RPG Design Patterns

Provide players with incentives that reward them for showing up to gaming sessions.

Also Known As E.P., X.P., EXP, Character Points, Development Points

Failure Reward, Idiom, Narrative Reward, Success Reward

The Attendance Reward pattern is a means of rewarding players for attending gaming sessions. The idea is to encourage player participation and help ensure everyone shows up. A game follows the Attendance Reward pattern if it does the following:

1. It gives a player a reward every session having some noticeable in-game benefit to the player without the player having to do anything to earn the reward other than participating.
2. The reward is a purely “meta-game” construct. That is, it isn’t any physical thing, such as money or food.
3. The reward is not something that must be expended to play at all. If it must be spent or play grinds to a halt or otherwise suffers greatly, then it is not actually a reward, but rather a mandatory refreshing of some vital resource needed for smooth game flow.

You should consider the Attendance Reward pattern in your game if your design goals include

1. Games that run more than a single session,
2. A desire to maintain a consistent group of players from session to session.

If you want to allow characters to be freely “handed off” to other players when their regular players are unable to attend gaming sessions, you probably have no need for an Attendance Reward.

Also, keep in mind that the ultimate reward for attendance is simply having fun. If your game is fun, players will attend. The more consistently fun it is, the more consistently it will draw players. If your game isn’t fun, no attendance reward will help. Even so, in games that are fun, attendance rewards can provide a little extra nudge.

As stated before, the Attendance Reward pattern primarily encourages players to diligently participate in a series of gaming sessions. However, it does this by having a real world event (player attendance) affect in-game facts. Having an in-game effect without a corresponding in-game cause can put off players valuing an accurate world simulation above other concerns.

It is worth mentioning that there is an ongoing debate among behaviorists and psychologists that rewards may actually be a long term disincentive to desired behaviors (read Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn). There is little argument that rewards produce short- term changes in behavior. However, the theory asserts that providing rewards for “good” or “appropriate” behaviors eventually transforms activities that start out “fun” into “work.” The rewards demonstrate the control the reward providers have over the reward recipients. This means the recipients are likely to lose interest in the activities, as they begin to view the tasks as obligations rather than as challenges. According to the theory, rewards that focus on individual actions are the most detrimental. This effect is noticeable in some seasoned gamers that tire of the “leveling up” and “random encountering” behaviors that Experience Point based games often encourage.

Alfie Kohn doesn’t give any realistic advice on what to do in lieu of rewards, though. He just seems to say that people should be allowed to do whatever interests them, and that they will then excel at those tasks. This all makes sense, of course, except that somebody has to fix the sewers when they break, and it is doubtful that there is an overabundance of people who are just dying to explore the enthralling possibilities of sewer repair.

The Attendance Reward pattern rewards player perseverance. In implementing this pattern, you should avoid diluting that strength with contradictory rules. For example, suppose we decide to provide players with an Attendance Reward in the form of “experience points.” Further, suppose we also allow “experience points” to be earned by other means in the game, such as slaying monsters. If we then prompt players to temporarily adopt the characters of absent players and allow those characters to gain “experience points” for slaying monsters, we have significantly lessened the incentive our reward provides in encouraging players to attend sessions. After all, the more monsters the character slays absent the owning player, the less important the actual Attendance Reward becomes.

A better option in this case would be to have separate rewards for attending sessions and for slaying monsters. That way, one reward cannot be directly substituted for another and players will have to attend gaming sessions if they want the corresponding reward.

Suppose we decide that we want our game to allow players to influence the outcome of conflicts that they deem especially important. To do this, we give each player a “Divine Intervention” resource. When a point of this resource is spent, they can declare the outcome of an upcoming conflict, circumventing the usual conflict resolution technique. The only way “Divine Intervention” is earned, though, is by attending a game session. Every session personally attended earns them 1 point.

Hero System 5th Edition awards “experience points” which can be spent in character development. Each session is generally worth at least 1 experience point, but players can earn more by being clever, role-playing well, solving a mystery, etc. The fact that this has a minimum value for every gaming session makes this (at least partially) an attendance reward.

Nobilis awards each player a “Dynasty Point” at the end of every game session, provided the players agree that they all had fun. So, this reward is an attendance reward that has the caveat that it is only awarded if all players enjoyed themselves. Dynasty Points can be converted into other important game resources.

The World of Darkness awards each player between 1 and 5 “experience points” at the end of each gaming session. The amount awarded is largely based on GM Fiat, but at least one point is awarded for “just being there.”