Earning stuff

[Arkandel]

TL;DR: This is a discussion trying to answer a simple question - should players have to earn their stuff?

Usually threads like this attempt to discuss the nuts and bolts of progression; that is whether there is a hard or soft cap on XP, how or if newbies can catch up to oldbies, even if system A is better than system B. I wanted to see if there's interest in debating the same issue from a more fundamental point of view - namely whether a character's power should be offered based on performance (in other words, if it has been 'earned') or if everyone should get the same opportunities... and, more importantly, why. What is the reasoning behind choosing to go with either design option.

When we discuss progression here it should mean both directly quantifiable traits - typically numbers on a +sheet which players can raise with XP - and stuff like ranks, positions or titles bestowed on individual characters.

Some games try to boost progression to the players they deem worthy based on whatever criteria their staff sees fit; activity levels, peer recognition (think +votes), plot participation or running, and so on. It's a carrot of sorts to incentivize what the MU* wants to see more of. Furthermore important positions are either earned in-game or they only become available to trusted individuals in whatever way the game has implemented 'earning' them.

Other games offer the same opportunities across the board. Think a universal flat rate of XPs per week, rostered positions given on a first-come first-served basis, or even implement a completely statless approach; all characters are (at least theoretically) equal and if some are more recognized than the rest it's because of how they are played and recognized by their peers.

What works best and in which cases? What are we hoping to see and what do we actually get, historically, given either approach?

Discuss.

[Apos]

@arkandel I believe it helps a game if the game is designed to reward the behavior that helps cultivate the kind of environment that the owners want to see.

Sure, it doesn't have to. Players can do the same kind of behavior regardless. But I think it makes for a much more consistent buy in, and this is important because negative experience tend to greatly outweigh positive ones for players.

[Lithium]

I think it depends on the game system and what stuff /is/.

Stuff is a lot of things, sometimes it's represented with xp spends, sometimes it's represented with plots and notes, etc.

I'm of the opinion that stuff /earned/ has more value... but being able to spend xp for stuff can also be nice for those who don't have the time to run multiple plots but still want to have stuff.

[Arkandel]

@lithium said in Earning stuff:

I'm of the opinion that stuff /earned/ has more value... but being able to spend xp for stuff can also be nice for those who don't have the time to run multiple plots but still want to have stuff.

Although it's probably not debatable that earned stuff is more valuable, requiring it to be earned by both the person who can log on every day for hours and the one who plays twice a week introduces the same kind of barrier even if there are no XP involved.

For instance should you have to earn playing Batman? Should Batman go to a very active, great player as opposed to a somewhat active good one? We treat the answer as obvious sometimes but I think it's still going to be useful to discuss why since there are sideeffects; for instance a super involved character of this magnitude could have a cascading effect on the game's plotlines. Assuming he doesn't go to a bad player, should he be available on a first-come basis instead?

Activity tends to also be the ultimate player resource, perhaps even more so than XP, positions or in some cases even writing skill. Characters who get to be on the grid doing things more often tend to be more successful - powerful, influential, known - than those who are less active. How does this fact (if y'all agree it's the case, and feel free to debate otherwise) affect players having to earn things?

[magee101]

@arkandel when it comes to items outside of CG i think earning things thru rp is a good rhing. It helps promote an rp rich environment amd helps keep out folks that just want to make badass characters without rping

[mysticalpixel]

I think it ultimately comes down to what is fun, or not. Earning some shiny toy in a PRP is fun. Slogging through a half dozen scenes of "I am learning how to speak Spanish" because that's the requirement to increase a stat or something is (often, but not always!) a lot less fun.
As I only play WOD, I can only speak from that perspective. So, for me, being able to spend XP, whatever way it's earned, on skills and attributes is ideal. I'll usually be RPing this increase leading up to it anyway, such as pposing my charaacter joining a scene in their jogging gear if I'm working toward an Athletics raise, or perhaps getting caught with a 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' book before a Manipulation raise, but for the most part, that sort of thing is easily done off-screen and can be reflected through XP spends and a few poses.
But things which are gained in play- A title bestowed for acts of bravery, a sword forged from your blood sweat and tears during an epic quest, the a favor owed to you by a local authority figure...These should /generally/, in my opinion, be stuff that doesn't cost XP. The act of doing the plots and earning it should be enough. I've often found myself, as an ST, in the position of wanting to give a player something other than what they had 'officially' requested, based on the RP and the choices they'd made in a plot, but because they didn't have the XP, it wasn't something that I could do. Obviously there should be limits to this. Grinding for the shiny horde is lame. Gaining things appropriate to the story you're telling with your character is awesome.

[surreality]

It depends entirely on how you define 'benefits'.

Is being able to participate in events, or have scenes run for a specific need (by staff, by fellow players, by either) a benefit? What about participating in non-GM'd RP? (A game designed more along the lines of online tabletop may not allow this, or allow this to 'count' for anything. Similarly, a game that is heavily coded may not allow completely realistic and reasonable events to unfold if there's no code to support it.)

I don't consider the above 'benefits'; I consider the ability to tell stories with others -- as GM, without a GM amongst players with understood parameters (adherence to policy and the system and the game reality of the setting), or GMed by either staff or players as either is willing or able -- the point of being somewhere in the first place.

If I have to jump through extraordinary hoops to accomplish these things, I wouldn't play there. Nor would I set up a game to run in this way, because that would just be creating more bureaucrazy and overhead that I have to maintain and support as a staffer. I'm not opposed to simple requirements: putting in a basic +request, or potentially using a simple system of resource allocation that prevents a small handful of people from overwhelming the resources of the game to provide for all players (staff time, GM time, etc.).

When it comes to individual character advancement, I am very biased in favor of 'earned', to the extent that the 'just handed out' portion I've considered implementing remains consistent and has a 'catch up' metric to not benefit early adopters to the detriment of new arrivals, but it's such a small amount it's fairly inconsequential. Key to this is providing a wide variety of means to earn XP/CP/points/whatever you're working with. This is because different players have different strengths, and ultimately I believe in rewarding the player's contribution to the game (as a community) as much as anything any given character has learned or accomplished.

This means you can do what Apos describes quite well: reward the behavior you want to encourage, whatever those behaviors may be. It may be volunteering to help newbies at certain times, it may be running plots, it may be creating on-grid businesses, it may be creating new items in character, writing up specs for items/magic/rosters/what-have-you for the game on the whole to benefit from out of character, going for the compromise rather than the kill, taking a loss... the list is practically endless. You can cap this if you need to, but I'm not personally inclined to low or universal caps for a variety of reasons.

[Arkandel]

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

When it comes to individual character advancement, I am very biased in favor of 'earned', to the extent that the 'just handed out' portion I've considered implementing remains consistent and has a 'catch up' metric to not benefit early adopters to the detriment of new arrivals

I have two caveats about what you're saying sur. Let me break those down:

This is because different players have different strengths, and ultimately I believe in rewarding the player's contribution to the game (as a community) as much as anything any given character has learned or accomplished.

This is really important because you've seen how we all value different playstyles here on MSB even when it's a theoretical thought exercise and not a matter of dictating policy; anything from posed tense or length, playing to win or not, sharing or hogging the spotlight, PrPs versus grid play... it would be very easy for staff (and thus systems) to bypass players whose contributions are using a different vector than expected.

To give an example consider the stereotypical "quest-giver" type of high end noble. It's a pretty useful archetype - you're in a position to delegate responsibilities and thus generate RP for others, but depending on how that's measurable (or if) it can slip under the radar since you're facilitating rather than directly determining the outcome of RP. The party you just inspired to go investigate the attack at that farm got a sweet PrP out of it and some extra XP, but maybe your efforts weren't recognized the same way.

Earning things depends on observable contributions.

This means you can do what Apos describes quite well: reward the behavior you want to encourage, whatever those behaviors may be. It may be volunteering to help newbies at certain times, it may be running plots, it may be creating on-grid businesses, it may be creating new items in character, writing up specs for items/magic/rosters/what-have-you for the game on the whole to benefit from out of character, going for the compromise rather than the kill, taking a loss... the list is practically endless.

Again I agree, but again I'll present a counterpoint - in this case that what staff wants to incentivize isn't necessarily what they are actually doing.

For instance +vote based systems are supposed to reward socialization by crowd-sourcing the act... yet they have been known to go awry either because players mishandled them ('YOU get a vote, and YOU get a vote... everyone gets a vote!') or the carrot itself distorts the nature of interactions on the grid by creating gigantic scenes people join to try and milk votes. Both HM and Arx have suffered from the same issue, at least for those who prefer smaller gatherings, since they can force players to choose between comfort and advancement.

In other words even if you go in with the purest motives to reward what you want to encourage, it doesn't mean you don't end up inadvertently causing a different, possibly unrelated or even counterproductive effect.

[faraday]

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

I don't consider the above 'benefits'; I consider the ability to tell stories with others -- as GM, without a GM amongst players with understood parameters (adherence to policy and the system and the game reality of the setting), or GMed by either staff or players as either is willing or able -- the point of being somewhere in the first place.

That's how I feel as well. I don't want plots or ranks or skills to be behind a pay-wall; I just want a place where people (including myself) can tell stories.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

This means you can do what Apos describes quite well: reward the behavior you want to encourage, whatever those behaviors may be.

The behavior I want to see is players who don't need to be bribed to play the game. That's why my games have extremely minimal incentives.

Funny enough - even with those extremely minimal incentives (like getting "kills" in battle or medals for valor in missions or even meaningless cookies for scene participation), people still manage to gripe about "it's not fair - he got more than me". That sort of behavior really does not incentivize me to create more OOC incentives.

[magee101]

@faraday lol.

For me as a player one of the main reason I don't play your system is that it has very little in the way of mechanical progression. I am huge into RP and character developement but I still want to play a game and other system (such as tabletops) have much more progression for me to sink my teeth into. I also use a system's mechanics to help define my character and FS3 is sort of the opposite way around and that is difficult for me to do. Still find it LOL worthy that people thunk people got more or less than anyone else in a FS game tho

[faraday]

@magee101 That's fine. Everybody's different.

I don't play MMOs because I utterly despise the forced mechanical progression of having to start at level 1 and grind rats or chickens or whatever dumb thing just to get a moderately competent character. And forget about ever trying to catch up to my friends, who have been playing longer. Even with the bonus rested XP or whatever, it's the Dino Effect on a massive scale. I hate it.

I play Minecraft with my kids, but I don't particularly enjoy it because building/creating feels utterly pointless to me.

That doesn't mean either is bad though, as millions of players who do play those games illustrate. It just means people look for different things in their games.

[Apos]

I kinda hate weighing in at length on this because it's easy for people to be rude and insult the work someone has put into a system by denigrating it. So I want to emphasize that while people can subjectively prefer one thing, I think there needs to be a lot of courtesy while expressing any kind of value judgments.

Like I don't think there is anything at all wrong with going with a very minimalist, RP purist approach with a laser focus on story, and feeling that anything besides that is a distraction. I disagree with it, but I don't think it's wrong, just different.

I feel that I can try to accommodate things I personally have no interest in without it disrupting or devaluing the things I do enjoy, but someone that doesn't want to do that is not wrong, they should not feel obligated to try to do that.

[magee101]

@faraday For sure. I dont think FS is a bad system, I think it does what it does very well and if all else provides a good launching point for anyone that wants to start a MU but cannot afdord for custom code. They can get use FS3 to get it started and either mod it or replace it down the road.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in Earning stuff:

And forget about ever trying to catch up to my friends, who have been playing longer. Even with the bonus rested XP or whatever, it's the Dino Effect on a massive scale. I hate it.

I honestly feel the rat race (har har) in regards to leveling is an artifact MMOs are simply copying over from one to the next any more or a money grab to prolong subscriptions. There's no point in it. In the majority of games there the progression from 1 to $MAX_LEVEL doesn't count anyway since gameplay (be that raiding, PvP or whatever else) is aimed for the max. For example any new storylines WoW introduces is only available for 110 (the current maximum) so leveling an alt there is, at best, a timesink.

However to truly catch up on the power curve all that matters is gear. To avoid the dino effect you mention WoW has periodic catching up events - basically when they have a big patch every few months to introduce fresh, harder content they also open a new quest nexus or vendors who hand out cheap gear just high enough to handle that content enough to farm better stuff.

That doesn't mean either is bad though, as millions of players who do play those games illustrate. It just means people look for different things in their games.

Yeah, if one kind of game was what everyone enjoyed then by now we'd have figured out what it is, and that's all we'd be making.

[magee101]

@arkandel MMOs hedge on addictive personalities and addictive personalities like simple easily repeatable tasks for shinies. Its eude but its true. There are a few MMOs that have tried to step away from conviential MMO mehcanics and they always either sink or barely stay afloat. Tbh the reason I dont MMO is the lack of my ability to become immersed in a world that is fetch quests and pure nonsense filler txt dialogue popups for quest interaction. Destiny is more what I would like in an MMO, but what I am really hoping is that CP2077 shows us what real interactive multiplayer story games looks like.

[faraday]

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

However to truly catch up on the power curve all that matters is gear. To avoid the dino effect you mention WoW has periodic catching up events - basically when they have a big patch every few months to introduce fresh, harder content they also open a new quest nexus or vendors who hand out cheap gear just high enough to handle that content enough to farm better stuff.

In theory maybe. In practice, when I played, I was perpetually behind everyone else because they were hard-core and I was casual. The gear and/or level differential effectively made it impossible to play with my friends (at least - unless I wanted to be always dying in the first five minutes), and then it was like: what's the point? If I want to do something solo I'll go play playstation.

I don't bring this up to harp on MMOs, because that's not really what we're talking about here. My point is just that advancement/earning systems all have the same potential pitfalls: the Dino Effect, OOC jealousy, alienating casual or disconnected players (as some were talking about on the other gamification thread), and other unintended consequences. I'm not saying any game is wrong for using these things. Like @Apos said, everybody has to make their own value judgements as to the pros-cons, and clearly there are players who just won't play without some sort of carrot. I've just made the decision that the cons dramatically outweigh the pros from my perspective.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in Earning stuff:

In theory maybe. In practice, when I played, I was perpetually behind everyone else because they were hard-core and I was casual.

Sure, and that same effect (being unable to play with your friends as a peer) is in place for MUSHes as well. In fact it's more pronounced there since socialization is pretty much the only way to enjoy the game - there's no solo content! That's why I said earlier activity is the ultimate player resource.

My point is just that advancement/earning systems all have the same potential pitfalls: the Dino Effect, OOC jealousy, alienating casual or disconnected players (as some were talking about on the other gamification thread), and other unintended consequences.

Right. Mine is that there even on games designed around these pitfalls - such as FS - you noted yourself people still find a way to compare themselves to each other and complain about it. I can't say if it's human nature or a cultural norm cultivated over all the other games they're playing but it's there. For example we've seen how even non-systemic elements such as who's hanging out with whom ('those guys are always locked up in a room together, they must be TSing!') are viewed enviously.

I wonder though how you feel about the observation made earlier in this thread - that what's earned is valued more. Do you find from your point of view as staff on a FS game that it's true? Do players seem to prize their achievements less or do they make up/use metrics (such as kills) they can feel proud of? Are they missing out?

[faraday]

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

That's why I said earlier activity is the ultimate player resource.

But without level or gear differentials, the playing field is a lot more even. If Bob and Sally are both online and want to do an adventure - they can just make up a scene that involves them both.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

you noted yourself people still find a way to compare themselves to each other and complain about it.

Yes, some amount of this is unavoidable but it's decidedly less pronounced on the games that go out of their way to avoid it. Besides my own games, I've seen this on the statless/consent games I've played on.

I wonder though how you feel about the observation made earlier in this thread - that what's earned is valued more.

That's kind of hard for me to gauge honestly. Some folks complain about the slow XP progression, but there are also a good many folks who never even bother to spend their XP because chargen let them make a character they're happy with. There are people who complain that there's no rank ladder to climb, but there are also people who say how refreshing it is that everybody's on a level playing field and there are no FC bottlenecks or PCs lording their IC position over others. For those who do play and enjoy it, the achievements are the stories they get to partake in ("remember the time when we...") not the points they got out of it.

I don't really have a better answer than 'to each their own', I guess.

Side note - it's FS3 not FS. Faraday's Simple Skill System.

[magee101]

@faraday allow us to further shorten your already shortned acronym XD. I actually thought it was FS3 as Faraday's System V3

[surreality]

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

Earning things depends on observable contributions.

And the list of examples is a list of those things for exactly this reason.

I can't speak for the hypothetical game designer that only wants to see novellas of purple prose in 20+ person scenes in which someone must strictly adhere to pose order or be thrown in the penalty box, because I'm not that game designer. I can't speak for the hypothetical game designer who wants to use +vote systems, or the hypothetical game designer that feels only running plots and events is worthy of reward of some kind, because I'm not them, either.

You could hypothetically decide that you're going to hand 1XP out every time someone complimented staff, or insults a rival game, or TSes a staffer or staff favorite. You could decide you're going to give out IC status based on the number of notches on someone's virtual bedpost, or how many rooms they include in their build down to every bathroom and broom closet. You could dock XP every time someone complains, or has to leave an event before it is officially over because they have to go to work and the scene ran long. If that's how hypothetical you wanna roll, you do you -- and you'll see precisely how well those things work.

Ultimately, I place 'earned' above 'you get it just for being there and whatever you do or don't do doesn't make much if any difference' -- whether this is because some people do all the work and everybody gets the same amount in catchup to keep pace, or advancement is very slow or nil -- because for many, that advancement is part of the story. 'Everybody gets everything' doesn't accomplish this as it requires no story or action for this evolution to occur. 'Nobody gets enough to evolve through advancement' can hamstring things a bit too much and can readily get in the way of these story arcs. How people can assign these benefits and under which circumstances is relevant, but also somewhat outside the scope of this discussion.