Metagame Incentives and Player Engagement

It’s almost a cliché at this point to say that modern life is distracting. Social media, smartphones, crumbling political systems, etc. It all feeds into short attention spans and feeling left constantly on read while everyone else is busy flitting around in their own lives putting out various fires. As a tabletop RPG fan I like to pretend that me and mine are immune from these troubles, but we aren’t. I’m fortunate to have a pretty focused weekly group, but I still find that I have to struggle for player mindshare between sessions.

While we’re at the table everyone is mostly present, but sometimes there are bits of housekeeping between sessions that need doing. Discussing rules changes, talking about which system to play next, or just asking general questions about what players plan to be doing next session to help with prep gets very easily ignored. I don’t take it personally, we’re all busy. Life is busy. At first I thought it was just me, but after trading out GM duties my friend who took over had a similar complaint. Everyone was present at the table, but getting any game-related conversation outside of our weekly two hours of gaming was as impossible for him as it had been for me.

During my friend’s final few sessions before I took the GM reigns back we devised a feedback system that incentivizes players, but let’s set up some context first. We shift back to my “main” campaign that I’ve been running for a few years in an off-and-on fashion. We’ll travel back there for a few months to a year and then get a wild hair and take a vacation in a different system.

Eliciting Feedback

I use the Old School Essentials ruleset, which is basically a cleanly stated version of BX D&D. In OSE, XP is largely obtained only through the accrual of treasure at a 1 GP = 1 XP return rate. Found a chest with 1,000 gold coins? Great, that’s 1,000 XP to distribute amongst the party. Clean, simple, straightforward. What I love about this method is that it incentivizes exploring and being opportunistic, but does not incentivize killing every monster you come across.

What I don’t like about it is that it’s slow, often dependent on luck, and can lead to strings of sessions with no meaningful XP. Players just don’t have the patience for that kind of pace in the shorter sessions we play weekly, and, frankly, neither do I. But instead of just cranking up the XP dial for exploration and monsters (which I’ve also done a bit) I’ve also started to reward XP for actions taken outside the game entirely.

I had wanted to implement a more formal feedback system for our games to allow players to voice grievances in a more formal way. Just a place to say “hey, I didn’t like this part of the game very much.” Not in a confrontational way, just in the interest of us playing the most enjoyable game possible. We’re all here to have fun, right? I landed on the Stars and Wishes system, but was hesitant to introduce it because it was before I took over GM duties again (I had already been thinking about returning to our regular campaign for a while) and because previous requests for feedback were nearly unanimously met with “yeah it’s all fine.” Which is nice to know, but that’s not feedback.

So I met with our GM at the time and we decided to hand out XP bonuses for submitting Stars and Wishes after each session. A meaningful amount of XP, not a pittance. Instantly we saw player feedback coming in. People wanted that XP, and if all they had to do was say what they liked and didn’t like about a session then they were definitely going to do that. Occasionally a player didn’t submit feedback, but it was rare and often met with “Oh, I meant to! I just forgot” during the subsequent session.

Expanding the Rewards

I continued this system when I took over GMing and it continued to truck along without interruption. I was finally getting meaningful feedback! Actionables! Validation! And then we had a string of absences because real life just happened to stack up poorly for a few members of our group. As a rule I like to have players recap sessions for those who miss, and I decided that if metagame XP rewards worked for feedback then why not for recaps?

I put out a 50XP bounty on a player recap from the missed session for our player who missed out. The player who responded gave a beautifully written, dramatized recap of events, and I doubled the XP reward for the effort put forth. I didn’t think that the increase was important, but it ended up showing my players that not only am I rewarding engagement but that it’s a sliding scale. The rewards can increase for more engagement.

Concerns and Other Rewards

It feels a bit antithetical to allow characters to grow for things that are explicitly not in-game actions. Many systems use metagame currencies for this sort of thing, and often only during the session proper. But what I’m finding is that between-game engagement is often as important as being present at the table. Being a GM is a lot of work, and GMing every week for the same group of people often requires a bit of tweaking and lots of communication. If your mind is on the game, whether we’re playing or not, I’ve learned that rewarding that has merit.

I do hold some concerns that this can get out of hand. I try to stick to feedback and recaps for my metagame XP rewards so that people who just legitimately don’t have the time to think about the game aren’t left behind. But to play devil’s advocate to my own concerns: aren’t the players more invested, more present, and more active the ones that should be getting extra rewards? Not enough to create an imbalance, but enough I demonstrate that it’s not going unnoticed? In an ideal world we all show up to the table for the simple thrill of the game, but in real life we’re all conditioned animals looking for a hit of good brain chemicals.

I do see myself expanding this system even more. We’ve flat out stolen the Bonds system from Dungeon World and implanted it into OSE wholesale. So some sessions the bonus XP from feedback, recap, and fulfilling in-game bonds can add quite a boost. We’ve even implemented carousing, which allows players to spend gold gained on adventure for additional XP once they return to town as long as it’s “wasted” in a frivolous way that does not materially benefit the character. This has the added benefit of often keeping players poor and hungry, which is my preferred state for players to be in.

Final Thoughts

Right now this increase in XP seems to be going well and we’ve had more chatter in our group Discord server than ever before. Several players immediately submit their feedback at the conclusion of a session. And they’ve started to truly celebrate the dramatized recaps that one player is now incentivized to put out. The only downside is that the players are progressing at a pretty decent clip, but given our shorter play sessions it seems to be enhancing the situation rather than taking away from it. There’s always the worry that this could turn into a Monty Haul situation, but for now: I’m quite happy with it.

Speed Demons: Ascending Through Nine Levels of DCC in Nine Weeks

Call to Action

About 12 weeks ago I was advertising the following for a Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) campaign I wanted to get off the ground. This is the original recruitment post from the various Discord servers it was posted in:

Looking for players! Details below, feel free to ask any questions either here or via PM. No experience necessary, apply within, etc…

When: Wednesday from 8-10:30pm Central.

Where: via Discord voice chat (please have a decent audio setup)

System: Dungeon Crawl Classics

Who: We’re a long-running private group and have maintained the same meeting time for about three years now. We’d love it if you wanted to hang around after the campaign and keep playing since our numbers have dwindled from around 8 to a measly 4 over the years.

Description: You are doomed. You were hired to stop the Warlock Apteth, sealed deep within the Blood Mountain. The High Wizard who gave you the elixir told you that your powers and abilities would grow at an impossible rate, but didn’t tell you that after nine weeks of growth you would die. Now Apteth’s plans are coming to a head, and all you know and love will be reduced to ash. It is nine weeks until the blood moon, nine weeks to stop the warlock, and nine weeks before your body fails you. Can you get there in time?

Mechanics: This is a seat-of-our-pants high-speed DCC campaign in which your doomed characters will grow one level per week. At the end of the ninth week of play, you die. Characters who die in action will be replaced with new victims adventurers with an identical fate. We’re here for a good time, not a long time.

The idea was a simple one: let’s play through nine sessions of DCC and experience all the system has to offer without having to commit years of our lives to a single campaign. DCC had always been an exciting system to me, but it only ever hit the table in our group for one-shots and short romps.

Seats pretty quickly filled up and we had a party of six adventurers ready to roll, only half of which had ever played DCC. In fact, one of our players was relatively new to RPGs in general.

The Game

My plan was to take snippets from adventures according to the appropriate level of the party that week and just kind of slot them into the game. The story involved the BBEG taking all the most dastardly locations from across time to assemble his infernal workshop, so it was easy enough. And since I never knew where players would be ending each session they became pretty accustomed to small inter-dimensional gateways between rooms.

When passing through one of these gateways, effectively moving from a zone appropriate for their previous level to one appropriate to their current level, I also had them interact with a small time-traveling gnomish merchant. We were moving too fast to worry about stopping in town.

Plenty of fun was had and despite some hang-ups here and there we all had a great time. The party ascended Apteth’s mountain, killed him and his time-displaced clones, awoke a mountain-sized titan, sundered the mountain to knock it over, and then climbed inside the titan to destroy its heart.

I had decided pretty early on that their characters, like the invite said, would be dying by the end of things. But we had grown attached so I softened that stance a bit when they had such a successful end cap to their mission. Having destroyed the heart of the titan a great wave of time energy was released reverting them all to babies and removing all memories of their lives. The High Wizard then retrieved them and secreted them away for further adventures.

Not quite the gruesome death I had in mind, but I thought it left the door open for more intrigue.

DCC as a Campaign System

Despite the fun had by all I grew to have quite a laundry list of complaints with DCC as a system for campaign play. While DCC very often gets lumped in with OSR games, it’s very heavy on rules and mechanics. It makes sense given the system’s 3rd Edition heritage, but despite cutting a lot of meat off the bone there was still enough left to trip up players that were trying to move swiftly through what remained.

Specifically, I want to pick on the spell system.

It’s worth mentioning that one of our casters loved the magic system in DCC explicitly because the entries for various spell-effects were so verbose and specific. He was excited that he never had to come up with anything, since the spells already did so much just out of the book that it looked like he was injecting a lot of role-playing while not having to go through the effort.

That said, his enjoyment was my disappointment. As a GM I like to see my players being creative with every tool they have, and the extremely lengthy spells kind of supplanted that. It’s hard to feel like you have much room to play around with spell manifestations when they’re so explicitly laid out before you. And oftentimes it was the case that the alternative effect you might want was the result of a different check on the same table, so granting that effect instead in the interest of narrative had the knock-on effect of making the initial check feel meaningless.

This verbosity also meant that casters who were on the ball in effectively casting their spells and having their effects pulled up and ready to go would still frequently take turns that were two and three times longer than melee focused party members. By the end of the campaign our melee attackers had gotten pretty efficient at dishing out their turns by calling deeds, rolling attacks together, and then proclaiming hits and damage together (I always share the to-hit number with players for faster play). Meanwhile our casters were reading huge passages out of the book for virtually everything they did.

The disparity between melee and caster has always been a bit of a thorn in the side of RPGs, but the novellas that some spell effects turn into at higher level play really exacerbate things. The deed dice system that allows proclaiming of mighty deeds in melee combat mitigates some of the disparity, but when done well highlights the inflexibility of the spell system by comparison.

I also expected the swinginess of early DCC and/or funnel play to wear off at higher levels, but it only seemed to continue building. While I’m generally in favor of deadly gameplay, the abilities of higher level DCC players with a small slew of magic items was such that anything short of encounters explicitly built to be brutal or exploitative meant there was no tension in combat. One of our players had a spell that allowed them to summon a horde of dozens of combatants, which was just an overall nightmare to meaningfully track as a GM.

Final Thoughts

Going into this I was really just looking for a fun way to get the experience of months of campaigning in a shorter time frame, and I think we achieved that goal. It was a bit stressful and confusing at times as new abilities were constantly being piled on, and maybe it was a mistake to choose a system like DCC. If I had it to do over again something simpler, with flatter curves and less wacky stuff injected might make for a smoother ride. But maybe the bumps along the way are what made the ride so memorable to begin with.

And I still do enjoy DCC as a really fun system for convention games, one-shorts, and short adventures. To the system’s credit the modules that I was yanking rooms, encounters, and loot from were very well put together and enjoyable to use. It’s definitely the system to choose if you’re after pre-written modules, but next time I’m planning a longer campaign I’ll be reaching for something else.