impulses out of people regularly exposed to it...except for stubborn ones....*cough*
JoyWriter:
Slight headscratch here, as I thought that this insight was included in the principle of "reward mechanism": The reward mechanism changes the game in a way that keeps the players interest, and encourages them to stay invested, for example by unlocking new gameplay, so that the person who levels up their character is actually enjoying the change from "fighting goblins" to "fighting dragons".
Increased ability to succeed is no reward, as it just nullifies the challenge, the reward is succeeding at better stuff!
Now this definition can only cover one kind of reward mechanism, but I think it is one; the unlocking of new conflicts as legitimate challenges. Also xp is a reward because it allows players to continue to flesh out their characters with the full force of the rules behind them, by making choices that are appropriate to their character within the class system.
There are many games where winning is a matter of time; almost every computer game in fact, where at no time does the game disk melt because you have failed at something, and not let you retry! In such cases the fact that you can get back up when you trip is less important than the direction you are walking in. 4e seems to get this reasonably well, with the idea of the different tiers and the epic destiny, creating a basic narrative about the character within the level/class system.
Now I should mention that I'm not claiming any dictionary powers here, just thought this stuff was part of the basic assumptions. Rewards/failures being temporary is fine, because they only need to operate on a level that is sufficient for reinforcement. You don't tell your dog off today for what he did a week ago, you forgive and move on, and bizarre though the analogy might be, it is quite similar to the "behaviour altering" component of a reward mechanism.
I also believe that any system that tries to teach players a lesson (in either the aggressive or instructive sense) should really have a lesson to teach, rather than just being a slap on the wrist for not meeting expectations: If you are trying to encourage something with such mechanisms, then you should also put in some work making the thing at the end of it in some sense a reward in itself, so they feel justified in playing your little pavlov game. Make treasure/beating stuff/quest completion matter to the player in their own way.
Now I suspect that last bit is actually very well known, but I thought I'd stick it in anyway.
JMendes:
Ahey, :)
Cool, guys, thanks for your thoughts so far. :)
Eero, on the easy/lazy front, I don't know about that. In early D&D, the dungeons had their levels and encounter difficulty was keyed to dungeon level, not party level. In those circumstances, players had a sense of selecting the "difficulty level" they wanted, and were thus rewarded with XPs for selecting encounters that were tough, but feasible.
You should have no trouble recognizing what I'm talking about, as it's sort of implied here:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on June 30, 2009, 01:54:23 PM
The way I play D&D myself, it's really important to lose all the mechanical constraints that limit the mechanical strength of encounters; [...] It's an important part of the challenge at my table to judge the rewards and dangers for yourself and play accordingly.
Speaking of which, how do the players at your table judge the dangers? Are you told the encounter level up front?
Anyway, it may, in fact, be lazy to design XPs as a reward in modern D&D, but players think of it that way because it's how it's written in the books. Either that or WOTC knows full well that it's about pacing but keep on calling it rewards because it's easier to keep the vast masses playing "correctly" that way...
As for rewarding good role-play, that's covered in the rules for 3.x, although it's glaringly absent from 4e. Even in 3.x, the DMG recommends keeping those awards to no more than 10% of the total XP awarded, and recommends awarding extra treasure, to "keep things balanced". In any case, I don't think I need to go that route. I'm talking about having actual mechanical rewards for success, not for other things. :)
--
Callan, you may or may not be conflating winning and losing with success and failure, but I'm definitely, emphatically not trying to inject "competition" into the games. You can have strong, solid, functional gamist play without it being competitive.
By the same token, the presence or absence of mechanical rewards will have little impact on those gamist impulses if the social and fiction rewards are aiming towards that, anyway, which they are, in my games. :)
As for the "evil points" thing you were talking about, I'm afraid I didn't grasp what you were aiming at...
--
JoyWriter,
(Hmm... I've been absent a long time, but back when I was active here, there was a culture of using real first names. Are we still doing that? If so, I'm Joćo. What's your name? :))
Quote from: JoyWriter on June 30, 2009, 05:50:03 PM
The reward mechanism changes the game in a way that keeps the players interest, and encourages them to stay invested, for example by unlocking new gameplay
Yes, but what's being rewarded? In fact, that's exactly what a pacing mechanism does. It changes the game and keeps the players interested and invested.
I hear you on the part about making choices for your character when you level up. That's what I was talking about with the strategic challenge, though. It's still not a "reward", in the sense that it doesn't really create an incentive for any particular type of behavior.
In fact, if I read you correctly, you pretty much feel the way I do about the nature of reward systems. They're there to "teach lessons", to "alter behavior" and, in a sense, yes, they are a bit pavlovian.
The disconnect comes from this bit here:
Quote from: JoyWriter on June 30, 2009, 05:50:03 PM
There are many games where winning is a matter of time; almost every computer game in fact, where at no time does the game disk melt because you have failed at something, and not let you retry!
Absolutely, and if this were true, then yes, XPs would be a reward for trying and trying and trying again, until you finally succeed. Thing is, in my games, (and I venture in most other modern D&D games as well), there is no "try again". Succeed or fail, after one fight, there's the next one. And the next one after that. They scale up when they have to, hence the pacing thing, but the structure of the game is unchanged. (I'm not saying that success and failure are the same thing. They do have social as well as fictional consequences. I am saying, however, that XPs aren't part of that particular picture.)
Lastly:
Quote from: JoyWriter on June 30, 2009, 05:50:03 PM
Make treasure/beating stuff/quest completion matter to the player in their own way.
This is exactly what I mean by rewards at the social level. :)
--
Anyway, good stuff so far, and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with this view...
Cheers,
J.
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