I don't care what GMs say about rewards.

Welcome to a new series I’ll be sure to abandon in two months given how often I actually post on this site. Kidding! I actually kinda like the idea of this series (henceforth tagged as GM Says), and a lot of my posts could be boiled down into posts along these lines. And because I’m boiling a lot of these more vague post ideas into this particular, more central theme, I have to give you a spoiler as to what most essays will have in common.

The people who run our games (who we dearly appreciate) are actually furthest removed from many of its best components.

The snarky followup to this premise (as it will also be repeated through most, if not all of these) is the unreliability of GMs in soliciting feedback, tips, and tricks for improving games both on the whole and according to a table’s specific needs and wants.

But why run through that process here when I could just do it with specifics people could actually attack or endorse? Let’s talk about rewards in tabletop rpgs.

First off, I consider rewards to have a reasonably broad potential set of applications that are nevertheless united by a common property: assets or abilities which benefit the state or potential state of the players’ capacity to interact with the world around them. Obviously, this covers magic items, archers, supplicants, spells, spaceships, that one of a kind rocket launcher, titles, castles, baronies, exclusive access, etc. Rewards span all modes of play, and many types of rewards exist for each mode of play.

Why do we give rewards out to begin with? I could’ve asked why we need to give out rewards, but that’s a red herring GMs and even some designers fall for; practically nothing in rpgs is done out of necessity. Do you need dice? Nope, you could flip a coin. All action resolution is done by coin toss now. Wait, you don’t even need a by-chance action resolution method at all! You can just compare higher stats. Do you even need stats? You can-

You get the idea, we don’t engage in this silly “need” thing. Does the mechanic add value to the game? Is it worth the effort to implement? Is it worth putting alongside a conflicting system, or booting that other system out? We work with incentives! Incentives for players to push on instead of taking a rest. Incentives for players to take an active role in the campaign. Incentives for players to improvise their actions rather than just use everything on their character sheet.

Rewards can incentivize all of the above and more. Rewards help remind us why we’re playing this game, and not videogames when we’re going through an utterly predictable set of scenarios. That’s our worst case scenario. “Well we could be playing divinity, but I couldn’t get this cool sword or spell in divinity, so this is cool. Oh neat, this knight pledged loyalty to me, that’d have to be scripted in skyrim. Oh nice, I got a castle. I can’t usually get those in a game where I play a single character.” These are band-aids for games which don’t themselves offer anything which wouldn’t be served better than videogames, with the sole (but powerful) exception of interacting with your friends around a table or on a call.

In good games, these rewards take on a completely different meaning. They’re not just novel (if they even manage such a lofty goal in bad games), they become accelerants. The sword turns you into a monster in combat; and it becomes a more viable method of resolving encounters (and minimizes losses when it’s not). The knight who pledged loyalty to you can act as your lieutenant in your domain, and as a backup character when yours dies. Plus, they can take additional hits in combat, and potentially give you access to mechanics you’d need to switch characters in order to access. The castle allows you to begin (or even better, simply advance) the domain game, where you begin changing the map of the campaign.

Rewards exist for every mode of play your game supports. These rewards can function off of existing mechanical features (improving to hit chance, boosting your results when hunting), use existing features as mechanical hooks (trading health for damage, improving military might through your typical spells), or introduce new modes of play altogether (wizard towers letting you research spells, or guild ownership introducing new faction play variants.

These rewards can span very grand and incredible gradients depending on the number of mechanical hooks. In Lords of Brackas, we’ll tackle magic users, and the stuff they can get. Magic users can first off acquire material components, which inflate their chances of successfully using magic, and (provided they did their homework) can inflate the general effectiveness of it. One level up from that, they can also be used to produce additional or unique effects according to specific rewarded components. They can acquire formulae which alter or produce specific materials as part of magic. Casting a transmutation spell to control water could instead turn the water into a hydrogen dominant gas, perhaps to set it on fire or lift a balloon higher. Scrolls and other inscriptions can of course provide mages a larger library of magic to access or provide to retainers (like apprentices). Retainers themselves are a reward. Additional magical power or a bodyguard are what every enterprising archmage needs. What if your mage dies? The apprentice becoming your new player character is just the excuse you need to ensure all of the components, spells, scrolls, wands and staves, towers, etc you built up as you mage didn’t go to waste. Ah yes, towers and similar strongholds for magic users. They let you summon magical beings, research spells of your own, provide enchantments to your armies and use battle magic, etc etc. You get the idea.

Point being, I’m developing a game in which players can chase, acquire, and multiply rewards for their achievements every single session. They’re so embedded into the game, that they’re not all up to the purview of the Historian to dole out. Lots of these are just there for the players to carve out once they take the right actions, and the Historian can include extras of those rewards for shopping or loot.

Why did I do this?

I did this because rewards are part of playing a game. They tickle parts of our brain so I can interpret the activity in front of me as being “fun”, and help distinguish the activity in front of me as worthwhile in comparison to some other activity which would normally fill my “fun” slot. Titanfall is fun, but there are very few titans and weapons and weapon mods available that hold my interest, and I unlocked them all in about 6 months. The gameplay loop maintains my interest because it’s also fun, but titanfall drops out of play for a few months when I tackle another game that provides me with rewards. Those games are tickling the part of my brain which says “good job, you accomplished something, here’s a cookie.”

What I will at all costs prevent is some complete jackass who is present (as a baseline) to facilitate and manage the shenanigans and solutions of my players of my game trying to keep rewards away from the players as a cheap trick to maintain interest in the campaign. It’s not happening. My players are not your opportunity for a sociology experiment. A GM who thinks they’re testing “how much can I reduce the loot pool/markers of progress before the game isn’t fun” doesn’t actually have the ability to run that test. More likely than not, they’re actually testing “how heavily can I lean on the fun of being around a table with your friends” and “how shitty do I have to make the game before someone gets disagreeable enough to take the reins”, or perhaps “How willing are my players to embrace popcorn fantasy in lieu of a better game”.

I can give you the answer to all of those questions here, to sate your curiosity and keep you from ruining a good thing. The unfortunate answer to all is; quite a bit. You can screw up incentive/reward, turn the game into a passive popcorn engagement, and make the game pretty bad overall before your friends take you aside and say “Let’s do something else.” More likely is they’ll put up with the campaign as it goes, hoping it ends sooner rather than later. You’ll notice them get bored, sit back with their arms crossed, pay attention to their phone to the exclusion of the table, and be non-participatory.

It’s theoretically risky for me to tell you this, given you might decide to try it anyway. Lucky me, I have a game of my own, which is so suffused with the incentive/reward structure, you’d have very little game left over if you tried to get rid of all of it. Not only that, you’d have less players! I don’t plan on sourcing my playerbase from the existing RPG market. It’s infected with competing egregores and memes focused on removing anything not identifiable as one of their own. I’m not even touching whether that already fractured and (frankly insane) market is practical to advertise to from a business perspective. No, I’m sourcing players from video games! I’m handing them a product that feeds them all of the incentive reward structures of video games. I assume from the get go the Historian of my game is a wonderful opportunity to expand the design of my game, keep the game distinct from being a board game, facilitate improvisation, and manage complexity. I also assume the Historian can screw that up unless I build safeguards into the system, and influence the social setting of the table through the design and maybe even direct contact.

TL;DR: I love game masters, I appreciate them, and I want them to have great campaigns they can reminisce over in which they made fond memories with friends around the table. But game masters are not designers, and too many campaigns are hobbled or outright ruined by GMs venturing where they shouldn’t. The moment they cross the line to carelessly editing basic functions of games, they become a problem for the players to suffer through, and a problem for me, the designer to solve.

The question of whether players get rewards in games about kingdoms, spaceships, or killing monsters which include said rewards need to be walled off with a complement of generous barbed wire and TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT signs.