Game Theory Essay

Wow, its been 10 months. I’ve missed you guys. Lots of gaming between then and now. I wrote this too.

Games Want To Be Played

A mechanical analysis of reward systems in modern RPG’s

Stephen Bateman – August 5, 2015

Introduction

Games Want to be Played

Role-playing theory states that a good game tells you how it is intended to be played. A game encourages you to play it the way it was written to be played. It encourages a player to play it by offering that player rewards for ‘gaming’ the game. There are several types of rewards, and all games give different rewards, but most games use a system that they refer to as, ‘experience points’. Most games refer to experience points as a unit of measurement to quantify a player’s character’s growth throughout a particular game. Many table top role-playing games give them out for incredibly different reasons. Some do not give them out at all.

You can look at the way a particular game offers players rewards, and tell exactly how it is intended for you to play that game. The game rewards you for a specific style of play. By playing this specific way, outlined in the rulebooks players are rewarded with experience points – and other ‘in game’ rewards we’ll get to soon – for having played this intended way. The rewards entice the players to continue said behaviors in order to be rewarded again for them in the future. This allows characters to grow and be able to face a continued and ever growing threat against them. It is a revolving system where the game asks players to have a certain behavior, and rewards them for having this certain said behavior so that they can continue to gain rewards.

Below we will look at five incredibly different table top role-playing game systems from both major and indie publishers, and compare and contrast the ways they ask players to play their games, and ways they reward players for playing them in their intended ways.

Of course this is not the ‘end all, be all’ of table top role-playing essays. It is only intended to be my opinion of what I feel games strive for, and how they are written to each be played in a very specific way, encouraging players to play that way with their own independent reward systems.

Dungeons & Dragons

The Original

Dungeons and Dragons is the giant of table top role-playing games, even 40 years after its original publication. It was originally designed by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, and first published in 1974. Based on Arneson’s concepts of heroic adventurers delving deep beneath the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor and Gygax’s miniature war gaming ruleset, Chainmail, D&D’s publication is widely regarded as the start of modern table top gaming. We’ll take this classic game as our first case study.

 

Sticking with our main themes that, games want to be played, and that they, tell you how they want to be played, and reward you for playing them that way, we can see that games encourage a particular play style through the way they influence player’s behavior and decisions. Dungeons and Dragons has a particular play style at its core, and it rewards you for playing the game that it wants you to play.

Without a better term I’ll call it, hack and slash, emphasizing combat over other play styles. Its not surprising either, once you learn that the game’s history comes directly from that of table top miniature war games.

Let’s take a look at how Dungeons and Dragons influences its player’s behavior and encourages a ‘hack and slash’, kick in the door, shoot first and ask questions later style of table top role-playing.

Dungeons and Dragons offers two main kinds of rewards to players: experience points, and loot, treasure that the character can accumulate. Both are essential to the characters progression, even so much as to say that the character could not progress through the game if it were to only be rewarded with one or the other, and not both.

Experience points are used in the game to determine character level, the amount of power, skill, and precision the character possesses. They sit in a pool, accumulating over time and count up from zero at the beginning of level 1 and cap off around 355,000 points when the characters reach level 20, the pinnacle of character progression in the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons. They are not spent in the current edition – but have been used before as a magical currency in previous editions – but only kept to show the growing amount of experience that a character earns throughout play.

Loot, as I tend to refer to it, is the treasure the character amasses throughout its career in the game. It ranges from the mundane copper, silver, and gold coin that can be spent at in game merchant shoppes to purchase better arms and armor, to magical equipment, potions, gauntlets and the extreme and fantastical ancient artifact weapons, to only name a very brief sampling of objects to be accumulated.

A player would want his character to gain these things in order to contend with the wave of monsters – a term I use broadly to describe hostile enemies of the character – that will be thrown at him during the game.

We then have to examine our main theories again. Games want to be played and, they reward you for playing them the way they were intended to play. So we have to ask ourselves what action is necessary for players to take on in order for the game to allow them to gain the rewards discussed above.

The answer is simple: kill monsters. By killing monsters the players gain both experience points – which are determined uniquely per monster before the game and referenced in additional source material for the game – and loot from either the monster’s lair or from predetermined loot tables the game master uses for the particular creature type encountered.

As discussed earlier the experience points are used to make the character’s stats physically stronger and the loot is used to buy new equipment. Both of these things make the characters stronger and more capable of continuing the game. Which means being able to fight newer, stronger, and deadlier foes in order to get more experience and higher quality loot. This creates the revolving system that I referred to in the introduction.  

Characters are able to do other things. They have skills to allow them to track, search, perceive, disable, disarm, disguise themselves, act diplomatically, etc. But none of those things gains the character experience points. Only through killing monsters. 

Games want to be played and they tell us how they want to be played. They tell us that in Dungeons and Dragons players will be rewarded, not for using skills, or for clever ideas, but for killing monsters. They are rewarded with experience points and loot, and encouraged to delve deeper into the ever more perilous dark under bowels of the earth searching for a bigger monster.

Palladium Fantasy RPG

An Outdated System 

Palladium was first published in 1983 and written by Kevin Siembieda. In its core essence it is  comparable with that of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and even uses some of the same core ideas. The game was updated again to a second edition in 1994, and compared with Dungeons and Dragons’ current 5th edition rule set, it is in much need of a more current modernization of its core rules. However, that is a topic for another article. Palladium’s fantasy RPG branches off in several ways of course – from traditional Dungeons and Dragons – in order to create its own distinctive style of fantasy role-playing. One of the most intriguing ways that it does branch off from its predecessor is in the ways that it rewards players.

Palladium’s Fantasy RPG has one main method of offering rewards to players: experience points. Loot is offered in the game -consisting of coins, magic weapons, armor, etc., but it is not weaved into the mechanics in such a way that it becomes an integral part of character progression. Like Dungeons and Dragons the experience points are kept and not distributed and are used in the game as a record of determining character level and progress throughout the game.

The experience points in this ruleset begin at zero at the beginning of first level and peak at around 412,600 – depending on character class played -upon reaching level 15. Its important to note here that the experience table for each character class –a common name for a method of differentiating one character’s capabilities, archetypes, or careers from another character’s – is separate and unique from other character class’s experience tables. This is unlike the standard Dungeons and Dragons games, that uses a static experience table for all character classes. This means certain classes will ‘level’ sooner than other classes.

The interesting thing however, about Palladium is how it  rewards these experience points to a player. Like games mentioned above experience points are given to players for killing monster or overcoming serious threats to the character’s well being. But unlike Dungeons and Dragons, Palladium’s fantasy RPG rewards players for things such as coming up with clever, useful, interesting ideas or plans concerning the situation of and in the game- even if they’re futile! And for, wait for it…using their character’s skills in applicable ways. Each time the player rolls.

Players are rewarded much more experience for putting their characters into situations that may possibly be self sacrificing, or for situations in which the character’s main purpose is to help others, than they are for defeating  monsters. Players can earn anywhere from 400 -1000 points of experience for a major plan that saves many innocent people and 700 – 900 experience points for self sacrificing their characters for the wellbeing of others. This is to be compared with the reward of a maximum of 300 points for defeating a major, significant menace to the player’s character.

In Palladium’s system, gaining levels causes the character’s stats and abilities to increase and a character’s progression is never dependent on the loot that the character picks up in game. Loot is not given in the game as a mechanical reward, because it is assumed the players ingenuity, the characters abilities, combined with the luck of the dice rolls will be substantial enough to overcome the evil denizens that the game master throws at the players. Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, the monsters in Palladium’s fantasy game do not continually scale in order to compete with the gained might of the character. Monsters are much more static than in the games mentioned above. This implicitly states then that the need for players to have behaviors that are rewarded with loot are non existent in Palladium’s fantasy RPG.

We then again need to examine our main theories; Games want to be played and, they reward you for playing them the way they were intended to play. So we have to ask ourselves what behaviors are necessary for players to take on in order for the game to allow them to gain the rewards discussed above. The players must play their characters in ways that enable them to come up with quick, clever, ideas. They must put their characters into situations that are dangerous and selfless. And they must overcome adversity. And they must make use of their characters skills in all applicable situations.

Doing these things makes the characters stronger, and able to face bigger badder situations and monsters. Its not as strongly the revolving system as Dungeons and Dragons but Palladium’s fantasy RPG tells players that it wants them to use their heads. It wants to engage the players in situations that call for plans and self sacrifice. It wants players to focus more on a character’s skills, and a player’s ideas, than it want the focus to be on killing monsters, and gaining loot. This in my opinion can lead to games richer in emotional story telling, because it implicitly tells you to put characters into those sorts of situations.

Dread

A Game of Horror and Hope 

Dread is an apply titled indie-rpg developed by The Impossible Dream, and written by Epidiah Ravachol and Nathaniel Barmore. It was first published in 2005, and stands out as a peculiar entry in our discussion that games tell you how they want to be played by rewarding you for playing them in that particular style. Dread is not very comparable with either of the last two games reviewed and it stands out among many of its peers. Dread is a horror game with a very particular play style at its core, and it does reward your for playing it in its intended way, the way it wants you to play.

Let’s take a look at how the game influences player’s behavior and rewards them substantially for playing it in its intended way. Dread offers one main reward to players: an engaging story filled with the sense of Dread. There are no experience points, there is absolutely no loot to collect. There is only the inescapable impending doom that haunts each and every one of the players sitting at the table. At its core Dread achieves this with a very simple and very provocative way. The resolution mechanic is tied directly to the reward players receive. This resolution mechanic is a simple tower of wooden blocks. Most of you know it as another game, called Jenga.

So you may be asking yourself, “How does this encourage players to play as intended by rewarding them for playing in this manner?” The answer is, that the game through its resolution mechanic, naturally induces the sense of dread to the players each time they approach the wood tower and pull from it. To resolve almost any situation in the fiction of the game, Dread asks the player to physical pull from the tower and place the wood block on top of the tower. If the tower doesn’t fall, the player succeeds. If the tower falls, the player fails and the character immediately dies in the most horrific theme appropriate way possible. This mechanic entices the player to become emotionally involved with both the story in progress and the resolution of the game mechanics. If they play into this and approach the tower often, they will naturally be met with an overwhelming sense of Dread knowing that, looming not far from them at all is the knowledge that the tower will fall. Every time they approach the tower, the character’s life is on the line, and the player is reaping the rewards.

We then have to examine our main theories again. Games want to be played and, they reward you for playing them the way they were intended to play. So we have to ask ourselves what action is necessary for players to take on in order for the game to allow them to gain the rewards discussed above.

In Dread, they have to play the game and have to be willing to engage in a story of horror and suspense. By physically playing the game the players are emotionally invested and every time they approach the tower they are naturally rewarded with an overbearing sense, of Dread.

Dungeon World

Play to Find Out What Happens

Dungeon World, is a new bread of table top role-playing game. It was originally written by Adam Koebol and Sage LaTorra as a ‘hack’, using the Powered by the Apocalypse game system designed for Apocalypse World by D. Vincent Baker. It was published in 2012 after a very successful crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter. Perhaps you can already tell, without knowing anything else about the game, you should be able to tell that it stands out as different among other fantasy titles.

At its core is a fantasy role-playing game, not unlike Dungeons and Dragons -just look at the name of the game. It features character classes of standard fantasy tropes – fighters, paladins, thieves, rangers, wizards -just as does Dungeons and Dragons, and countless other table top games. But unlike the reward systems of these earlier games, Dungeon World is cut above the rest. Dungeon World’s main motto, if you will, is: Play to Find Out What Happens. The game from the very first few pages tells you what it expects of you. But how does it reward you for this? How does it reward a player, for playing it in its intended style? Lets find out…

Like Palladium’s fantasy RPG, Dungeon World has one main reward for players, experience points. Like most fantasy games loot and coin, what Dungeon World uses to describe its in game currency, are important. Especially as enticement for character’s -not players- motives. Loot and coin is not however essential to the progression of the character in the game. So we leave it out of this study.

Now Dungeon World has perhaps one of the most interesting ways for players to gain experience points. There reason that I say one the most interesting ways is because of there are such a myriad of ways to gain these experience points.

• Really? Tell me more.

Its very much tied to everything in game, from creating a character, to playing out that character’s motives, when players learn new things about the fiction, and even tied to the core game mechanics.Take character creation: When choosing an alignment for their character, the player will choose from a list of certain mottos that the alignment dictates. By playing this motto during the game session a player gains an experience point.

• Sweet!

During character creation, a player will choose four to five bonds for their character to have. These bonds symbolize background between either this player’s character and another player’s character, or between this character and a non player character. These bonds are written on the character sheet as things like the bard’s, ‘I sang songs of ______ long before we ever met in person’, or the paladin’s, ‘I respect the beliefs of ________ but I do hope that one day they learn the true way.’ When the player resolves one of these bonds in the fiction, during the game session, he gain an experience point.

At the end of the session the game master will ask the group a series of three questions: ‘did you learn anything new about the world?’, ‘did you defeat a great enemy or monster?’, ‘did you find a hoard of treasure?’ For each ‘yes’ that a player can answer with detail, they gain an experience point.

Last, but absolutely very least every time a player fails a roll of the dice, he gains an experience point.

• How do you gain experience for failing a dice roll?

We can speak further about the individual dice mechanics of game in further articles, but it is important to notice and mention that Dungeon World uses a dice system of mitigated failure. The standard system uses 2d6 plus a modifier dependent on the character’s strength, charisma, constitution, etc. -depending on the action the character is taking in the fiction – If the player rolls a 10+, it is an absolute success. If the player rolls a 7 – 9 then the player gets a success but with consequences in the fiction. On a 6 – the roll is a failure, the character becomes endangered or gets into trouble someway in the game’s fiction, and as a condolence to the player, the player gets an experience point.

• Thats pretty cool.

Going back to our main theory, and looking again over the way that Dungeon World rewards you, we can see its intended play style. Characters are supposed to stay in line with their intended alignments and are rewarded when bringing that into the fiction. Players are rewarded for coming up with inter-party relationships, binding the group at the table together in the fiction of their shared imagined space. It challenges players to learn about their shared world, defeat dangers, and discover treasure, and thats cool too! But, going back to the theory games are written in a way to reward players for playing them in their intended way, this begs the question: does Dungeon World want you to fail? My answer is explicitly YES! Because failure brings interesting unforeseen circumstances into the story every single time it happens. These circumstances manifest as new quests, and new challenges for the players to take  on, and thats pretty cool. – That IS cool!

Burning Wheel Gold

Fight For What You Believe 

The Burning Wheel is a fantasy table top RPG written and published independently by Luke Crane. It was published in 2002 in its original form and again later in August of 2011 it was published in its current Gold form. Burning Wheel is like nothing other I’ve experienced in table top gaming. I saved it for last in order to be contrasted against Dungeons and Dragons.

Burning Wheel will be the furthered evolutionary step of modern table top gaming.

Sticking with our main themes that, games want to be played, and that they, tell you how they want to be played, and reward you for playing them that way, we can see that games encourage a particular play style through the way they influence player’s behavior and decisions. Burning Wheel Gold has a particular play style at its core, and it rewards you for playing the game that it wants you to play.

Burning Wheel not only allows for a very narrativist play style, I feel that it encourages that play behavior from players around the table. Let’s take a look at how Burning Wheel Gold is able to elicit such a play style.

Like many table top role-playing games, Burning Wheel offers experience points as rewards for playing the game it wants you to play. It breaks down these experience points into two main categories, each does a different thing for player character progression.

First, we’ll talk about what the game calls advancement, which covers skill, ability, and attribute progression in the game. Burning Wheel Gold uses a d6 dice pool, and each character begins the game with an exponent –listed from 1 to 6 – for each one of his skills, abilities, and attributes. For each exponent, one through six, a player needs to have his character test, what the system calls rolling for a skill, attribute, or ability- so many particular times in so many particular cases, or situations.

To break that down into a little bit easier understanding, we’ll use a character’s Sword skill listed with and exponent of 4. Burning Wheel Gold lists that individuals with exponent four skills are thought to be averagely trained in that particular ability. Looking at the rules for advancement we see that the player needs to test the skill multiple times in order for that one particular skill to advance. Yes you read that right. Skills, attributes, and abilities to not advance arbitrarily one a character ‘levels up’ in Burning Wheel Gold. No, instead the game encourages you to use the skills that most interest you, and the more you use those particular skills, the more they themselves will advance naturally though play.

In order to advance that sword skill with and exponent of 4, a player would have to test in 4 routine situations, and then test in either 2 difficult situations, or 1 challenging situation. So yes, this does encourage the character to get himself into situation that cause difficult and challenging tests. Harder opponents to fight. But if we look at the vast array of skills available in the game we begin to realize how the game is asking us to create situations in play that allow for excellent and dramatic stories to unfold.

Not all skills are sword, bow, and axe. Most of the skills in the game are things like, persuasion, falsehood, ugly-truth, rhetoric, religious diatribe, and intimidation. I have never counted them myself but I do believe that the game features nearly 200 separate skills. Now if we take another example and this time use falsehood, the greatest skill of a manipulator, and we put it at a trained 4 exponent, the player here too has to test the skill in 4 routine situations, and either 2 difficult, or 1 challenging situation.

This encourages a rich play environment, where players go after the sorts of situations which will breed the types of tests needed for the advancement of the particular skill. Already have those 4 routine tests you need for falsehood? You’re so close to advancing it to exponent 5 -giving yourself 5 dice to roll then once it advances. Now as a player you need to put your character into a situation that calls for that one brilliant challenging falsehood test. Roll the dice, pass or fail, you advance. But when you fail, similarly to Dungeon World above, you have to face a consequence. This breeds excellent fiction at the table. This encourages players to grab situations by the throat and demand advancement from them.

Secondly, we’ll look at the meat of the game, the truest portion of the game’s intents. This is a reward system of experience points called, artha. Artha is a sanskrit word translating to a means of life, and artha is the lifeblood of Burning Wheel Gold. This is truly how the characters and the game come to life.

Artha is rewarded to players who play the game Burning Wheel wants you to play, and some further explanation is needed if you are to understand the importance of the artha system. Artha is rewarded for several reason, but we’ll look at the three main reasons the game rewards artha to players. Working towards and accomplishing Beliefs, using Instincts that bring your character trouble, and invoking Traits that move the story of the game in some previously unseen way. Quickly -as I could spend the entire length of another essay explaining all the ins and outs – a character chooses three beliefs at the beginning of the game, and has the ability to change them at the end of any given session of play. There a several ways to write these, but generally speaking they are always written in and concerning the specific situation of the friction at the table. These are a character’s ideals, and goals related to the situation and could be things like, “King Joffrey is the mad boy-king that dishonestly killed my father, his head on my stake is the only way justice can be served.”, or “My village is under plight of ravaging bandits, I will travel to town to hire Ronin to protect us.” When a player has his character work towards a belief during a session he gains a point of artha called a Fate point. When a player has his character fulfill a belief in game, he is rewarded with a stronger type of artha called a Persona point.

These Fate and Persona points can then be used -not just kept like experience points in other games- in order to effect the dice at the table and offer players boons in order to help the player continue to work towards fulfilling their beliefs. This is a perfect example of the revolving system that I referred to at the beginning of the article. Players are rewarded for fulfilling goals that they set forth at the beginning of the session, and when they do, they can use these rewards to yet again help themselves accomplish further goals in future sessions.

The next thing that earns a player artha is when a player uses a character’s instinct in order to get the player into trouble. These are action macros that explain to us what the character does by default, and allows us to change the rules of the game, for just a brief moment. The easiest example that I can come up with quickly is “I always draw my sword at the first sign of danger!” This is very useful for the player when the group is ambushed by brigands. He doesn’t have to use his first action in combat to draw his sword, its already drawn because of the instinct. But looking at the other side, if the character is at court in front of the Duke, trying to convince him to send troops to the eastern hinterlands when the character’s enemy walks in. The player can then choose to invoke his instinct. How would the story change when he draws his sword there in court? How will the Duke feel about this disrespect? This is yet again something that leads straight to story! Straight to new situations to resolve.

The final thing to look at would be a character’s traits. There are a few different types: Character Triats, Call-on Traits, and Dice Traits.  If a trait is used -similarly to the rules above- the change the story in a way previously unthought of, or unseen. Then the player is rewarded.

So here we can see how Burning Wheel wants us to play it. Burning Wheel wants us as characters to be deeply involved in the scenario and hand, and deeply involved in the progression, not only of our characters but of the story overall. The game rewards us for pursuing beliefs tied to the scenario, the game rewards us for pushing the story in new and unforeseen ways. The game is about story.

In Conclusion

Mine is not the Final Say

So I hope now you can all see my examples and understand what I meant to share with you from the beginning. Im not the first one to talk about this, Ron Edwards wrote similar essays some 15 years ago. I just mean to have an avenue to write down my thoughts and opinions as well. And I wanted to be able to look at several games and the ways the reward players.

Taking each game and contrast, I’ve spoken with several gamers in my community and have been told by them that, ‘Its really the Game Master that you have, and the group of people around the table, that make up the game.’

Sure, I say. Certainly you can play what ever game you like, and of course its possible to have fun planning any of these games, in multiple ways. Of course thats what gaming is for, to have fun with your friends around the table.

Taking Dungeons and Dragons again as an example – and please believe I think its an excellent system, Im not in anyway trying to downgrade the game, or make it seem like a bad game. You and your group of friends are more than able to play a game of court intrigue using the rules. It would probably work well. Sneak checks, and perception checks, and enough diplomacy checks to love off of for a year. And yes you and your friends a more than welcome to role play out discussions and wits with one another until you’re blue in the face. But after the session, once you’ve finished your ‘in character’ arguments, after you’ve rolled your d20 to convince the duke to send troop to the eastern hinterlands, how many experience points do you log down for your characters? How can characters progress in those sorts of scenarios?

On the contrast if we used Burning Wheel to play a story about a group of adventures that have to journey into the deepest depths of an ancient temple to learn the secrets of a forgotten deity, and bring back its ancient holy symbol, all the while fighting the masses of the undead that call the ‘dungeon’ home. Not only would our characters die, or become maimed very quickly, but the system would stagnate. Yes the characters could write beliefs about killing the undead, about protecting their friends, about finding the lost treasure, but the magic of the revolving system that makes up Burning Wheel would slow, nearly to a halt. If not so, I still think killing monsters is easier said that done. The game would work, but it would not support the ‘hack and slash’ kill ‘em all play style.

These are just the sort of questions that I wanted to pose to you, the reader in this essay. I only wanted to have evidence to back up a belief of my own, that Games Want to Be Played.

And they’ll tell you how.

Bibliography

The Credits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_Fantasy_Role-Playing_Game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_World

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_RPG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Wheel

Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford; Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition: Player’s Handbook; First Printing: August 2014; USA; Wizards of the Coast; Page 15.

Kevin Siembieda; Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game Second Edition; Fourth Printing: October 2000; USA; Palladium Books Inc.; Pages 31 and 336.

Epidiah Ravachol, Nat Barmore; Dread Standard; Eighth Printing 2005; USA; The Imposible Dream; Pages 6 and 12-17

Sage LaTorra, Adam Koebel; Dungeon World; First Editon Fourth Printing: 2013; USA; Sage Kobold Productions; Pages 17, 30, 76, 84, and 122.

Luke Crane; Burning Wheel Gold; Gold Edition Second Printing; 2011; USA; Luke Crane; Pages 19-20, 31-32, 42, and 63-64.

Art

All photographs by Stephen Bateman

All artwork taken from the game supplements mentions above and copyright per documents mentioned above.