Heroic Sacrifice

Pandora

Incentivizing taking the backseat can quickly become problematic in more ways than one.

For example, there are many, many players that eschew the limelight. They enjoy taking the backseat, they don't ever actually want the limelight. So you pour rewards and XP onto these background characters...and they never die because they don't take the big risks, and they get more and more powerful/rich because they're being consistently rewarded, but they aren't inclined to use their power in any meaningful way, so you get these non-confrontational dinosaur-minions becoming the living shield of whoever is their buddy, disincentivizing anyone from going against them because conflict leads to Ser Gregor Clegane showing up.

Secondly, you wind up with multiple avenues for humble-bragging, which I'm sure at least some of you agree is the worst sort. There's the 'Even though it shall cost me my life, I humbly invoke whatever punishment it may be to valiantly smite the dragon and save the day, worship me from here on out because I'll be dead afterward and I need you to give me praise and pet my head a lot first.' And also the 'Staff sucks because the only reason I didn't stick my neck out in that plot was because they said they wanted people to be in the background, I have (insert long rant about dice and modifiers here) and could have EASILY done (X thing, where X could have resulted in death/dismemberment) way better than So-n-So, and they totally didn't notice me not-doing-it (along with the other 20 or so people that didn't do it).'

And then there's the simple fact that in games with risk, it's much easier/safer to not stick your neck out, so there's already a lot of hobby-wide not-doing-anything-unless-it's-a-staff-run-plot anyway. So you wind up with people not stepping up to do anything even more than they already don't now. If there's a dragon to slay and 10 people show up and none of them want to lose life or limb so they all want to be the person supporting the hero but there's no hero...what then. Or if one does step forward, gets killed, and the other nine make off with the treasure's riches... that might work in tabletop, but people usually aren't playing MU*s to be cannon fodder.

That was a lot of naysaying. Let me sum up by saying, if you want to incentivize people, reward the behavior you want to see. Reward content-creation more heavily than participation. Reward group-efforts. Don't make Losing the new Winning, make cooperative, compelling story-writing the end-goal, and foster a community that shares that goal. And when I say foster it, I mean it. Shout it from the rooftops when players have done well, because more than XP, more than money, what players want is to feel appreciated.

Kay

@kestrel You make some really great points.

I think, thinking about it some more, that part of the issue might be that really creating a story together does usually require a sense of trust between the players. I'm a bit too tired at the time of writing this to really feel I can explain that coherently, but I'll give it a shot. Notice that your example of characters that died for the sake of the story all feature characters that were part of small groups, that worked together intimately and at length.

In a MU* setting, that would be a small group of players whose characters were part of the same motley/pack/family/company/etc, so there's the IC bonding and knowledge of each other but also the OOC bonding and knowledge. With that scenario you would also (assuming everyone becomes friends out of character) have a lot more sense of making a story together. You're more willing to sacrifice, because there's the direct sense that you are doing it for that story you are making together, and that you are also doing it for the well being of the group.

I think that might be a key. Encourage IC and OOC bonding to encourage the willingness to win-by-losing, that feeling that you're working together.

faraday

@lithium said in Heroic Sacrifice:

And I know for a fact, a LOT (relative to my perspective) of people never played on TGG because of the short campaign length.

Oh, yes, I agree. I must have misunderstood your point. All I meant is that there are many people who will cling tenaciously to their character in a long-running campaign but at the same time happily take risks and sacrifice themselves in a short-running campaign. These people are not polar opposites, they're just behaving differently in different environments.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So for me, this is very much a key aspect that needs to die. ... This is a good example of something I see as a game culture issue. Ideally (in a perfect, utopian MU) people shouldn't be focused on 'my story' — this is hero-think; protagonist-think. It should be first and foremost about the story, and sometimes for the benefit of the story, an important character has to die, or suffer.

I don't think you can kill that part of the culture though. It's been fed by decades of RPG culture, video game culture, and media culture - all of which is what we (as a collective) base our games on. We use RPG systems. We retell stories from books, movies, etc. that are often about the Hero's Journey, the awesome badass(es) who may struggle a bit but ultimately save the universe.

Trying to fight that culture through incentives, I think, will just lead to what @Pandora and @Seraphim73 said about making "losing the new winning", with people just min/maxing their failures in order to build more success.

Incidentally, it's funny you mention FS3, because in FS3 you never die unless you consent to it. (And hardly anybody does.) I've seen far more sour grapes and whining about how someone wasn't as badass as they thought they should be in +combat than I ever have people taking creative license and failing/struggling in an interesting fashion. The stuff you describe exists, but it's a minority.

So I think you'll get more success just by trying to attract the scattered folks throughout the hobby who are already craving more of a story environment than by trying to bribe people into playing a completely different style of game than the one they want to play. As @Lithium said - find like-minded people and cater to them. Even if, as with TGG, that's just a small group.

Side note - Cooperative tabletop games work by making it all about the group rather than the individual. The group wins or loses together. You're investing in the group, not in your own character. There are mechanics that make it easy for you to trade cards or moves or whatever so you can enable somebody else to do something that furthers the group's agenda more. I have no idea how you'd try to apply that concept to a game with dozens of individual characters played by strangers on the Internet, but food for thought maybe.

Arkandel

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

The former is a little harder. I agree that taking away gamist incentivisation is a good start, but I worry that @seraphim73's idea of having only 'karma' as a stat would also risk people running too wild with their character builds. I like @arkandel's idea of rewarding failure but I feel like this too is a band-aid, as it would still, ultimately, be about a system of rewards and progression. However a band-aid might be the best that can be hoped for.

It isn't a bandaid, and it's easy to see why if you look at stat-less sheet-less games; there are no hard carrots there - no XP, no gear, nothing - yet people still chase victory for basically the same reasons @faraday mention. Their characters are their proxies, and the game still rewards winning over losing.

What do you get for being successful on such a game? Oh, everything. You have access to exclusive scenes, for starters; there are plenty of "high council meetings" in MU* to the point it's almost a separate trope for them, where the Duchess and the Count meet their peers to share secrets and make decisions. You are among those who get the spotlight in public scenes, who are invited to social events and are bestowed the cool ranks.

You don't get those - as a rule - for failing. It's not a matter of attributes and dice pools (or at least not exclusively) but rather the fact that it reflects how real life works; politicians, business people and generals don't advance in their perspective careers because they are challenged but because they beat those challenges.

Books are just different because they present readers with different perspectives. In the Robin Hobb's Farseer series Fitz isn't a powerhouse although he gets his chance to kick ass, he's a character repeatedly brought down hard, and we as readers are given the chance to empathize with the measure of his sacrifices.

Something like this is not going to work on a MUSH the way we design them because for characters like Fitz, the sacrifice itself would simply take agency away from them. They would get access to fewer scenes, less name recognition, and their ability to be the catalyst of great things would be lessened since what drives roleplay is perception, and the ultimate focus of too many people is getting a stranglehold on the spotlight.

This effect isn't intentional but it's not accidental either; most games explicitly reward the latter and they punish the former.

To change it you are fighting an uphill battle. If you want a literary experience then you need to build a game meant to emulate and incentivize that, which means breaking free of traditional MU* tropes since they are doing the exact opposite of what you want, and a MU*'s culture is based on actions and not words. You can't say what you want on a post or wiki page, you need to design then implement it in your entire game, from CGen to the grid.

Tat

So many good thoughts in this thread.

I've played a few games where people were generally pretty okay with 'losing' in some sense (losing an arm, having serious injuries, occasionally a death), and also games where people really weren't. I've never played a game where EVERYONE was okay with the losing, or even where most people were okay with ALL SORTS of losing, so I think one thing to recognize is that there's a sliding scale here.

Not all losses are created equal. I'm one of those players who generally does NOT want my characters to die, unless I'm just done with that character. CG is hard for me and I tend toward slow burn on character arcs and hate when they get cut short. But I'm pretty okay with big injuries and setbacks.

The games where people were more okay with losses tended to have certain things in common.

Culture. Most of them were started with groups of friends who lean heavy on the story side of things instead of the game side of things. Having a solid core of players who are willing to fuck up sets a tone that makes it easier for new players to also be willing to fuck up. This is a hard thing to accomplish if you don't just happen to have a fuck-up-okay core playerbase sitting around, but I do think that it's worth thinking about how one sets the culture and tone of a game on opening.
Smallish. I think that in many ways, several of these games had a similar feel to the tabletop stuff @faraday is talking about. We're talking probably 25 or fewer players, 35 or fewer active characters, and a ton of GMing work. The sort that is not really scalable to bigger games.
PvE, single faction. No PvP in sight, beyond personal disagreements. Everyone working toward the same goal. Factions WITH a goal to work toward. This means that the group could have a success even while an individual had a failure (Incidentally, the bigger pushback on these games tended to be when the group had a failure). The single goal also means that there was a group sort of trajectory toward winning, even if this specific event was a set back or a loss.
Largely consent. Some had no system at all, one had FS3, where the results of combat were in the hands of the dice, but death and permanent maiming were consent-only and generally you assume that the dice are going to be /largely/ in your favor. Being able to choose when and where and to some extent, what, makes it easier, I think. This is how you get players going 'YES CUT OFF MY ARM PLEASE!'
Failures and losses get attention, and sometimes badass compensation. None of these games had coded rewards for these things outside of attention - but man did you get LOTS and LOTS of attention. Kill off a character? Watch people RP about you for weeks! Cut off an arm? NEW METAL ARM + lots of meaningful RP around topics like identity and loss. I'm someone who, as mentioned, HATES killing characters, but I killed two of them in this way, because both times it felt like it MEANT something. It did not pass unnoticed into the night, it generated a lot of RP. Technically it was a loss, but for me it FELT like a win.

I'm painting a bit of a rosy picture here, and I'm sure there were losses on these games that did not feel meaningful to people and did not result in the attention they may have craved, and that there were people who hated having them and who preferred to win all the time (in fact, I know there were, because sometimes they complained), but I still think that overall, there was a trend toward feeling comfortable doing stuff that was fun story and not just winning.

I'll also note that I think generally it's easier to take a loss that isn't your character's fault than one that is. To have your arm blown off or to lose in combat because that's how the dice roll than to not save your friends because you made a bad decision. Those sorts of failures do show up, but not nearly as often as the others. It's way less fun to RP for months about your bad tactical decision that got all the NPC kids killed than about how sad it is that you have terrible scars on your face now.

Kestrel

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So I think you'll get more success just by trying to attract the scattered folks throughout the hobby who are already craving more of a story environment than by trying to bribe people into playing a completely different style of game than the one they want to play. As @Lithium said - find like-minded people and cater to them. Even if, as with TGG, that's just a small group.

I think this is a given, but the thing is that the kind of playerbase you advertise for isn't necessarily the kind of playerbase you'll get. The 100 for example is a brutal survival setting filled with culture-clashes, war, genocide, criminal protagonists, and the oft-repeated phrase 'there are no good guys', but the MUSH version of it mostly had people who really wanted to establish peace and play moral protagonists. It was, through no fault of its creators, a very mushy version of the setting it was based on, which is why at some point I walked out. (Side note, is anyone else ultra excited for Season 5 airing tonight?)

Any game can state its ethos from the outset, and you can proudly trumpet ICC = ICA until you're blue in the face, but ultimately it's the game designer's responsibility to cultivate the player culture they want. If the design doesn't support the ethos it's trying to achieve, no amount of asking people nicely is going to change that. @arkandel is quite right in that if you're telling people that it doesn't matter if you win or lose, but you're only rewarding winning, you aren't going to get the results you want.

So absolutely, I will look for like-minded people, but I'll also look for ways to encourage and reward that like-mindedness, to ensure that it sticks, and doesn't change when people invite their friends from other games or people join the game with preconceived notions from other game-cultures they've been involved in. Besides, there's a minimum and a maximum people can do in any situation: the best and worst fits can still be coaxed towards the higher end of their natural range if the environment provides positive reinforcement. That's all I'm looking for.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

What do you get for being successful on such a game? Oh, everything. You have access to exclusive scenes, for starters; there are plenty of "high council meetings" in MU* to the point it's almost a separate trope for them, where the Duchess and the Count meet their peers to share secrets and make decisions. You are among those who get the spotlight in public scenes, who are invited to social events and are bestowed the cool ranks.

You don't get those - as a rule - for failing. It's not a matter of attributes and dice pools (or at least not exclusively) but rather the fact that it reflects how real life works; politicians, business people and generals don't advance in their perspective careers because they are challenged but because they beat those challenges.

I don't see why it has to be this way. If you fail and your character ends up in jail, they could still have a very cool scene where they're brought before the high council and interrogated about their crimes, who they know, etc. They could be bribed to betray their friends, thus being turned into a double agent who has regular meetings with important NPCs trying to blackmail them or extract information.

Story, even spotlight, isn't contingent on winning or losing. In fact I think that when people think of a character like Wash from Firefly/Serenity, his two most memorable scenes are: A) goofing around with toy dinosaurs; B) dying horribly. His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.

Lisse24

@kay said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Seems like a pretty good solution would be to give more reward for failure than success. We learn more from failure. Give more XP to reflect the experience earned.

If there is a built in reward for something, people will eventually have a pavlovian response.

That said, having your character die or otherwise effectively taken out of play, that is a more difficult issue. That's not failure but that you don't get to develop that character's story further. The only two ways I see to make that easier for players is to either somehow make it a fitting end for the character or have a game like Paranoia or Kult where you KNOW your character is going to be short lived and the goal is to have as much fun as possible before the inevitable end. But that also means players will be much less invested in those same PCs and typically makes for more beer and pretzels type RP than anything with depth. Ymmv.

Right, maybe take automatically earned XP or XP through +vote away and instead have people earn XP only when they suffer a setback of some sort? For example, WoD's negative conditions give XP to a character. Maybe you could also create some sort of command that lets two (or more) players certify who lost on a contested roll and then gives that player an XP point.

Tat

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Any game can state its ethos from the outset, and you can proudly trumpet ICC = ICA until you're blue in the face, but ultimately it's the game designer's responsibility to cultivate the player culture they want. If the way the design doesn't support the ethos it's trying to achieve, no amount of asking people nicely is going to change that. @arkandel is quite right in that if you're telling people that it doesn't matter if you win or lose, but you're only rewarding winning, you aren't going to get the results you want.

I think this is 100% spot on and a great point. I've played a number of games where I was baffled at some design choices that seemed to contradict what they said they wanted. I think especially there is a fear among M*s of turning away people who want the faction or character option or power you aren't offering. There is a fear of being small.

And to some extent I get it. There is a critical number of people needed to keep a M* going. But I also think that certain sacrifices to game design in the name of attracting more players cause more trouble than they solve, and that being smallish is sometimes a bonus, not a flaw.

faraday

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

when people think of a character like Wash from Firefly/Serenity, his two most memorable scenes are: A) goofing around with toy dinosaurs; B) dying horribly. His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.

Except look at MUSHers. How many people want to play Wash vs. how many people want to play Mal or Zoe or even Inara. It's horribly horribly lop-sided precisely because those are his only two memorable scenes. There's a difference between what kinds of characters people will love to watch on screen versus what they want to be in their player-proxy avatar.

@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:

one had FS3, where the results of combat were in the hands of the dice, but death and permanent maiming were consent-only and generally you assume that the dice are going to be /largely/ in your favor.

Well, with FS3 the dice literally are largely in your favor. The stats are slated heavily towards PCs and it's a very consent-ish system, where death occurs by choice and there's no built-in mechanic for maiming or lasting injury.

Tat

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Well, with FS3 the dice literally are largely in your favor. The stats are slated heavily towards PCs and it's a very consent-ish system, where death occurs by choice and there's no built-in mechanic for maiming or lasting injury.

Yeah, that's what I mean - there are systems out there where that is NOT the assumption with dice, but with FS3, you get that balance of randomized while still leaning toward PC success.

In my use, at least, this balance tended to encourage people toward things like terrible injuries because they knew that they weren't ALSO going to bleed out and die and PROBABLY the team as a whole was going to win.

Done right, it might even mean that there's a lot of RP around other players trying to save your butt on the battlefield and freaking out about you being down or too injured to fight well, which again - attention, man. It's intoxicating.

faraday

@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Yeah, that's what I mean... Done right, it might even mean that there's a lot of RP around other players trying to save your butt on the battlefield and freaking out about you being down or too injured to fight well, which again - attention, man. It's intoxicating.

Yeah sorry I misread part of your post But yes, I agree. A system like FS3 makes it easy for people who are inclined to do those things to do them. It's just that most people aren't.

Apos

Way, way, way more people are okay with their characters dying in a cool way than they are ever okay with being made to look like an idiot, or just being wrong about something. It isn't even close. People will tolerate catastrophic losses no problem as long as it doesn't undermine how they picture their character, but if you basically ever suggest their character is less cool than they think it is, a lot of players will fight that to their dying breath, and would way rather be banned while throwing a meltdown of epic proportions than take that.

My personal take is that you should just build the environment around people that like story and get invested in it, and reward them for that behavior as much as you can, because they are the ones that generally make the environment really come to life and generate positive experiences for other people. Then you can try to create as much incentives as possible for buy in from people that aren't as invested in story, but mostly I'd be looking at how to stop them from damaging things for the much smaller first group.

Like I honestly think it's pretty simple, though simple doesn't mean easy. Just keep rewarding quiet, no drama players that gracefully deal with consequences and roll with stories. It's incredibly easy to fall into the trap of trying to appease people that are cool 95% of the time but freak out 5% of the time, particularly when they have tons of friends, but you really should just focus on the 100%'ers rather than tweak the game to accommodate 95%ers at their expense.

ETA: OOC environment is the #1 reason very chill, story focused players aren't on more games. If someone is just looking to collaborate and tell stories with other people and only invested in RP, what do you think they do when they log into the game and their first experience is seeing someone be a dipshit in an ooc room? They are gone immediately.

Pyrephox

I feel like one thing we, as designers of persistent environments, could do a better job at, and that would help to make people more amenable to setbacks and challenges, is to stop thinking so much in binaries of 'success/failure' and more in a series of meaningful choices that each open up different avenues of play. We set up games to have one "success state" - it's not an immutable condition of the universe, it's a design choice.

For example, if we're going to use literary/story conventions (which, if I'm honest, I don't think are a very good match for RPGs, because the story isn't entirely in the hands of any one author, and may be in the hands of a random statistical element, so expecting things to turn out as smoothly as they do in media is setting oneself up for frustration, I feel) then failures in a story are rarely ever just FAILURES. A good author doesn't slam a barrier down in front of the protagonist without creating a path to get around, under, or over the wall - usually a more interesting and dramatic path than just going straight through the obstacle would have been.

I've been playing around with the idea of, essentially, there being continuums of play which are interesting but mutually exclusive - you can dabble in each, but to commit to one, you have to damage your reputation with the other - although that reputation can later be repaired if you decide it's more fun to play the other side. Like, instead of "Here's the dominant power structure - if you screw up with them, you're SOL when it comes to play," instead thinking of it more like, "Here's the overt group of power-brokers, here's their shadowy counter-points. Pissing off the overt group is going to shut you out of some of their opportunities, but it's also going to make you attractive to the shadowy counterparts, who will open up opportunities for you that you can only get by "failing" to impress the overt group."

Basically, the designer needs to think: If I'm putting out this challenge which can be failed, what are the consequences of that? If the consequences aren't inherently fatal, then how do those consequences allow players to continue to advance their character's desires by other, but still fun, means?

That said - some people can't accept consequences of any sort, so some people are always going to cry "my story" or "my agency" whenever things don't work out exactly as they have planned. You can't design around these people, you can only gently shoo them to other games that work better for their needs, before they cause too much trouble.

Arkandel

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:
I don't see why it has to be this way. If you fail and your character ends up in jail, they could still have a very cool scene where they're brought before the high council and interrogated about their crimes, who they know, etc. They could be bribed to betray their friends, thus being turned into a double agent who has regular meetings with important NPCs trying to blackmail them or extract information.

Because if you fail your character doesn't typically end up in jail (fatal or truly bad endings don't happen very frequently) but there's a worse hell than that for PCs to end up in; irrelevance. You can't get as much leverage to negotiate, you aren't invited to as many of those decision-making scenes, and this loss of agency means you are reliant on other players coming up with ways you can stay relevant.

Successful PCs have more agency. It's just how it is. To give you an example on HM I played Theodore. The number of scenes I had as a lowly Sheriff's Deputy, as fun as they were, didn't compare to the access I had for RP after he rose to Dictator; suddenly I had people coming to me, asking to set up audiences, I had the luxury of sending others into side quests... my character's leverage increased my level of involvement to "at will" rather than "what I can get today", which makes an enormous difference.

His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.

He was a successful character on a TV series. You won't see him played on a MUSH nearly as much, and what's even more important, the way games are set up he wouldn't get as many opportunities to shine as other characters, built for 'success' would.

I'm not saying you are wrong in what you want, just that there's a reason there's a mismatch between what people like to watch and/or read about, and what they then play. People want to win because one way or the other, they always get something out of it and nearly nothing when they don't.

Pandora

@apos said in Heroic Sacrifice:

People will tolerate catastrophic losses no problem as long as it doesn't undermine how they picture their character, but if you basically ever suggest their character is less cool than they think it is, a lot of players will fight that to their dying breath, and would way rather be banned while throwing a meltdown of epic proportions than take that.

This right here, 1000x. Not that I'm advocating for anyone having a meltdown, but this takes me back to Firan, where if staff decided to come at you, you were better off hoping for a quick death than jail --> the public shaming --> speeches --> eventual grandiose execution. Because it's your story, and having it dragged over the coals in the 'wrong' direction is way worse than simply having it cut short.

faraday

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Because if you fail your character doesn't typically end up in jail (fatal or truly bad endings don't happen very frequently) but there's a worse hell than that for PCs to end up in; irrelevance.

And there's an even worse hell than irrelevance: embarrassment. Because @Apos is 100% correct that the overwhelming majority of players would rather be banned for a meltdown than see their character suffer a humiliating setback. Which is ironic since many of the heroes they're emulating did just that in the stories (Luke in Empire Strikes Back, much?)

It's good to say that we want to make people more amenable to failure, to cater to the people who are, but how is the million dollar question.

Derp

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So reverse that. Make having adversaries the way everything is earned; you are judged by your political enemies, you grow by losing social encounters as much as you do by winning them. The more powerful your major opponents grow the more you do in a symbiotic way.

This would be totally amazing.

Tat

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Because if you fail your character doesn't typically end up in jail (fatal or truly bad endings don't happen very frequently) but there's a worse hell than that for PCs to end up in; irrelevance.

And there's an even worse hell than irrelevance: embarrassment. Because @Apos is 100% correct that the overwhelming majority of players would rather be banned for a meltdown than see their character suffer a humiliating setback. Which is ironic since many of the heroes they're emulating did just that in the stories (Luke in Empire Strikes Back, much?)

I think part of the key here is that I think the issue is OOC embarrassment - that is, as @Apos says, something that is not a part of the story YOU want to tell.

I've seen people take on IC embarrassment because it fits their version of the story they want to tell. Usually they do this because, as in your example, they know that the setback is not the end of the story, but merely a beat on the way to some larger win or growth. They trust that they are going to be able to get to the point beyond that poor decision. I've mostly seen this on games where I think players feel like they aren't going to get the rug pulled out from under them, RP and story wise if they choose to do this. It's a hard balance sometimes - consequences vs keeping things playable and fun.

Arkandel

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

It's good to say that we want to make people more amenable to failure, to cater to the people who are, but how is the million dollar question.

A while ago I had proposed a 'nemesis' system. It was basically part of a social mechanics thread but it could be converted to fit this objective.

So basically the idea is to entice players into valuing their opponents. Each time you do a contested roll against someone you get a small reward (XP, status, whatever) whether you succeed or not as an IC demonstration of being challenged. It also begins increasing a counter showing how often you've been challenged by that person, and over time the higher this counter the better the reward; after all opposing a Fett in a negotiation, as long as you walk away from it, is more significant than being roughed up by some random thug. The fact the two of you are opposing each other makes you peers, and as one rises so does the other.

I think by systematizing this opposition and ensuring friction is always a positive would result in people treasuring their long term enemies on an OOC level. Every time you clash with that Primogen, each time the Elder spits vitriol your way, your status increases alongside their own; you are antagonists, but now it's a symbiotic relationship instead of a zero-sum one.

So that's my pitch. Remove the zero-sum part out of encounters, social or otherwise.

Coin

A few notes, though everyone is touching on important things:

Many MUs aim at reaching a certain "critical mass" wherein the game can sustain its activity on player inertia alone, so that staff don't overwork themselves into burning out. Catering to only one sort of player ("story players", "XP players", "TS players", "combat all-the-time players") will usually not allow you to reach that critical mass. There are always exceptions, so no one needs to roll out their list of examples.

On @Seraphim73's Karma idea, and touching on some of @Pandora's critique of it: it's not bad. I would aim for a middle ground. Pick a number of "areas" a character can be skilled at (I will go with 6 and all my examples hereon will work off of that)--say, "combat", "academicism", "mechanics", "socializing,", and "sorcery"; then create some subgroups--("combat with swords", "cavalry combat", "war strategy,") ("history," "physics," "chemistry,"); ("automobiles," "crafting weapons," "improvisational mcgyvering"); ("throwing parties," "animal husbandry," "manipulating allies,") etc, etc.

Then have a character pick 1 Area they are good at, two ares they're okay at, two areas they're very average at, and one area they're bad at. We will give these ratings: 4, 3, 2, 1.

This is your multiplier. This is the value of each spent Karma point. Someone good at combat will get a lot more value out of spending 1 Karma point than someone who's average at it (twice as much, in fact) but if they are low on Karma points, and that other person isn't, they might just lose a fight against an inferior opponent anyway.
It's also the value of the Karma points you get per failure. Since in this type of system confrontation is basically a bidding war, you usually spend a lot of Karma when you eventually do spend it--so when you fail at someone, you get a number of Karma points equal to the value (so if you're good at combat and get your ass kicked in a duel, you gain 4 Karma points; but if you're bad at combat, you only gain 1).
This number is also the amount of days/weeks/months/[time period decided by the game devs] you have to wait before you can gain Karma by "losing" in this particular area again. For example: you are good at combat--but you lost a duel. Sucks. But you get 4 Karma! However, you can't gain Karma from losing a duel again for another four days. If you DO, you get a Tick. Five Ticks, and your rating in that area goes down. You're obviously not Good at combat, you're just Okay at combat.
On the other hand, if you're really badf at combat, you can lose a duel every other day and get 1 Karma point each time, since you only have to wait a day to pass. Combat isn't important to you, and being bad at it is part of your character, so you're consistently playing that aspect of your character.

On a tie, the character with the most amount of applicable sub-specialties (as exemplified above) can decide the outcome--they can lose on [OOC] purpose (barely), or declare themselves the winner (barely). Their specialization gave them the upper hand or made them too cocky, or whatever other justification they want to cook up.

If both players have the same amount of sub-specs that apply, they can bid Karma again. If it ties again, roll a single die or flip a coin, or whatever other method you want to break a tie.

You can only ever have 1 Good area. If you drop from Good to Okay, you can work your way back up to Good by spending Karma points to succeed without failing. Five successes in a row can raise you a level.

Through losing levels in Areas, you can't havemore than 6 Bad Areas (because there are 6 areas, but if you choose a different number, that number). You can't have more than 5 Average Areas, you can't have more than 3 Okay Areas, and you can't have more than 1 Good Area (all this working within the '6 areas' example).

Your absolute best spread is your initial one; but this system allows you to switch. Maybe you want to have your initial combat dude become a sorcerer, etc.

Some things can cause you to drop in quality. If you lose an arm, your Good Combatant probably becomes an Okay Combatant, at least until they find a way to overcome their missing limb, etc.

It's not perfect, but it would force people to focus on playing up their flaws and rationing out their "moments of awesome".

Last thing: more and more I am largely an advocate of XP being a player-gained thing and not a character-gained thing. I am so tired of the math games. You want five characters? Fine. You get to spread all your XP however you want among the characters. The person with 1 character is obviously going to have a more concentrated spread (i.e. only one character) but will also only have that one character. We give XP for people doing cool things, and this would also pretty much get rid of a lot of people's concerns (those who value XP anyway) when it comes to character death.

I can't tell you how many times "but all my XP, I had like 3000 XP on this character and now they're dead! What a waste!" Guess what, now it weas all YOUR XP and what you spent on the character has been funneled back to you and you cans pend it however you want. Make a new character, buff some of your other ones, I don't care.

Again: not perfect, but so much simpler, and directly rewarding to the PLAYER, and not the abstract concept of character they created to represent their power fantasies.