Rewarding Player Behavior in Mechanics

Ironically, after my last post about rewarding good roleplaying, I noticed here and there other forms of "positive reinforcement" psychology being applied to role playing. These discussions brought, to the forefront of my thoughts, the necessity of rewarding your players for doing the things you want them to do.

This is often called a "reward cycle", and most often is applied to the in game experience or treasure players get to progress their characters in power. But one thing that I haven't thought enough about is how to reward the players by playing the game "well". I've created an "aces" system that acts much like the standard fate point, benny, or cypher XP. This is a good mechanic, as it rewards players that make the story more interesting by highlighting their failures and later letting them emphasize their awesomeness.

But there are little things we can do to the core mechanics to get the most "fun" out of each little action the players take. First, I decided to take out "disadvantage". Advantage rewards the players, but disadvantage only serves as a take-that punishment. Instead, I will choose to increase the difficulty ratings, which players are already expecting. This both simplifies my rule set and removes an unnecessary deterrent.

Second, we award advantage to players for good role playing and good combat tactics, but what about good exploration? First, what is good exploration? Is it finding all of the traps? Uncovering the whole map? Is it discovering all of the clues within a messy, chaotic scene? While story elements can always reward players for exploring, I want something more mechanically driven. So, we should make sure to give advantage to those players who do something specific: run their hands along the walls looking for switches, look under the rug for a trap door, or break all of the jars to see what's inside.

But, some might ask, if the players do these things specifically, why not just automatically give them what they're searching for? Because, I say, for the same reason we do not automatically give players who role play well an automatic success. Player skills should have an effect, but not be the only factor in play. Even if you are looking directly at something, your ability to perceive what is around you can affect whether or not you realize what you're looking at (i.e. a perception or search skill). Anyone who's been locked up in a mystery room knows how true this is!

Another reason is simply that in playing role playing games, we play to find out what happens. This means rolling the dice and letting fate decide, no matter how close or obvious the players think something is. It also gives opportunity for "exploration" type characters, such as investigators or scouts, who specialize in exploration type scenes. In this way, you don't also have to make the rogue character a DPS fighter.

Unfortunately, another simple thing you can do is use a "roll over" system and go big numbers. While obvious, I'm going to take the hit on this one and keep with my inverse dice mechanics. I balance this with an increased critical hit rate due to the higher chances of rolling a "1". Hopefully this and all of my other efforts offset the unfortunate setback of low success numbers.

What are some other simple rewards players get mechanical rewards for playing a game the way it's designers intended? What other mechanical bonuses have you seen in games? Remember, we want to avoid the complexity of +2 +2 +2 +2, but still give players little boosts here and their so they're not always counting on the next level up for a confidence boost.