Observations on Motivation from Optimization, and Constrained Design Environments

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Glömmerska

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Different games, different players, different ways of having fun. Gameplay decisions driven by realism, greed, or optimization. Premises skipped or abandoned, unusual ideas adopted. There are lots of reasons to play TTRPG's, and even more to play some systems over others.

I've struggled with finding players outside of D&D 5e for a while, but broke out by playing Mythras about 2 years ago. The system instantly clicked for me, and eventually clacked for my regular group too, after their initial skepticism. I wanted to explore WHY exactly that happened by comparing how Mythras and D&D drive gameplay decisions through their systems. This is not meant as an indictment or denigration of either system, just what I've seen in my groups through the years.


D&D Gameplay Drivers


Let's observe gameplay drivers of D&D. I do not mean to say these are primarily what drives these systems as a whole, rather, what is most optimal or encouraged by its mechanics. What rewards you, in the system?
  • The core premise of the early editions was dungeon delving. This is what all of the main books supported: strange monsters, deadly dungeons and grimy environs. XP as gold made greed the motivating factor. To be greedy was to play the game optimally, as those players would accumulate more levels, magic items, and power. Stats are inferior to strategy.
  • 3.x games similarly encourage greed. To keep on track for the expected wealth-by-level, you'd need a certain amount of wealth. To do otherwise makes encounter planning as a DM difficult. XP from death also encourages violence. Though it is oft disparaged, the murderhobo is the most optimal way to play unless the DM takes special precautions to discourage that behavior.
  • 4e introduces carefully crafted systems for skills and combat abilities, which grow on their own from levels obtained from violence. Abilities encourage violence for its own sake, as that is where the core meat of the mechanics lie. Greed is still present, but expected wealth is more tightly baked into the system, with explicit callouts in DMG to include lavish treasure hoards.
  • 5e, with XP from violence, largely avoids greed, as magic items are not expected nor necessary for progression (aside from certain monster resistances).
The main drivers of power (levels, magic items) in D&D come from these motivations. This works perfectly well for dungeon delving, but problems arise when doing any other sort of premise using the system. It's simply not built for political intrigue, large scale warfare, or economic manipulation. The most common way to alleviate this is to do milestone leveling, which changes the motivation to character or plot driven goals. But this often falls apart due to a disconnect between what leveling rewards you with.

Obtaining more HP, combat abilities, and spells for blasting monsters means that even if you leveled up from helping the duke remove a curse on his heir, you've improved at combat. Even if it comes from other sources, ultimately, all actions cause you to foremost become better at violence. Skills improve too, but they will always be packaged with learning how to swing your sword faster too.


Buttons, Feats, and the Mundane Constraint


Of course, you can just homebrew the system! Break its knees and twist its bones around until it whimpers. Let the players start a bakery, invest in the cow trading market, and pay taxes. No matter how many surgeries you perform though, that frankenbeast will still want to delve some dungeons.

Historically, the way D&D has attempted to sew this frankenbeast up is to allow certain actions be only available through features or feats. This can work well if it suits the genre fiction: only allowing players who take Craft Staff make such magic staves feels interesting and impactful. A problem arises in the later editions, when some concepts are only available through a feature or feat, a button granting permission to do a specific task.

For example, the Chef feat allows you to do make special snacks and improve resting healing. By introducing this feat though, it implies that the only characters who can get a mechanical benefit from cooking must have this feat. Similarly, due to the existence of Imposter, only level 13 Rogues can be good enough mimics or actors. Hereafter, I will call this concept the Mundane Constraint.

Of course, there is also the early "skill" system in AD&D/2e that restricted things like Listening and Climbing Walls to the Thief only, but later supplements make those options more broadly applicable to other classes

We are used to saying that constraint breeds creativity. Limited tools or resources forces you to come up with novel solutions to problems. However, there is a problem with gating those solutions, especially if the players are drawing from real experience, behind mechanical barriers ("I can't clean this animal because I don't have this feat? I do this all the time when I hunt, it's super easy!").

The Mundane Constraint subtly shifts the available play space from "whatever we can think of" to "what buttons can we push on our character sheet". If the only hammers in your bag are Attack More and Cast Big Spell, you'll start every problem solving session by looking for nails. This firmly keeps the focus on what the system wants: violence. And it's no surprise! That's where most of the rules are, it's where most of the interesting mechanical interactions happen. Framing auxiliary buttons around it is natural.



Mythras Gameplay Drivers


Let's now look at the gameplay drivers for optimization in Mythras, what is encouraged most by its mechanics.

  • In order to maximize XP rolls, you need a high CHA and to stay around settlements, or, if you have a low CHA, you need to actively avoid them. There is a focus on communities as a driving force for how your character behaves.
  • To be powerful in combat, you'll need a high STR, SIZ for damage modifier, and 3 action points, so a high DEX and INT. But high numbers here means less XP or luck points, which are also important. Since your stat distribution doesn't change after character creation (outside rare circumstances), you are forced to interact with the skills system more. What skills you do or don't know define your character. Training through communities allows you to advance your skills the fastest.
  • A lot of fun rules are around the combat. It is fierce, fast and dangerous. Violence is fun! However, foes, particularly humanoids, will rarely fight to the death, making parley or de-escalation a viable option. Neither the players nor the bandits want to risk their limbs over a petty dispute. This means violence isn't always optimal. It's more of an emergent, urgent problem that needs to be addressed or handled carefully, rather than an expectation that is required to increase in power (you'll get XP rolls regardless).
  • To gain big bonuses to any skill, you can invoke your Passions. This means aligning your character or plot driven goals with your Passion is optimal since you'll succeed on tasks more. This also ties to the communities built around cults, which are the trainers of not just skills, but often the creators of Passions through Oaths.
XP rolls are important for improving combat skills, but also increasing other skills and acquiring new ones. Specializing in specific skills makes character naturally push or pull in directions that fit their character. A character with 100% in some Combat Style will want to solve problems with conflict, but one with 100% in Influence will want to talk their way out. Both are viable, and the preferred approach speaks more to the characters than the system expectations.


Mythras' Mundane Constraint


Mundane Constraint is actually stricter in Mythras than in the later editions of D&D. If you don't have Literacy, you can't even attempt the check, full stop. This is reminiscent of Trained Only skills in D&D, but the difference being that my players find it far easier to abstract it into Mythras. If you were never taught to fish with a rod, you can't just pick one up and expect a catch. Even if you personally know a lot about it, your character doesn't.

Gronk doesn't know how to read, and certainly can't navigate the Bureaucracy of the city's crime laws, but he feels good when his Survival and Craft(Leatherworking) skills are able to be used when staking out an enemy encampment.

Sarlas can not just read, but write! An exceptional Literacy and Deceit actually allows them to intercept, and re-write the battle plans headed to the enemy front...

A lack of access to skills more faithfully fulfills the idea of constraint as creativity, as they have limited options. If there is some wild solution they come up with ("Let's dam the river to dry out their water supply!") that requires a new skill (Engineering), then the learning and execution of that skill is an adventure in itself that tells us a lot about that character's expertise and life experience.




These are just some general observations I've had, but I wanted some outside input from you folks to see if you've had similar ideas or experiences!
 
Experience as a reward and power boost is a really baked in expectation in rpgs.

D&D's experience system is terrible and always has been. That's probably because it rewards a style of play that doesn't interest me. But, really, you have to consider the experience rates of different classes in that context and the various patches like the 1e DMG's thousands of GP to train and level up or second edition's fairly broken class specific rewards.

At the far end of the spectrum there are arbitrary rewards like Palladium, GURPS, and HERO give out. It reminds me of writing essays in English class where the secret isn't presenting your ideas clearly but telling the teacher what they want to hear. One more reason to take Blood Lust, Bully, and Sadist so you can get more experience for roleplaying I guess.

Well, I'm fond of the Rolemaster experience system. You get rewarded for what you do but actively doing something is necessary to being rewarded. There are modifiers for early use and banality First time x 5 xp hundreth time x 1/5 xp.

For Galaxies In Shadow, experience is strictly tied to the passage of time with 3 points per month slowly falling to nothing as a character ages. The activities involved open up learning experiences as you have to be actually doing something to improve at it. The Arcane Confabulation has a similar suggested rate and assumes a fifty year old will generally be twentieth level in something, even if it's not combat related.

Because, personally, as a player and a GM I'd rather know what I'm going to get and when I'm going to get it than having to sit up, beg, and roll over for the asshole at the head of the table. This probably goes back to that junior high group where the DM killed my character at least twice per session while the other PCs were 14th level, and riding personal dragons.
 
Experience as a reward and power boost is a really baked in expectation in rpgs.
And this is an expectation worth challenging, or at least reviewing. I can make a case that a game ought to be, and that a good game actually is, reward in itself to play, that players who have fun are amply rewarded by the fun and don't need an extrinsic reward; furthermore that it is better to enable the players to play the characters they want to play at the beginning and go on playing them until the campaign is over, rather than have them start with characters that are too weak and limited at the beginning, develop through a fleeting sweet spot of power and versatility, and then become too overpowered to be fun to play.

Some RPGs have already accepted this proposition. For example, Spirit of the Century did not reward play with character inflation nor bake in an expectation of continual power escalation. That worked fine.
 
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Different games, different players, different ways of having fun. Gameplay decisions driven by realism, greed, or optimization. Premises skipped or abandoned, unusual ideas adopted. There are lots of reasons to play TTRPG's, and even more to play some systems over others.

I've struggled with finding players outside of D&D 5e for a while, but broke out by playing Mythras about 2 years ago. The system instantly clicked for me, and eventually clacked for my regular group too, after their initial skepticism. I wanted to explore WHY exactly that happened by comparing how Mythras and D&D drive gameplay decisions through their systems. This is not meant as an indictment or denigration of either system, just what I've seen in my groups through the years.


D&D Gameplay Drivers


Let's observe gameplay drivers of D&D. I do not mean to say these are primarily what drives these systems as a whole, rather, what is most optimal or encouraged by its mechanics. What rewards you, in the system?
  • The core premise of the early editions was dungeon delving. This is what all of the main books supported: strange monsters, deadly dungeons and grimy environs. XP as gold made greed the motivating factor. To be greedy was to play the game optimally, as those players would accumulate more levels, magic items, and power. Stats are inferior to strategy.
  • 3.x games similarly encourage greed. To keep on track for the expected wealth-by-level, you'd need a certain amount of wealth. To do otherwise makes encounter planning as a DM difficult. XP from death also encourages violence. Though it is oft disparaged, the murderhobo is the most optimal way to play unless the DM takes special precautions to discourage that behavior.
  • 4e introduces carefully crafted systems for skills and combat abilities, which grow on their own from levels obtained from violence. Abilities encourage violence for its own sake, as that is where the core meat of the mechanics lie. Greed is still present, but expected wealth is more tightly baked into the system, with explicit callouts in DMG to include lavish treasure hoards.
  • 5e, with XP from violence, largely avoids greed, as magic items are not expected nor necessary for progression (aside from certain monster resistances).
The main drivers of power (levels, magic items) in D&D come from these motivations. This works perfectly well for dungeon delving, but problems arise when doing any other sort of premise using the system. It's simply not built for political intrigue, large scale warfare, or economic manipulation. The most common way to alleviate this is to do milestone leveling, which changes the motivation to character or plot driven goals. But this often falls apart due to a disconnect between what leveling rewards you with.

Obtaining more HP, combat abilities, and spells for blasting monsters means that even if you leveled up from helping the duke remove a curse on his heir, you've improved at combat. Even if it comes from other sources, ultimately, all actions cause you to foremost become better at violence. Skills improve too, but they will always be packaged with learning how to swing your sword faster too.


Buttons, Feats, and the Mundane Constraint


Of course, you can just homebrew the system! Break its knees and twist its bones around until it whimpers. Let the players start a bakery, invest in the cow trading market, and pay taxes. No matter how many surgeries you perform though, that frankenbeast will still want to delve some dungeons.

Historically, the way D&D has attempted to sew this frankenbeast up is to allow certain actions be only available through features or feats. This can work well if it suits the genre fiction: only allowing players who take Craft Staff make such magic staves feels interesting and impactful. A problem arises in the later editions, when some concepts are only available through a feature or feat, a button granting permission to do a specific task.

For example, the Chef feat allows you to do make special snacks and improve resting healing. By introducing this feat though, it implies that the only characters who can get a mechanical benefit from cooking must have this feat. Similarly, due to the existence of Imposter, only level 13 Rogues can be good enough mimics or actors. Hereafter, I will call this concept the Mundane Constraint.

Of course, there is also the early "skill" system in AD&D/2e that restricted things like Listening and Climbing Walls to the Thief only, but later supplements make those options more broadly applicable to other classes

We are used to saying that constraint breeds creativity. Limited tools or resources forces you to come up with novel solutions to problems. However, there is a problem with gating those solutions, especially if the players are drawing from real experience, behind mechanical barriers ("I can't clean this animal because I don't have this feat? I do this all the time when I hunt, it's super easy!").

The Mundane Constraint subtly shifts the available play space from "whatever we can think of" to "what buttons can we push on our character sheet". If the only hammers in your bag are Attack More and Cast Big Spell, you'll start every problem solving session by looking for nails. This firmly keeps the focus on what the system wants: violence. And it's no surprise! That's where most of the rules are, it's where most of the interesting mechanical interactions happen. Framing auxiliary buttons around it is natural.



Mythras Gameplay Drivers


Let's now look at the gameplay drivers for optimization in Mythras, what is encouraged most by its mechanics.

  • In order to maximize XP rolls, you need a high CHA and to stay around settlements, or, if you have a low CHA, you need to actively avoid them. There is a focus on communities as a driving force for how your character behaves.
  • To be powerful in combat, you'll need a high STR, SIZ for damage modifier, and 3 action points, so a high DEX and INT. But high numbers here means less XP or luck points, which are also important. Since your stat distribution doesn't change after character creation (outside rare circumstances), you are forced to interact with the skills system more. What skills you do or don't know define your character. Training through communities allows you to advance your skills the fastest.
  • A lot of fun rules are around the combat. It is fierce, fast and dangerous. Violence is fun! However, foes, particularly humanoids, will rarely fight to the death, making parley or de-escalation a viable option. Neither the players nor the bandits want to risk their limbs over a petty dispute. This means violence isn't always optimal. It's more of an emergent, urgent problem that needs to be addressed or handled carefully, rather than an expectation that is required to increase in power (you'll get XP rolls regardless).
  • To gain big bonuses to any skill, you can invoke your Passions. This means aligning your character or plot driven goals with your Passion is optimal since you'll succeed on tasks more. This also ties to the communities built around cults, which are the trainers of not just skills, but often the creators of Passions through Oaths.
XP rolls are important for improving combat skills, but also increasing other skills and acquiring new ones. Specializing in specific skills makes character naturally push or pull in directions that fit their character. A character with 100% in some Combat Style will want to solve problems with conflict, but one with 100% in Influence will want to talk their way out. Both are viable, and the preferred approach speaks more to the characters than the system expectations.


Mythras' Mundane Constraint


Mundane Constraint is actually stricter in Mythras than in the later editions of D&D. If you don't have Literacy, you can't even attempt the check, full stop. This is reminiscent of Trained Only skills in D&D, but the difference being that my players find it far easier to abstract it into Mythras. If you were never taught to fish with a rod, you can't just pick one up and expect a catch. Even if you personally know a lot about it, your character doesn't.

Gronk doesn't know how to read, and certainly can't navigate the Bureaucracy of the city's crime laws, but he feels good when his Survival and Craft(Leatherworking) skills are able to be used when staking out an enemy encampment.

Sarlas can not just read, but write! An exceptional Literacy and Deceit actually allows them to intercept, and re-write the battle plans headed to the enemy front...

A lack of access to skills more faithfully fulfills the idea of constraint as creativity, as they have limited options. If there is some wild solution they come up with ("Let's dam the river to dry out their water supply!") that requires a new skill (Engineering), then the learning and execution of that skill is an adventure in itself that tells us a lot about that character's expertise and life experience.




These are just some general observations I've had, but I wanted some outside input from you folks to see if you've had similar ideas or experiences!

Most of what you say about Mythras here was true of Runequest, the system Mythras is an extension of. It has always been the second major fantasy option for that reason I think.

I don't agree with everything you say about 5e, it is easily playable without Feats (which along with skills and multiclassing are expressly optional) for instance and has an elegant optional skill system nicked from 13th Age in the DMG, but lots of times I see people endlessly tweaking D&D rules when they'd be better off using another system like RQ/Mythras, WFRP or 13th Age.
 
And this is an expectation worth challenging, or at least reviewing. I can make a case that a game ought to be, and that a good game actually is, reward in itself to play, that players who have fun are amply rewarded by the fun and don't need an extrinsic reward; furthermore that it is better to enable the players to play the characters they want to play at the beginning and go on playing them until the campaign is over, rather than have them start with characters that are too weak and limited at the beginning, develop through a fleeting sweet spot of power and versatility, and then become too overpowered to be fun to play.

Some RPGs have already accepted this proposition. For example, Spirit of the Century did not reward play with character inflation nor bake in an expectation of continual power escalation. That worked fine.

I think this is another point in favor of Mythras for my group. There is progression, but it's very, very slow (I don't allow players to spend more than 1 XP roll on a single skill at a time). At the same time though, each % matters, since the players can often fail a roll by single digits. This means increasing a skill by, say, 3, feels really good.

It will also take a year or so of constant play to have a player reach absurdly high %'s in skills, but they won't get too brazen because of it. They still will only have 4 HP for their arms :devil:


Tying intrinsic (or the appearance thereof) motivations to extrinsic motivations is I think a strong reason my players are so sticky with the system. Oh, you want more powerful spells? You'll have to find a whole new cult, perform an initiation, raise your cult skills, gain their trust... and oops! You're roleplaying and having fun and find yourself involved in the world and maybe forget about that new spell entirely.
 
The problem here is a referee problem as well as a author problem not a system problem.

The author problem
D&D XP is what it is because that what Gygax focused on when developing the system namely the Greyhawk dungeons. So naturally he rewarded players for doing stuff in the dungeons. If he was more inspired by Fafhrd and the Grey Mousers adventures in Lankhmar I have no doubt the XP awards would the rewards of adventuring in a fantasy city.

Gygax wrote OD&D as an aide for an audience who were well aware of what it took to running campaign. Including tweaking things to fit what the campaign is about.

We can see this because this is what Dave Arneson did.

Each player increase in the ability in a given area by engaging in an activity in that area. For a fighter this meant by killing opponents (normal types of monster), their ability to strike an opponent and avoid the latter’s blows was increased.” (Wargaming issue 4.)

Blackmoor started out as a campaign where players went at each other in a fantasy setting. They were loosely group into two teams (Law and Chaos). Dave was known for being a great "seat of his pants" referee. Given his experience running Brausteins with each player having their own unique goals it not surprising that he adopted an XP system like the above.

The problem is that nobody including Gygax expected D&D to grow as fast or wide as it did. What written as an aide for a hobby in the midst of doing interesting scenario and campaign around gaming that more freeform escaped to a larger world used to game where you played by the rules and if you don't you are cheating. And this was never corrected fully. Instead the focus was on a cleaner presentation (various Basic D&D Editions) or more detailed presentation (AD&D). Both of which reinforced that D&D was a game meant to be played by its rules instead of how it originally developed as an aide for people used to developing their own campaigns.

The Referee
In a nutshell D&D, Mythras, and RPGs in general are not things where you are meant to play by the rules. Instead they are an aide that save you work running a campaign using a setting and a genre. They save you work in three area.

  • Providing a consistent framework to handle common things that players want to do in a specific setting or a setting based on a genre like fantasy. Combat comes up a lot. Magic for fantasy, starships for science fictions, etc. Different system exist because authors like to handle things in specific ways or at different levels of detail.
  • Providing advice and aides on how to run a campaign. AD&D's XP award system is an example. Structuring encounters and challenge levels found in D&D 3.X onwards is another.
  • Providing lists of ready to run material. Typically classes, templates, skills, spells, monsters, treasure, equipment.

In my experience, once a system is picked the main it system framework get altered is handle stuff that comes up that isn't covered. Or the referee likes most of the system but not how handle some elements.

I find that people tend to elevate, advice and aide on running a campaign as rules. I view this as a fallacy. They are there to help. Mythras, AD&D, D&D 5e do not break just because a referee alters or ignore this part of an RPG. I also find RPG authors have a bad habit of welding campaign aide too tightly with the system framework. Their thoughts on how a campaign ought to be runs muddles up the utility of the system in handling what players try to do as their character.

Of the three, the lists are the things altered the most. Character related lists not so much. But Monsters, Magic items, etc a lot.

Addressing the OP specifically. My AD&D campaign in early 80s is where I started to develop my ideas about sandbox campaign. I let players trash my settings and to make that fun and interested I had to be open to what they wanted to do as their characters. And I found the AD&D XP system with its focus on adventuring 24-7 to be in adquete to the task. So I came up with the following. AD&D didn't break, the players were glad of it which meant they could trash the setting on their own time table rather continue on traditional adventures like dungeons all the time just to get the XP. And they still felt like they were playing AD&D. Some really liked the fact they didn't have to grub for gold all the time.

I still use a descendent of the below for my Majestic Fantasy RPG. The main difference instead of being a roleplaying award, it became more of a milestone award based on the goals the players set for themselves. Whether they fought, adventured, roleplayed, plotted, or something, if they succeed in achieving a difficult goal they have set for themselves, like winning a throne, they get the highest award. As well as a lesser award along the way as they achieve things along the way.

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The OP's baseline assumption seems to be that player decisions are driven by extrinsic motivators (xp or other mechanical gains) rather than intrinsic motivation (doing what's fun). I would challenge that. It may apply to some players, but certainly not to all, and maybe not to the majority. I have the privilege of having run games for some of the same players for over 40 years. I have watched them play games with very diverse reward and advancement mechanics. I see very little difference in how they, as individuals, play these games. One friend is always the first to kick-in a door and initiate combat regardless of whether or not the game rewards it mechanically. He fights because he loves a fight. Another wants to figure out clever and unexpected ways to use his abilities because he enjoys emergent gameplay whether it leads to success and advancement or not. They all enjoy loot, whether the current game awards xp for it or not. I ran one campaign where advancement was just based on counting sessions, with no direct connection to what they did during the sessions. Nobody objected to that and they didn't play the game any differently.

I do also know players who do focus on advancement and the mechanisms that provide it. I have no problem with that, but they have always been the minority at my table.
 
The problem here is a referee problem as well as a author problem not a system problem...

The Referee
In a nutshell D&D, Mythras, and RPGs in general are not things where you are meant to play by the rules. Instead they are an aide that save you work running a campaign using a setting and a genre. They save you work in three area.

  • Providing a consistent framework to handle common things that players want to do in a specific setting or a setting based on a genre like fantasy. Combat comes up a lot. Magic for fantasy, starships for science fictions, etc. Different system exist because authors like to handle things in specific ways or at different levels of detail.
  • Providing advice and aides on how to run a campaign. AD&D's XP award system is an example. Structuring encounters and challenge levels found in D&D 3.X onwards is another.
  • Providing lists of ready to run material. Typically classes, templates, skills, spells, monsters, treasure, equipment.
In my experience, once a system is picked the main it system framework get altered is handle stuff that comes up that isn't covered. Or the referee likes most of the system but not how handle some elements.

I find that people tend to elevate, advice and aide on running a campaign as rules. I view this as a fallacy. They are there to help...
This is a very good point. We often use the phrase "my players have an issue with the system" when the system itself may be perfectly serviceable for what we like in gaming. It can be cut apart, modified, sewn together however we please, the issue is the precedent (your lists mentioned in the 3rd point) set by published materials.

Back when out group played AD&D, we felt far more comfortable ripping its limbs off and rearranging them in fun ways, as you've done with your XP system. For a brief 3 month period of play, one player exclusively leveled up by monopolizing the cow supply in a small city, defeating and draining political rivals of their power. Not a single attack roll was made.


I think it's more difficult to challenge "living" systems more than ones built decades ago. To go against the exact subclass structures set in 5e D&D just makes people uncomfortable. In fact, your 2nd and 3rd points are large sore points for 3.x/4e/5e specifically I think. These newer books "tell you how to run the game" by presenting you with rules, but offer little advice on how to actually... run a game! The advice can be drolly authoritative to fit other numbers in the system ("every player must have X gold pieces by level Y"), to totally tension breaking for inexperienced GM's ("if your players are bored, give them a surprise troll").

This issue is compounded when you try and look for WHY these decisions were made, as the design philosophy for each rules system is rarely explicit in the books. You'd better hope the author published an op-ed in a zine (for older editions) or has an active social media account (for newer) to get any clarification. This creates an atmosphere of sanctity that can be hard to dispel.

The OP's baseline assumption seems to be that player decisions are driven by extrinsic motivators (xp or other mechanical gains) rather than intrinsic motivation (doing what's fun). I would challenge that. It may apply to some players, but certainly not to all, and maybe not to the majority. I have the privilege of having run games for some of the same players for over 40 years. I have watched them play games with very diverse reward and advancement mechanics. I see very little difference in how they, as individuals, play these games. One friend is always the first to kick-in a door and initiate combat regardless of whether or not the game rewards it mechanically. He fights because he loves a fight. Another wants to figure out clever and unexpected ways to use his abilities because he enjoys emergent gameplay whether it leads to success and advancement or not. They all enjoy loot, whether the current game awards xp for it or not. I ran one campaign where advancement was just based on counting sessions, with no direct connection to what they did during the sessions. Nobody objected to that and they didn't play the game any differently.

I do also know players who do focus on advancement and the mechanisms that provide it. I have no problem with that, but they have always been the minority at my table.

Some of my players are absolutely extrinsic creatures, but as you've observed in your own group a majority are not. Everyone will show up regardless of what game we're playing, because we're all good friends anyhow.

The reason I chose to focus on the extrinsic in this discussion is because this was from a perspective of introducing players to a new system after sticking with a different one for a decade or so. In this switch, the extrinsic push and pull would be more obvious, as they have to recontextualize the actions they would typically perform. Immediately jumping to combat is now not a given, as the rewards won't usually measure up to the risk. They'd felt that fighting was a mechanical decision before, a wrote motion of the system, but never really knew that until they were able to take a step back (6-8 encounters per day in 5e was difficult to maintain when your players just want to start cow trading empires).


So though my players still stuck to their general habits, they felt more freedom in what they could do with the switch. One pair loves planning elaborate schemes, one loves seeing the numbers get big, another is there to play as a reptile, and so on. Mythras' rules tended to fit all of their desires better, and the more lax progression system permits an environment that better suits their preferred character types.


However, I posit that lining up extrinsic and intrinsic motivational desires for gaming is important for, well, making a good game. Pure extrinsic motivation gives you skinner boxes and gambling addictions, pure intrinsic motivation is too personality dependent to reliably hook players in. The best games are those that mix the two. To find each group's favorite game, you have to create it, and that necessitates molding systems to your own liking.

Of course, if you love a base system of rules enough, you can just hack it however you want, doing ridiculous things like adding Halo weapons and maps into Dark Souls. Nothing is stopping us.
 
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There is loads of advice and tools, including random tables to generate adventures, locations and encounters, of how to run a game for GMs in the 5e DMG and little of it has anything to do with gold by level or what have you.
 
You are right, Voros. I didn't clearly define advice, and it's true the DMG has loads of good stuff in it. This is sort of a separate specific gripe of mine, maybe deserving a different thread, but when I say "advice" I mean the sort of stuff that empowers a GM to be a, uh, generally good GM.

Being able to swiftly adjudicate satisfying interpretations of rules, come up with compelling story narratives, improv hairy situations, craft interesting yet pliable scenes... these are all things the book does not teach you, merely lets us know that they are options. Supplying tables and situations is immensely helpful, but newer GM's I tutor often struggle with this aspect of the book.


WotC has trained me to assume it's unreasonable of me to expect this of a GM's guide, and maybe they're right. If every system included these types of general advice, then people might start skipping the GM's advice book since the info may largely be the same. But if it is not taught in that book, then where should it be taught?

Most GM's learn these skills from experience, or have to read books specific to those subjects.
 
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