Incentivizing Good Gaming or Ripping off a Cool Idea

I recently read a blog post by David Rollins, that can be found here: https://searching-for-magic-blog.blogspot.com/2024/12/new-experience-in-d-clones-breaking-old.html.

It is a great read that talks about different strategies used by two recent RPGs, Dragonbane and Forbidden Lands, to incentivize players to collaborate with the story telling of the game. The idea is that we should award experience, XP, or whatever advancement currency is used in the game, based on the sort of behaviors we want to see from the players, rather than simply killing and looting.

This is not a new idea. About twenty years ago I ran a few short d20 games and at the start of each session the players and I would agree on the session’s goals and what the XP reward for achieving each goal would be. It would be something like:

    Make friendly contact with Faction X: 300 XP.

    Get enough money to save the orphanage: 200 XP

    Publicly embarrass rival group: 150 XP.

And then, when things were working correctly, each PC also had their own goal for the day on top of the group ones.

It kind of worked. It took time and required the group to have something approaching consensus on what they wanted to achieve.

What I want to do here is rip off the ideas that Rollins was writing about and apply them to the Experience Roll system in modern d100 games like Mythras, Legend, and Rubble and Ruin. In these games characters are awarded 1 to 5 Experience Rolls which are the currency of character advancement. They are used to improve skills, but new spells and abilities, and the like.

I would love to know how my system works for you. Would you change anything? Did I forget something obvious? Let me know in the comments.

Here are the guidelines I intend to use.

Gaining Experience

At the end of an adventure, player characters are awarded between 1 to 5 Exp Rolls, as per usual. Characters gain +1 Exp Roll for each category which is true for their character in the adventure.

1. Showing up: +1 Exp Roll. Did the character show up and participate in the game?

2. Play in Character: +1 Exp Roll. For Mythras, Rubble and Ruin, and games with a formal system of Passions. Did you play to your character's Passions? Do the people at the table agree that the actions of the character align with their stated passions? For systems without formal Passions, like Legend, did you play in character?

3. Engaging with the World: +1 Exp Roll. Did the character participate in the core actions of the game? Did they find treasure, salvage Old Tech, explore a new area, discover a lost secret, or similar advancements? This can be for the whole party, e.g. “Everybody traveled to the new town and found a place to stay.” Or, frequently, for the individual character. “Bob the Wizard found the lost scroll of Jarlow Tusk which he still needs to study,” or “Peri the Engineer fixed a salvaged pump and upgraded the group’s water supply.” The latter example has the character being consistent with their core behaviors rather than achieving a specific goal. They changed the world while being in character.

4. Advance the Story: +1 Exp Roll. Did the character take actions that advance the shared story? Did they make progress towards a goal? Did they help overcome some obstacle or defeat a monster or dangerous enemy? Did they make an alliance, expose a concealed threat or enemy, or develop a creative solution to a problem?

5. Above and Beyond: +1 Exp Roll. Was this adventure larger than usual? Made it all the way to the volcano and throw the ring in! Survived the dramatic clash of five armies! Big things. Or, during typical adventures did the individual character do something spectacular? Exceptional roleplaying; An absurdly cleaver idea at a critical moment; that sort of thing.

The Secret History of Rubble and Ruin

So there is this game I self-publish called Rubble and Ruin and I think a few people my find the history of how the game came to be interesting. 

I grew up in a large house in a temperate rain forest. We used to joke that it only rained once a year there. It would start in October and end in April. In the mid-late 1970s I was already a "fantasy nerd" (but we weren't called that back then), but D&D hadn't made it to our little town--or at least not down to my age group. But the place was crawling with an eclectic mix of hippies and shell-shocked war vets (we didn't call it PTSD back then) and everywhere there were Tolkien-obsessed people. 

During the rainy season I started building a massive fantasy diorama on a 4' by 8' sheet of plywood in our attic. I'll likely post more about my lived-experience with the early fantasy culture of Northern California, but for now lets just say that when D&D hit my friend group, it hit hard. Being in Northern California we had all three game, D&D, Runequest, and Arduin (I linked the last in case you haven't meet it yet). It was a wonderful time, but out of scope for this story.

What is important is that all of these are games and interests are based on fantasy. They all focus around magic. But I was also a science nerd. I read science fiction, I took every science class at my high school (and even a few independent studies). When I graduated and moved to the local university I studied science and engineering--long before it was the trendy thing to do. I also had a bunch of personal trauma in this time and one thing that came through was that I found no evidence for magic. 

I am a humanist. I was raised a humanist. And I have never had a crisis of faith. It looks to me like we live in a world without magic.

So why can't I have a table-top RPG without magic?

There were lots of options and I have played lots of different games over the years, but I keep coming back to one thing. Near future, post-apocalyptic -- slightly gonzo -- but science based. 

It started with not exactly liking Gamma World or Metamorphosis Alpha. Something was wrong with those, but I didn't know what. Then came Morrow Project which was almost there, but the characters were too super-human for me (the PCs all started with a jumpsuit that made them practically immune from damage). Then came Aftermath, rules as written, and I found it. I wanted to run a game like all the D&D games I was playing in. One where the adventures were exploring lost and forgotten places. Fighting horrible monsters. Finding powerful treasures. The whole cannon fantasy, but based in science instead of magic.

And I developed that. Over the years I added GURPs components and bits from Morrow Project and as I refined my understanding of science and technology, I increased the overall realism. But basically, I was running a humanist fantasy game.

By around 2008 I was a Senior Scientist working in biomedical research, yada yada yada, and it was getting almost impossible to find people who would play my PA game. House rules were out. People wanted published rules.

So I published my house rules. The original Rubble and Ruin monograph was just me codifying the world I had developed so when I went to attract players, I wouldn't be running a home-brew, I'd be running a published game. And that was nice and I didn't want to do much more with it.

Then we had the pandemic. Do you kids remember the pandemic? Of course you do. ( ;-) ). Early in the pandemic we were all switching to on-line games. We were mastering VTTs and Discord and Zoom and everything was kind of crazy. And someone asked me to help out with a certain problem. There were a few young people who couldn't spend time with the Special Olympics and they really loved D&D 5e and would another friend and I run an on-line game for them. 

Sure. But I didn't know 5e. But we did our best and we got things going and before long we had a group of heroes in a hole in the ground fighting a swarm of giant rats. And one of the players asked, "What does the spell Burning Hands do?" 

And I told them.

But why did I know that. I didn't look it up. I hadn't reread the spell. I had remembered the basic use of the D&D Burning Hands spell from forty years earlier!

After the game I thought, if people are going to be remembering things from games for decades, wouldn't it be better if they remembered real things? And so my project over 2020, the first year of the pandemic, was to rewrite the Rubble and Ruin monograph. This new version doesn't have nearly as many nit-picky rules as my old Aftermath-Morrow Project-GURPs hybrid. I abstracted the handling of the bits-and-bobs of old technology and the creation and restoration of machines and other pre-fall stuff, but it has generally realistic Old Technology rules.

And I published it, and enough other of the required small books that I think I have a fairly complete TTRPG.

Now this story should end here, but I also did one more thing. I added modern science.

Science in the last century was dominated by physics. This century is being dominated by biology. In my day jobs I am continuously, deeply embedded in biomedical and translational science. I can see where we are going and few people seem to be writing about it.  In the past, science fiction would talk about the discoveries of physics and engineering that went with it. But few, if any, are writing about the massive changes in our understanding of, and ability to control, the living world.

Think about your Covid vaccines, they should have been the science fiction of twenty years ago, but I don't think anyone wrote it. What I wanted to do with all my TAGs and transhumans and uplifts was to get people thinking about the technology that will likely be in our world within the next century and maybe put a little thought into how humanity will have to react to these changes.

And this is probably more than anyone wanted to read about me and what I am trying to do with my writing, but I don't want it to be a secret, so I've put it down here. Thanks for your time and hopefully you got something from reading this.

 

Starting Somewhere. How I never met Greg Stafford.

I like Minecraft. I put a picture of my current Minecraft build as a header for this post. Why? Because Minecraft is a "block placing game". The main thing you do in the game is collect and place blocks so that over time you build greater and greater things. Of course, there is a lot more to the game, but at its heart, you place blocks.

I have a lot of things that I want to do with this blog. I have a multitude of complex ideas and realizations that are rattling around inside my head, and I think many of them will be either of interest or of value for other people to know about. Some of them might be of interest to certain communities, like I have a conjecture on how to establish gravity on the inside of a Dyson sphere and I've thought a lot about what the future holds given current trends in scientific research. I have other thoughts about careers in science, academia, and particularly bioinformatics, which may be useful to some other people. And then there is a lifetime of being deeply engaged with the table-top roleplaying community.

"I was there man, I played D&D in the 1970s. I was the old school!" (But, I'm better now.)

But I have to start somewhere. I have to have a first real blog post. The first real things I am stating publicly for all the world to potentially know, but generally ignore. I've had a complete mental block on where to start. What should be my first post. In Minecraft when you hit a mental block and don't know what to do, the common piece of advice is to just start placing blocks. Don't over think it. What I'm going to do here is just place my first block. I want to tell you the story of how I never meet Greg Stafford.

Greg Stafford did many things, but the one that affected my life was developing Glorantha, the fictional bronze-age world at the heart of my favorite roleplaying game, Runequest. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in a small university town in rural California. By the late 1970s I was hard into D&D when a small company down in the Bay Area came up with a cool, new game, Runequest. I suspect I had my copy within months of the original release. I loved that game. Me and my friends quickly added it to our rotation of on-going campaigns. 

We played both kinds of roleplaying, D&D and Runequest. (We counted Arduin as D&D.)

I have vivid flash memories of sitting in my room on the second floor of our old, Victorian family home reading that game. Learning about Animism and world religions and even math and computer programing. And as a kid, never knowing that Mr. Stafford lived just six hours south of my home.

Flash forward to the mid-20-teens, something like 2015. I was writing some minor pieces for Chaosium and following them on social media when I learned that Greg Stafford was retiring, and moving out of the big city. In fact, he was moving to my home town. Naturally, I followed this on social media. And then he posted a picture of moving into his new home.

And I recognized that home.

No, it wasn't mine. Instead, it was a house that was visible out my old bedroom window! In the intervening decades, I had moved two time zones away and didn't really know anyone back in my old home town. Except, I was Facebook friends with one of my late mother's old friends. And she still lived in the house next door.

I reached out to her. "Hey, do you have a new neighbor?"

"Greg? Yes, he's out walking our dog right now."

"Really! He's very famous with my friends. He's written a lot of great things."

Later, she said that she had talk to Greg and that he would like to meet me the next time I was in town.

Unfortunately, Greg Stafford passed suddenly in 2018, before I was able to get back there. One of the most influential people in my life retired to a house I could see from my bedroom window, but only decades after I moved on.

I don't know what to say about that, except if you are into TTRPGs, do yourself a favor and read Runequest, and I will end this inaugural post by quoting my late brother Martin who would say, "It is a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it."

Welcome to Rudus Writings.

We have to start somewhere... This is the blog of a boring guy who happens to do interesting things. I have reached a point where I would like to have a public-facing location where I can share information, thoughts, and the like about some of the things that I do--and this is that place.

Who am I and what do I do?

In my day job, I am a research scientist. I provide bioinformatic support to a Children's Hospital research institute in Manitoba, Canada. Bioinformatics is an interesting field at the junction of statistics, molecular biology, and computation. I have lots of opinions about science-related issues, and I'll likely be posting some of them here.

Modern scientists usually have public-facing lists of our research, and I am no different. Here are the two that I use the most.

Google Scholar

ORCID

I suspect I will eventually do a post on ORCIDs, but you should know that those are not the numbers Sauron assigns to the members of his army.

But the real reason I've started this blog is because in my spare time I write and publish both table-top roleplaying games and fiction. And a lot of my blog posts are going to be about these two topics--particularly about the science behind what I am writing. For now, I will end this short introduction with a link to my TTRPG, Rubble and Ruin, which is available on DriveThruRPG.

Rubble and Ruin