RPG Design Patterns

Decouple player success from character success.

Not Applicable

Attendance Reward, Idiom, Narrative Reward, Success Reward

The Failure Reward pattern awards players for character failure, whatever “failure” means within a game’s context. A game follows the Failure Reward pattern if all of the following apply:

1. Character actions or goals may succeed or fail.
2. The chances of character success or failure can be influenced by player decisions.
3. A reward is given to the player if his character fails to achieve a goal or perform an action, but that same reward is withheld if he succeeds in that endeavor. (Note that a different reward may be given if the character succeeds without violating this pattern. In that case, the Success Reward pattern is also being used.)

A Failure Reward gives players a reason to want their characters to “lose.” For many gamers, this is a totally alien concept. After all, what is the point of striving to lose? The answer can only be understood after one first understands that player success and character success need not be tied together. A player is not a character and a character is not a player. One is a real person; the other is a fictional construct. The character is merely a tool by which a player interacts with a fictional world. In a game whose goal is to attain some victory or win condition by means of manipulating a character in a game world, then character success and player success are, usually, tied together. However, in a game whose goal is primarily to create interesting stories, the player goal (creating an interesting story) is independent of his character’s goal (becoming the victor in some conflict).

Stories are enhanced by character failure at some level. Any decent book on fiction writing will tell you that a good story requires a conflict between antagonists and protagonists that are evenly matched. That is, a story has to have some central contest between the villains (antagonist) and heroes (protagonist) and it must be evident that both sides of the conflict have a chance at winning. (See Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith, Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver, The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing by Evan Marshall, and How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey.)

Most good stories give the villains the upper-hand at first, allowing the heroes only an apparently slim chance of victory. To prove the worthiness of the villains, the heroes must do their utmost to attain their goals and they must fail in the attempt. (If the heroes attain victory on their first attempt, then the villains are easily viewed as unworthy opponents and the story suffers greatly.) One common pattern in fiction writing is to have the heroes try and fail twice. Then, they try one final time where the antagonists maneuver them into a situation that is apparently hopeless. But, through some clever trick or insight of the heroes, they defeat the villains in the story’s climax. The rising tension and buildup to the climax hinges on the initial failure of the heroes. So, if you want to create a game that generates interesting stories, you are best served by designing a system where players can rationally decide to have their characters fail at important times.

Another important use of Failure Rewards is as a game balancing mechanism. Small rewards can be given to characters that lose conflicts so that those characters that consistently lose can be strengthened until they finally start winning.

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

1. A desire to disassociate player success from character success (in other words, you want for players to strive to have their characters “fail” at times).
2. You are not averse to including a mechanical means of gauging the value of character success versus the value of character failure.

It would be possible to design a game where players always strive for character failure. However, the Failure Reward pattern is most often used in conjunction with the Success Reward pattern. So, if you incorporate Failure Rewards into your game, you should strongly consider using other reward systems as well.

A game incorporating Failure Rewards decouples character success from player success. In such a system, players will tend to do what is best for them, regardless of whether it is good for their characters.

A game can give players real choice in their decisions to have their characters win or lose by combining Failure Rewards with Success Rewards. To do this, the rewards for character failure must, at times, be sufficiently compelling for players to take that option. To ensure it is a real choice, the rewards for character success and the rewards for character failure should differ in some important way.

Do not think that a combination of Success and Failure Rewards results in a drab system where character success and failure are meaningless. On the contrary, a well thought-out system of Success and Failure Rewards can have a significant positive impact on a game’s overall design. All it means is that players will try to have their characters win sometimes and lose at others. To be effective, there must be real differences between the rewards given for character success and those given for failure.

If a Failure Reward increases a character’s long-term chances of success in future conflicts, then it makes that character more mechanically potent. As long as these rewards are greater for failure than for success, they act as balancing mechanisms that slowly build the capabilities of weak characters until they are competitive with strong ones. This is an extremely powerful technique that can be used to make a game design self-balancing.

If a Failure Reward is used in conjunction with a Success Reward, it is important to differentiate the rewards for character success and failure. The differentiation can be qualitative, quantitative, or both. If the same kind of reward is given for both, then a distinction must be made as to the quantity of reward you are providing at various points throughout the game. So, you may deem it appropriate to reward character success but not failure at times and the reverse at others. If your rewards are both qualitatively and quantitatively identical, then you are actually rewarding all actions, whether they succeed or not. Now, if you’re trying to stimulate lots of activity in your game without regard to success or failure, there’s nothing wrong with rewarding action in itself. However, doing so does not require any sort of artificial division between Success and Failure rewards.

If your game differentiates the rewards for character success and failure in a purely quantitative way by varying the amount of rewards at different times, then you are not really giving players a choice about whether to have their characters succeed or fail. When rewards for two different options are qualitatively the same and only vary by amount, the logical choice is for players to always go for the biggest reward. If you are designing a competitive game where the goal is for players to attain some “win” condition over other players, then this may be appropriate. If not, then you should make sure your rewards for success and failure have important qualitative differences. One such possibility is to trade off character success “now” for character success “later.”

If you do not also include the Success Reward pattern in your game, then your design will encourage players to always seek character failure. While such a game is no doubt possible, it may be depressing or frustrating to play. (Either that, or downright hilarious if the goal is to achieve some sort of comedic outcome.) Of course, if that’s what you’re shooting for, a pure Failure Reward system might be just the ticket.

Let’s design a reward system for a game that tries to encourage the idea that good stories often have characters fail twice in their attempts to win some overarching conflict and succeed gloriously on their final attempt. To do this, we’ll give each player a “Plot Points” resource. Die rolls in our game will not directly determine character success, but rather determine which players are allowed to narrate the outcome of a conflict. How a player narrates an outcome, whether it results in his character succeeding or failing, is up to him. At the beginning of play, we give all players 5 “Plot Points.” Before any conflict, all players gain one more “Plot Point” to add to their pool. To keep things simple, on all conflicts we’ll have any player with a character involved in the conflict roll a number of d6 equal the number of “Plot Points” they spend. Any values of 4 or more count as a “pip” and the player with the highest number of “pips” wins the right to narrate the conflict’s outcome. Ties are re-rolled.

At the beginning of play, we have the players create their characters and negotiate exactly what it is that the villains have done that imposes hardship on the heroes and what the heroes must do (in general) to make it stop happening. In other words, the players negotiate the goals of both the villains and heroes. Next, we break every story down into three “Acts,” and every Act into three “Scenes.” Each Act is an attempt by the heroes to attain victory over the villains and every Scene describes some action performed by the heroes in that endeavor. The final scene in every act determines who wins the Act. The results of the first two acts cannot result in total victory for either side, but it can result in a major win that put the opponents at an apparently severe disadvantage. The outcome of the third Scene of the third Act determines ultimate victory.

Now, let’s design our reward system. Remember, we’re trying to design a system where the heroes try and fail twice and then ultimately succeed. So, every time a player wins the right to narrate the outcome of a conflict, we give him the opportunity to double the number of Plot Points he spent on that Scene’s conflict. To win this substantial reward, though, he must narrate the outcome in the heroes or villains favor in a way that depends on how far the Story has progressed:

Since ultimate victory is really only decided in Act III Scene 3, players will do what they can to gain as many Plot Points to spend on that scene’s conflict. To do that, they have extreme pressure to make sure the heroes fail in the third Scenes of both Acts I and II. Also note that this follows the Contest Tree Design Pattern as well since the results of individual Scenes provide mechanical input to the overarching conflict.

Capes has two important resources: Debt and Story Tokens. Story Tokens are a standard resource in that having more of them is always beneficial. Debt is actually a Conflicted Resource, in that having some Debt is good for a player, but having too much is bad. The conflict resolution mechanic is rather involved, so we won’t go into detail about it here (you can see a complete description in the Game Summaries section). However, one important aspect of the conflict resolution system is that “Debt” can be staked on a conflict to improve a player’s chances in winning the conflict. If this is done, the winner converts the Debt that he staked into Story Tokens, which are then given to the conflict’s loser. So, character failure is a way in which a player can gain Story Tokens if he finds himself in short supply. Thus, it is a Failure Reward.

Dog in the Vineyard conflicts impose “Fallout” on the loser of the contest. The effects of Fallout include injuries to the character, incidental damage to the character’s equipment, and the like. However, it also sometimes rewards the player as well. These include such things as adding points to an Attribute, adding a new Trait to the character, or increasing or decreasing the potency of an existing Trait (player option).

Torg has a “Hero Fails” subplot card which guarantees the hero fails at some critical task in exchange for a Possibility Point reward later in the game. The player determines whether or not to play the subplot card, but when and how it is invoked is up to the Game Master once the card is in play.