Reward Mechanics

Lately, I've been considering how games provide feedback to their players.

Look at any game, and you'll see that it is set up with certain expectations. Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, expects that you will explore maps, kill the monsters, and take their treasure. That's the type of game that D&D players want, and that's the type of game the designers provide. You get experience points for killing the monsters, and the game design expects that you will have a level X magic item improving your character by the time you are level Y.

What I've been wondering is which came first, the design or the expectations? Did the D&D designers see that people wanted to explore dungeons and design the experience system to reward that play, or did the rewards come first and play changed to generate the most reward?

We are, by and large, creatures of self-interest. We will usually favor actions that improve our circumstances. So, in Dungeons and Dragons, killing monsters and taking their loot is the fastest way to advance your character, so you do it.

For another example, look at Burning Wheel. It doesn't use experience points. Instead, there are two major forms of advancement: improving skills and earning artha. You improve skills by using them, and you need to use them at varying levels of difficulty to advance. Artha is used to improve your die rolls, and you earn that by roleplaying. Your character has beliefs, instincts, and traits, and you earn artha by incorporating those beliefs, instincts, and traits into the game. You set up your own reward system, by saying "This is what I want my character to do, and I want to be rewarded for it." If you had a belief that it is better to make peace with the orcs than to fight them, you'd earn the exact same rewards as a character that has the belief that all orcs must die bloody deaths.

I've been running a Burning Wheel game for my players for the last month or so. Before that, they were only D&D players. It's been a rough learning curve, but I'm beginning to see changes in how they play. They're no longer interested only in defeating their enemies. Instead there are moral dilemmas ("Do I heal this injured man, even though he is a heathen unbeliever?"), it also helps that Burning Wheel has a rather gritty combat system, where a wound can last for a long time, which makes combat something to avoid.

Reward mechanics can also influence the genre of the game. In TORG, for example, they use a mechanic called perseverence to create the feel of a horror story in the game. Until you generate enough perseverence points, the monsters have several advantages over you. You gain the points by researching the monster's weakenesses and witnessing the atrocities it commits. This strengthens your resolve to defeat it, until you gain enough information and resolve to enable you to overpower it. The system even encourages splitting the party up, as they can gain more information that way. Just like you see in horror movies.

It's important when choosing a game to consider what sort of behavior the game expects. If this doesn't fit YOUR expectations, you should choose a different game.

Now Reading: Code of the Lifemaker, by James P. Hogan.