[3.x/4e] Encounter XPs are not a reward, they are a pacing mechanism
Callan S.:
Quote from: JMendes on July 01, 2009, 02:25:17 AM
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.
I don't necessarily mean competing against another person. The evil points was a reference to a game I ran where at the end of each session the player group got a D6 points plus one for certain objectives met, and 'evil' got a D6 points (or was it a D8?). Whoever got to X amount of points first, won the campaign - the other side lost. This was basically competing against a countdown, not a person.
But yes, you do need competition like this. It doesn't have to be against a person - everyone can be on the same team. But it does have to be against something that can make you lose, or atleast a series of winnable/loseable games amidst some overall exploration, or it isn't gamist. It can't be a matter of 'Well, you can lose...somehow...can't quite name how'. Even my dismissal of dying just being a delay in XP accumulation, can be losing if the group says it is (though as is, all editions of D&D just calls it death ... not losing, not winning, just death). Which ties back to the topic, because XP in itself doesn't really go anywhere by itself except as pacing.
JMendes:
Ahoy, :)
Quote from: Callan S. on July 01, 2009, 03:27:40 AM
at the end of each session the player group got a D6 points plus one for certain objectives met, and 'evil' got a D6 points
Ah, gotcha! Yes, that makes sense. In structural terms, that's pretty much the "hard route" I talked about in my first post.
Coolness, thanks for clarifying. :)
Cheers,
J.
LandonSuffered:
Wow, do I really want to get into this conversation. Yeah, I guess so.
J. I agree with you that XP in 3rd+ edition is a pacing mechanism and not a reward mechanism. I don’t know if this was the original design goal, but that’s how it functions. A reward mechanism in an RPG will encourage/promote the type of behavior that will provide the reward. 3.x/4e play has no real gamist reward save for the subjective fist-pumping and back-patting your group gets from “playing heroically” whether 1st level characters against goblins or 10th level characters against giants.
Yay.
You asked for our thoughts, so here are mine: to me this is pretty lukewarm gamism. In the end you’re not challenging much more than your ability to create an optimal stat-block to run through a formula encounter and earn a set amount of XP to facilitate a formula encounter at a higher level. Hey, if I wanted to do this kind of thing I’d pay for a World of Warcraft account.
Recently I’ve been going back to my RPG roots…real Old School D&D of the pre-2nd edition variety. The interesting thing about it is that here XP accumulation IS a reward mechanism, not a pacing mechanism, and good play is mechanically rewarded IN PLAY. Let me just two examples to illustrate:
- XP is gained for actual treasure accumulated. In general, XP for treasure is present at a much higher frequency than XP for monsters. What does this mean? Players (not characters) will develop optimal ways of overcoming encounters (sometimes avoiding monsters all together…through stealth, trickery, negotiation) to get the most points (GPs = XPs) for their time and effort. You don’t have to hack, slash, and blow-up every encountered monster simply to “move to the next level of challenge” (3.x/4e play puts monster fights on a premium if you want to “open the new content” of the game).
- Presence of an actual end game. When players accumulate enough XP they can become land owners and rulers…basically becoming kings by their own hand. Here’s the use for all that XP laden treasure: building castles and hiring retainers. To my mind, this is the ultimate chest-thumping, one-upsmanship of gamist play: MY character’s a duke with acres of land-holdings and hundreds of servants that die for my armies and pay me taxes…what have YOU got? PCs become actual movers and shakers in the game world, rather than simply wandering soldiers-of-fortune.
So, yeah…I think you’re right on about XP being pacing. My thoughts are that the concept is kind of lame for folks who have a gamist creative agenda. But if that’s what the kids want these days….
JMendes:
Hey, Jonathan, :)
Coolness. We agree on the basics of the nature of XP. :)
By the way, in preparing for this reply, I went back and (re)read your whole "challenge the player" thread... :)
Also, I pretty much have different goals and preferences than you regarding the basics of where the challenge is or should be in any given session of adventure gaming. In our 3.x/4e games, we actually are looking for tactical gamism, and I can pretty much tell you it's there. In 4e, in particular, when we fight, it's not about seeing who wins. It's pretty much foregone that, unless something goes incredibly awry, the PCs are going to win. What I'm interested in is how much is it going to cost them. How many healing surges, and did they use their daily powers or not.
So, let's debate the non-basics, then, and see what sort of dialogue develops from this...
Quote from: LandonSuffered on July 02, 2009, 01:30:14 PM
You asked for our thoughts, so here are mine: to me this is pretty lukewarm gamism. In the end you’re not challenging much more than your ability to create an optimal stat-block to run through a formula encounter and earn a set amount of XP to facilitate a formula encounter at a higher level. Hey, if I wanted to do this kind of thing I’d pay for a World of Warcraft account.
Zooggy. Go figure. :)
Anyway:
Quote from: LandonSuffered on July 02, 2009, 01:30:14 PM
XP is gained for actual treasure accumulated. In general, XP for treasure is present at a much higher frequency than XP for monsters. What does this mean? Players (not characters) will develop optimal ways of overcoming encounters (sometimes avoiding monsters all together…through stealth, trickery, negotiation) to get the most points (GPs = XPs) for their time and effort. You don’t have to hack, slash, and blow-up every encountered monster simply to “move to the next level of challenge” (3.x/4e play puts monster fights on a premium if you want to “open the new content” of the game).
Alas, this doesn't change the nature of the XPs. Players may or may not develop those "optimal ways". Either way, succeed or fail, after one set of goldz comes the next one. (Unless, of course, you are used to equating failure with death, in which case, you're talking about high-stakes vs. low-stakes, which is a whole other ball game altogether.)
Oh, by the way, stealth, trickery and negotiation are still options in 3.x/4e. In fact, 4e has this whole bit about building a skill challenge which is all about catering to the players' inventiveness and creativity outside of combat. But I digress...
Quote from: LandonSuffered on July 02, 2009, 01:30:14 PM
Presence of an actual end game. When players accumulate enough XP they can become land owners and rulers…basically becoming kings by their own hand. Here’s the use for all that XP laden treasure: building castles and hiring retainers. To my mind, this is the ultimate chest-thumping, one-upsmanship of gamist play: MY character’s a duke with acres of land-holdings and hundreds of servants that die for my armies and pay me taxes…what have YOU got? PCs become actual movers and shakers in the game world, rather than simply wandering soldiers-of-fortune.
That's not it either. Those old games had specific (and unsatisfying, imho) rules for moving the arena of the game into that moving and shaking, but that up-manship is just as social as the rewards we do have at my tables. :) It's also very much a natural continuation of long term play, and as such, not really a "mechanical reward", either.
However, I do agree with you that those "old school" games had more teeth in their XPs.
As noted by both Eero and Callan above, if the world scales up with play time regardless of your success, then, yes, there is a very strong mechanical reward for success, as failure means not being able to keep up with the world. I believe that's where red box D&D and AD&D1 were, with their dungeon levels. Sooner or later, you're going to have to go down into dungeon level 2, and you better have reached character level 2 by then, or chances are you're not going to make it back out.
Unfortunately, none of this helps me any when it comes to having a mechanical reward for tactical gamism. :)
Cheers,
J.
P.S. By the way, I realize that this stated preference of mine is going to put me in the same camp as the "kids these days want this kind of lame concept", and I'm totally cool with that. We might debate the relative merits of that, but we would probably just end up re-hashing your other thread, so let's not do that. ;)
Jasper Flick:
Tactics in D&D 3/4 is a matter of efficiency. You said it yourself.
How many spells or daily abilities/powers did you use up? How many items? How many hit points?
The reward is starting the next encounter with above-average resources if you've been efficient or lucky.
This kind of reward falls completely flat if encounters aren't mandatory. If the party can go through a full recovery after every encounter, then efficiency doesn't matter, all that's left if winning the encounter itself, which is practially guaranteed if you're fresh for each fight. The only way to lose is a complete party kill due to an impossible challenge, recognized too late.
I believe that this kind of play isn't step-on-up at all. There's no challenge, just the illusion of challenge.
Recognizing the impossible encounter isn't functional play, it's a GM desperate to introduce real challenge and failing because it's impossible in this context. (Hold on, I'm not saying impossible challenges aren't fair in general, just that they're a possible result of challenge-less play gone wrong. I think a lot of disfunctional party kills are caused by this.)
So what I'm saying is that in D&D, the reward for efficiency manifests from the insistence on a sequence of encounters. It's the last encounter of the day that's the real test. Suviving that last fight, when all becomes desperate, is the reward. When I play D&D, this is what I'm looking for.
There is more to it, though. There are plenty of opportunities to make efficiency and tactics matter in different ways in a single combat. Just pick a criteria and reward it in some way. In fact, players do it all the time without prompting:
I didn't lose any hp!
I got the first kill!
I killed the most baddies!
We didn't use any daily powers!
As GM, you can insert stuff that has more teeth, like:
Finish the encounter within four rounds, or the ship departs without you!
If you damage anything in the room you invoke the duke's wrath!
If anyone gets bloodied in this fight, you're met with scron.
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