seeking concensus- adventure xp levels

[loke]

@ezzelino

Sure, but: how do you reward then characters who take that "golden middle path"? It's obvious that they should not advance as quickly as those who are consumed by the desire for advancement (intellectual, financial etc.). And how do you reward players for occasionally roleplaying a genuinely lazy character?

Is the question really relevant? Should good roleplaying not be its own reward?

This is were I really think ArM has failed. We try to combine a complex mechanical system which encourages players to come up with fantastic lab inventions, pushing the system to its limits, and at the same time, it tries to encourage cultivation of the narrative and the roleplay. The two simply do not go well together.

There is of course a second reason why external motivation is bad. Any reward system has to define its criteria and thus what is considered good, but good roleplaying is not playing to predefined criteria, but quite on the contrary, challenging expectations and creating something ever new.

And then there is a third question. In what way is playing laziness in downtime seasons good roleplaying? To me roleplaying is the storytelling, which has to be uptime. Downtime is bookkeeping.

Sorry, I don't believe in quick fixes, and I do not believe in tricks and treats.

[ezzelino]

@loke

@ezzelino

Sure, but: how do you reward then characters who take that "golden middle path"? It's obvious that they should not advance as quickly as those who are consumed by the desire for advancement (intellectual, financial etc.). And how do you reward players for occasionally roleplaying a genuinely lazy character?

Is the question really relevant? Should good roleplaying not be its own reward?

It should. But a good system encourages players into behaviours that entertain the group. Now, most players feel rewarded when something "positive" happens to their characters. Thus, the challenge is to encourage players to have their characters act in a way that's good for the gaming group, when said way is detrimental to the character - particularly if the player has strong emotional attachment to the character.

The way it's usually done is through mechanics that in some way "reimburse" the character for what would otherwise be suboptimal behaviour. For example, Flaws give a character points to purchase Virtues. Many games (not Ars Magica) reward characters who sacrifice themselves for other characters with extra xp. Etc. I think it should not be too hard to come up with some "reward" mechanics that encourage players to have their characters spend some of their free time just ... relaxing, rather than constantly improving themselves.

@loke

This is were I really think ArM has failed. We try to combine a complex mechanical system which encourages players to come up with fantastic lab inventions, pushing the system to its limits, and at the same time, it tries to encourage cultivation of the narrative and the roleplay. The two simply do not go well together.

I disagree. I think there's nothing in principle preventing them from going well together. I also think that ArM5 does pretty well overall (with the occasional issue such as this one). Personality and Story Flaws, Covenant Hooks etc. go a long way to encourage the narrative.

@loke

There is of course a second reason why external motivation is bad. Any reward system has to define its criteria and thus what is considered good, but good roleplaying is not playing to predefined criteria, but quite on the contrary, challenging expectations and creating something ever new.

This is .. a bit too fuzzy for me to tackle. But I tend to disagree, see my comment at the beginning of this post.

@loke

And then there is a third question. In what way is playing laziness in downtime seasons good roleplaying? To me roleplaying is the storytelling, which has to be uptime. Downtime is bookkeeping.

Roleplaying is mostly storytelling, yes. But storytelling in the sense of "creating a narrative" is not necessarily just roleplaying. Despite the fact that "Story" is the technical term in ArM5 for uptime, downtime does contribute to the narrative; it's not just bookkeeping, particularly in games like ArM or Pendragon that support it well. A character who decides to spend a season "off screen" searching for an apprentice, or performing works of piety, or working like a dog so he can afford to pay a decent dowry to his daughter does contribute to the narrative. So does a character who, after succesfully marrying his daughter off, spends a season sleeping and generally lazying off all day long while pining for her. It's just "accelerated" narration, like a montage in screenplay.

[loke]

@ezzelino

I think it should not be too hard to come up with some "reward" mechanics that encourage players to have their characters spend some of their free time just ... relaxing, rather than constantly improving themselves.

Every reward system I can think of just turns «relaxing, rather than» into «relaxing in order to» ...

@ezzelino

a bit too fuzzy for me to tackle

Sorry. Let me try again. You, at least partly, equate good roleplaying with sacrifice, and then you compensate said sacrifice. What happens then is that the sacrifice ceases to be a sacrifice, because the player knows the compensation and takes that into account. But this only works for those recognised «sacrifices» that are rewarded, and not the novel ideas that the rules did not anticipate.

As far as I am concerned, the reward is when players, after the session or maybe years later, retell episodes. Good roleplaying is remembered and enjoyed over and over again. You may be right that downtime is part of the narrative, but I have yet to see any downtime episodes retold and reenjoyed after the session.

@ezzelino

I think there's nothing in principle preventing them from going well together.

There is. There was even a Nobel Prize for pointing it out, admittedly the one in economics rather than any of Nobel's own, but still. 1978 Herbert Simon, who identified bounded rationality. There is a limit to how many objectives and rules the players can process.

[Fishy (Lee)]

The term laziness itself may not be the most accurate here.

We are typing on a computer discussing a rule system for a game which we do in our leisure time. We aren't focused on improving ourselves..... Maybe if I play Ars Majica enough, I, the player, on my metaphysical character sheet receives 2 exposure points in history? (assuming my SG is good with their history).
Just for the record, I'm not dissing RPG, I've played them for over quarter of a century, just saying the focus is not learning. Leisure is a focus for many of us.

The focus on non-stop improvement for magi, and in the 2 non-work seasons for normal characters is the peculiarity. Someone regularly engaging in leisure activities when given the option, such that in a year it would add up to a season, is not ridiculous, and is probably more likely.

[Jank (Medusa)]

A lot of people play their PCs as homo economicus who only work towards their optimal outcomes with limited regard to how humans actually behave.

[loke]

A lot of people live their lives as homo economicus who work towards their optimal outcomes with limited regard to what it means to be human.

(Herbert Marcuse One-dimensional man 1964 - paraphrased - no quote)

[silveroak]

First I think the idea of exposure experience for work is based not on how hard someone works but how repetitive it is- typical work does not involve a lot of pushing one's boundaries, and the typical grog on guard duty is likely to be gaining exposure experience in awareness rather than weapons skills (unless perhaps they are also entertaining themselves by twirling their weapons on watch and gaining some degree of additional familiarity with them or something).
The other thing to consider is the difference between relaxing as in doing nothing versus doing something we consider fun which might be considered practicing a skill. Take hide and seek for a juvenile example- children are quickly learning area lore and stealth as they pay the game, not because they are intensely trying to improve their skills but because thy enjoy doing so. People paint and craft for their own amusement, and of course you can always spend a season practicing carousing.

Additionally you have the potential from ROP:I to convert your vices into confidence points if you are not improving abilities significantly

However this is getting away from the intention of the thread as well, which was to try and create a standard outline of what kind of adventures should result in the RAW XP rewards for adventures based on the importance of the story
Part of the reason I ask is that it occurs to me that as things stand adventures are the only form of xp that you cannot properly plan what you will gain in a season, and with the RAW outline it should be possible to get a fair idea of the xp that will be rewarded depending on the mission, allowing better planning for which characters would be sent on a mission.

[raccoonmask]

I've definitely had some house rule decisions I made at my table for a combination of my own tracking and play, rather than realism.
As a person, I tend towards moderate rewards and struggles, and tend to not like power-bloat in shared games (Because it can create weird competitions of efficiency that makes players unhappy.) The two major changes I have in running my saga for adventuring:

1. We keep a spreadsheet of xp so people can plan together. The column right next to the season/year is MY column, where I put advance notice of potential adventures (so I don't forget them and so the players have some preparation time - during my first saga, we regularly had a mid-season or late-season adventure completely ruin all the labwork that season because the Mentem maga was the only one who could handle it, or they needed the Ex Misc with Demons Eternal Oblivion.) A brief note of 'something is happening this season' gives my players a sense of planning for problems and solutions, rather than just aimlessly reading the highest-xp book they can each season. [Also, my players get really confused when in 2 seasons we have 'Winter is Coming' as a note, and the player who's secretly engaged to to the Snow Queen is sweating bullets]
2. I tend to be stingy with Confidence - not because of any conscious decision, but because I just don't think about it. To counteract this, I give characters a point of confidence whenever they decide to go out past their comfort zone and take an adventure.

As I've mentioned before, I tend to give 5-7 xp for most adventures, and I tend to give more xp when adventures last multiple game sessions. Additionally, I tend to run 1-2 adventures per game year (Usually there's 2 'plot problems' a year and the players will solve or delay one with nonadventure planning, and then adventure for the other.)

[silveroak]

Personally I'd like to have an (online) game where each year there are several small adventures for grogs and companions that can be handled quickly and in parallel (played at the same time as each other), and adventures involving mages being lengthier affairs that occur every few years, but most of my games get bogged down by players wanting to send out all the mages on every adventure.

[ezzelino]

You are evidently very good at making stories best enjoyed when playing magi!
Does that happen even if you run really really low key stories? Like, "We need to go to the village fair to buy some wine - we have convinced those dastardly sorcerers to shell out some silver!" Do the magi sacrifice a season of study or labwork for such a small thing?

[Bartomeus]

I really like that "small adventurs" approach, for what it's worth, especially in the online setting.

Having that balance across the storylines (companion/grog centric stories and mage centric stories) is good, but I suspect in the online setting it may require really clear OOC (out of character) clarification from the SG that THIS is a grog/companion centric story and THIS more magus centered or driven.

I also think being more explicit with the seasonal timeline/schedule in an online play-by-post game might help. PBP games don't seem to be game session dependent, so setting up a framework that establishes a schedule that might help players not feel driven to get their magus into an adventure just to have something to do.

For example, seems to me in PBP game you could say: Spring 1250 will run from Jan - Feb 2023. Two story lines will be running: Finding the Lost Sheep and Preparing for the Summer Tribunal. Additionally, we'll have incidental roleplaying/lab improvement/seasonal study RP happening simultaneously over those two months.

In a PBP game that gives "stuff to do" for the players and their various characters. It also lets a players whose real life has gotten busy or complicated "bow out" of a storyline or two more gracefully without feeling like they have to withdraw entirely so as not to weigh down the rest of the troupe.

I could even see a "troupe role" where a player is the schedule keeper/nudger so the weight of that administrative game task isn't just on the SG's shoulders.

Just some thoughts from an apprentice who is super grateful for great SGs who run PBP games.

[loke]

Running parallel stories without every player in every strain is a good idea. Players may take part in one or more strains, depending on their time, and each strain is less vulnerable to individual players being stuck in real life. The constraint is the number of strains the SG can handle.

Bad Apples even ran parallel seasons; three stories per year, different seasons, but in parallel. Any inconsistencies were brushed under the carpet.

If you run an established covenant with lots of covenfolk and lots of activity, it is relatively easy to enforce grog only stories. Your magus wanted to join? Well, he did not even know about it. If the covenant is busy enough, even the Tytalus busy-body cannot keep up, and if the players are difficult, throw out a red heng. Your magus joined the grogs to find the lost goat. You found the goat. Nothing interesting happened. Exsposure 2xp. Then, of course, the other grogs went elsewhere and had a story worth telling.

However, in a fledgling, under-staffed Spring covenant, nothing really goes under the radar, and it may be important for the magi to explore the area too. Barring magi from a story may threaten the suspension of disbelief. Some magi will want to stay behind to study, but some magi are urban and sociable, busybodies, or whatnot; there need to be a reason for them to stay at home to keep the story plausible.

Things may work out better if the magi's downtime activities are narrated in advance, rather than being recorded after the stories are told. Magi might be offered, or even forced into, a story after they have committed the vis for an enchantment. Possibly harsh, but more realistic. In practice I find that most players are constantly behind with their paperwork, and cannot declare their characters action in intervening seasons before the story starts in session, and this is impossible to enforce. And I find that it is harder online, too, even with PbP because there are always some players who do not respond within reasonable time.

This is not easy, and what works in one group may not work in another, and it is rare to find a troupe with homogeneous expectations and commitment.

[RafaelB (Rafael Bessoni)]

@silveroak

Part of the reason I ask is that it occurs to me that as things stand adventures are the only form of xp that you cannot properly plan what you will gain in a season, and with the RAW outline it should be possible to get a fair idea of the xp that will be rewarded depending on the mission, allowing better planning for which characters would be sent on a mission.

Is this really relevant? I don't think one person will categorize saving the Pope as 10xp and another one as 5xp. Some are going to say 9xp, some 10xp, a couple might go with 8xp, but that's about it.

Do we really need a rule to even out marginal xp gains? Does it matter if one grog gains 7xp instead of 8xp at a given season?

Besides, as you pointed several times, adventure xp is suppoosed to correlate with the importance of the adventure. Importance is relative. For a magus harvesting a source might be worth 5xp at most, while for a grog that might be the one of the highest points in his life, worth 9xp.

Even if we settle for a less subjective view of importance (meaning the example above is not valid because harvesting sources is always low importance for anyone (assuming no other events occur)), we are back to the case where I might regard something as 9xp, you 10xp, and another one 8xp. So, maybe it's better to just eyeball it, as we are already doing? After all, we do have an intuitive grasp of how much things should be worth.

Degree of importance:

• Shouldn't even be an adventure (assuming someone goes lower): 3~4xp
• Low: 5~6xp
• Medium: 7~8xp
• High: 9~10xp
• Extreme (for the ones who go beyond the range): 11~12xp

[silveroak]

Not looking for a rule, more like <accent=pirate> guidelines
I was hoping that by discussing the topic I could get more perspectives to create my own scale for future games. Unfortunately we seem to have discussed everything else involving experience and character advancement.