We’ve said something recently about CharGen, that is, character generation, one of the core mechanics of most role playing games.  Another that gets a lot of attention in game design discussions is what is referred to as rewards systems, that is, what the players get for playing the game well.

  It is taken as axiomatic in discussions of role playing game design that if you want players to act in a certain way during play, you need to design a rewards system that encourages this type of play and discourages other kinds of play.  This has inaptly been called the carrot and stick approach, trying to suggest that there is a reward for doing the right thing and a penalty for doing the wrong thing.  The actual carrot and stick approach is to dangle the reward in front of someone such that it always remains out of reach, but they keep pursuing it.  This strikes me as a particularly poor choice for a role playing game, as eventually the players will realize that they’re never going to get the carrot, and they’ll stop moving toward it.  If you conjure an image in your mind in which the stick is attached to the back of the donkey and the carrot hangs on a string from the end of it, so that the donkey keeps walking toward the carrot even as it moves with him, you’ll realize that this is the sort of system that only really works well for jackasses.

  There is an important lesson to be seen in this, too.  Long ago I played in a game in which the reward system involved gaining experience points to a target number, at which point you were permitted a roll on a table which would indicate a minor character improvement, provided that this character had not previously received this improvement.  As play progressed, it was more and more difficult to reach the level at which the next roll was permitted, and less and less likely that any benefit would be received for it.  The result was that the players ignored the reward system, as something that didn’t functionally matter to play.  If the reward system is seen by the players as dangling that carrot unattainably in front of them, it will quickly become superfluous, encouraging nothing.

  However, that notion of rewarding desired conduct and penalizing undesired conduct is often fundamentally misunderstood, resulting in rewards systems that are internally conflicted and inconsistent, systems which in attempting to reward one sort of play actually encourage another.

  Multiverser has no “rewards system” at all; there is a sense in which nothing is rewarded and nothing is given as a reward.  Yet people play it, and find rewards, because the rewards are inherent to the experience.  This is the starting point to designing a reward system:  understand what it is that your players want to get out of the game, and encourage that.  By looking at it in a game like Multiverser, where there is no built-in reward system, we can begin to fathom what it is that gets people to play, and so understand what kinds of rewards are likely to work.

  To some players, the game is about the challenge, the competition, going up against something that you have to defeat.  At the risk of infringing on someone else’s theories of role playing, we will call this player the Gamist.  To him, the ultimate reward is that feeling that you just won, that you beat the odds or overcame the enemy or solved the problem in a significant way.  I’m currently playing in a Multiverser game on our official forum here at Gaming Outpost in which not so long ago I was engaged in a battle of magic.  The attacker fled; the attacker’s conjured assassin was driven away.  I had beaten the enemy, I had won the conflict.  The gamist reward here is phenomenal.

  To the player we would call a Simulationist, reward is a lot more subtle.  It involves feeling like you’ve entered another reality, in some sense, that you’ve explored a possibility and discovered something about it.  In that same game world, my background in law convinced the local prince to assign me the rather complex task of organizing his judicial system and creating a legislature as a way to bring his medieval princedom toward a modern democratic citystate.  I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to organize a dozen judges into a tiered judicial system with an emphasis on precedent, and more on devising a bicameral legislature in which one house represented the fading nobility and the other the mostly illiterate peasantry (how do you arrange elections for representatives when the electorate can’t read and write?).  I was watching the world evolve, and was involved in the center of it.  There is a great reward in being part of something like this.

  There is another kind of player who is often called the Narrativist.  There are a lot of ways to explain this player that that would lead someone to object to the terminology, but let me suggest that the reward for narrativists is the creation of something of a morality play; that is, we’ve created a story which is about an issue.  In that same world in which I fought the wizard and organized the legislature, the man who appointed me his Chief Justice required that I “swear fealty” to him, and I in essence did so:  I told him that I didn’t promise not to argue with him, but in the end I would recognize he had the right to decide what the law was.  But this man had closed all the churches in the princedom.  It was his opinion that the religious people were fighting with each other to the detriment of the community, so he made public religious ceremony illegal.  My character is very religious; and after taking his position he discovered that one of the major religious groups which was shut down was essentially agreed with his own faith.  That put him in a position in which he had sworn obligations to uphold a law that could easily be used to persecute people who shared his religious beliefs, which indeed could be used to accuse his self of treason.  The tension here is a wonderful narrativist premise, as the character must wrestle with whether he can serve as the chief jurist in a legal system that oppresses his own faith, or whether he can from his position of limited authority make it possible for that faith (and others?) to continue to be practiced and encouraged in the city despite the strictures placed upon it.  The reward here comes from resolving those tensions in one direction or another.  Narrativist rewards can in some ways be the most interesting.  My character could be the deliverer who puts the crack in the wall that ultimately admits the flood, such that the prince is forced to permit faith again to be expressed and practiced openly.  He could instead be the martyr whose death galvanizes the people to stand up for their freedom.  There are great story possibilities here, and the realization of those story possibilities is itself the reward.

  Mechanical reward systems can be gamist, narrativist, or simulationist; what that means ultimately is that the rewards encourage one kind of play.  The question becomes, how do these systems work?  I am convinced that a functional rewards system has two aspects; these must both be aligned the same way, or the system is incoherent–that is, it encourages and discourages the same sort of play at the same time.  I think I can give an example of a simple and familiar system which encourages gamist play of a particular sort (there are many types of play within each of the general groups mentioned), and of a popular fix that is used to attempt to change it which in fact makes it incoherent.  It is probably the most popular and best known model for role playing game advancement, and it’s probably the best known fix as well.

  The model is simple.  You kill monsters and collect treasure, and this gives you experience points.  Experience points are valuable because when you get enough you advance a level and so are better at killing monsters and getting treasure.

  Some people don’t want the game to be all about killing monsters and getting treasure.  They want it to be about playing your character well and creating good stories.  So they dump part or all of the point system for killing monsters and getting treasure, and instead give experience points for good role playing, in character actions, and advancing the story.  These experience points are valuable why?  When you get enough of them you can advance to the next level, and so become better at what?  You become better at killing monsters and getting treasure.

  I hope it’s patently obvious at this point what the problem is.  The functional reward system gives you something for doing what the game wants you to do that makes you better able to do what the game wants you to do.  The so-called “fixed” system gives you something for doing what the referee wants you to do that makes you better able to do what the referee doesn’t want you to do.  There is a fundamental discontinuity between the two prongs of the reward system.  It is incoherent.

  If you learn nothing else from this article, remember that a functional reward system has two aspects.  Rewards are given for actions of a particular type, and they are in a currency which can be used for actions of a particular type, and those types must be in accord or the system is dysfunctional.  A rewards system must both recognize desired play and facilitate desired play.

  There is a sense in which rewards can be almost anything and fit any type of play; it’s more a matter of how they’re earned and how they may be spent than of what they are.  Yes, there are some rewards that fit some kinds of play better.  But having just seen the flaw in the usual fix to the common system, you may be wondering whether it’s possible to design a rewards system for play that is not gamist.  Although I don’t consider rewards systems necessary (remember, Multiverser doesn’t have one–play is its own reward), I think it is possible.  Perhaps a consideration of the possibilities will put some ideas forward.

  To recap, let’s consider the gamist model.  A character earns experience points for beating the odds, whether that’s for killing monsters, solving riddles, capturing enemy spies, disarming explosives, or any other in-game challenge.  Those points are then spent to make him better at killing monsters, solving riddles, capturing enemy spies, disarming explosives, or some other in-game challenge.  This is the basic gamist reward system, because rewards are given to reinforce the inherent reward of winning, and are a type which help the character win over greater odds in the future.

  A player recognizes that his character has values which could easily be brought into conflict.  He moves that character into a place where the conflict will be forced upon the character, where he will have to choose between one value and another, and in doing so is given a credit.  He may then use the credit to purchase something to add to play that will help resolve this conflict one way or the other, such as bringing another character into the scene, or placing a previously unmentioned object within reach.  This is an arguably narrativist reward system, because it gives rewards for the creation of premise-enhancing situations which are of a type which helps the player advance the core of the story.  (This is more difficult, as a very similar reward system could be used in a simulationist exploration of character/situation game.  It also involves aspects that are not inherently narrativist, such as the ability of the player to add something to the game world; there are some excellent gamist games available from independent publishers which include this idea.  The critical point here is that the player who creates a situation in which a moral issue is brought into conflict is rewarded with the power to resolve that conflict, and so create story.)

  For a simulationist example, we’ve got to do something a bit more radical, perhaps.  A character in a new city takes a job as a stablehand.  The player puts effort into describing the life and activities of a stablehand, and his character’s feelings about this; he controls the character to be a good stablehand.  A tally is kept of the time he spends at this activity, with extra credits for doing it well.  When a predetermined score is reached, the owner of the stable approaches the character and offers to promote him to work as a groom.  This is arguably a simulationist reward system, as the rewards are given for playing appropriately in the context of the setting and lead to new opportunities to explore other aspects of the setting.  A better example that works well in a more modern setting would be for the character to be a reporter for his high school or college newspaper; by doing a good job at reporting the stories that matter to the school, he gets enough points to become a reporter for the local paper, county paper, small city paper, major city paper, then perhaps a correspondent for CNN, each advance opening up areas of the world to him that were not available before.  Other players in this particular scenario could be photographer/cameraman, editor, and assistant, with functions that keep the group together as a team, but require them to advance as a team.  Thus the simulationist system rewards exploration by enabling exploration.

  There are countless ways to do reward systems for each sort of play. I believe that the way to get at it, though, is to begin with an idea of how the game works without any reward system at all, to determine what sort of play you want to encourage, and then create a reward system which gives the players currency in response to the sort of actions desired which can be spent to make possible more of that sort of actions.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.