#RPGaDay2025 - 31 Reward

 

Again, we can look at this diegetically (considering the rewards that characters get in the game), or non-diegetically (the rewards that players get outside the game). Rewards are something that is often expected, it’s just a part of the concept going back to the earliest days of TTRPGs, sure there are plenty pof games in the past 20 years that have deviated from this pattern, but it’s still fairly common across the spectrum, especially among trad games.

I’ve tried to play with the way rewards are offered in game, starting early on with the idea of levels (because I didn’t know better)…moving to point buy systems where you had to earn experience relating to a specific aspect of your character, then only improve that aspect when you got enough…and to general systems where you earned points for playing with fidelity to your character, the story, or the genre tropes, then allowing those points to improve anything with a bit of justification. I’ve toyed with systems where you ask a pair of players to specify one element of your character to level up based on their experience of your character, then you have to choose one of those elements…I’ve toyed with systems where your character’s core abilities don’t change at all, and the only way to improve is to get better equipment and friends along the way.

None of these are inherently wrong, there are just different systems that work for different games and different types of storytelling. It’s always good to have an arsenal of tools in your kit, so that you don’t have to rely on the same one to attempt everything. I’m still trying to experiment with mix and match ideas, to combine different reward systems with different rolling conventions, genres, and other elements of game set-up to see which one seem to work together and which ones have so much dissonance that they just don’t seem to work at all.