"Freeform" chat-based play has no reward mechanics. It has, in fact, no official mechanics at all, but we all know that just means that the System is informal. But just like informal resolution mechanics spring up in such freeform play, so do actual reward mechanics, and I'd like to talk about that.

Short introduction: I am talking about character-ownership narrative games here. People play via chat or forum posts. Character ownership starts at the skin; you decide how your character is impacted by anything that happens around it. NPCs are controlled by those players who introduce them; environment elements are usually fair game (the same tavern might have a raging ogre for one group of players and a juke box for another at the same time, with some people deciding to ignore some elements and others accepting them all).

Now: as the player has total control over the character, old-fashioned reward mechanics make no sense. You can make your character as powerful as you like (though your impact on any other PC remains at their discretion). You don't make rolls or have any other places at which to use currency.

So what kind of reward, other than "fun of play", do you get?

I believe the answer is: you gain influence among the other players.

A character who's established, who's been played a lot over time, actually does become more effective. People defer to the player of that character more often, because seniority (and perceived "skill" of whatever someone thinks is "good roleplaying") brings status. Also, someone whose character is interconnected to many others is often seen as more important and therefore their input has more weight.

This, like all aspects of System in a freeform environment, is not very tangible, but if you've been playing in those fora for a while, you can identify those dynamics happening over and over again.

And I believe that this "status" is a powerful motivator, just like any formal reward mechanic.

I'm bringing this up because I was going to chime in to the discussion about reward mechanics with something like, "Well, freeform playing has none." But I don't think that's actually true.

Thoughts?

Sounds like the normal behaviour of any self-organising network. Long-established nodes become more connected; more-connected nodes gain connections faster. The rich get richer.

Everyone: please re-read this thread (especially the second half of Xenopulse's original post), substituting the word "designer" for "character", "design" for "roleplaying", and "Story-Games" or "The Forge" for "freeform".

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

I know - I just feel like I'm playing Neville Longbottom sometimes. Or perhaps even one of the indistinguishable Patils. :( It's like all the good characters were taken - I would have taken Pomona Sprout, at least she knows what she's doing and people respect her...

sigh...

In many cases I think the lack of a clear-cut and reasonable reward system is one reason freeform play doesn't get anywhere. Since the chief purpose is (usually) celebration of some source material, that gets done every time someone posts. As a result, there's no special reason to keep posting if you don't feel like it. There's no intermittent reinforcement like D&D's levelling up or Dust Devils' climactic showdown.

Why take a shower? You'll only get dirty tomorrow.

Not necessarily entertaining. Showering with one's significant other is a completely different experience.

Ye gods, why do I type these kinds of things in a thread related to fanfiction?

Interminability is indeed a problem. To use D&D as an example, this is one of the reasons I liked the old Immortals boxed set and the Dragon Kings supplement for Dark Sun far, far, far more than the Epic Level Handbook. In the former two, things changed. You'd been playing for long enough and gotten enough power that the whole setting changed in response. The old stuff is child's play now. The ELH, however, was a tool to play "more of the same" - just more D&D, with more stats, more HP, and bigger and stupider traps. You could have just started over Diablo II style, fighting the Ur-Orc Horde and giving everything an extra 300 HP or so; nothing would change. Boring as heck.

Posted By: Joshua BishopRobyVax, are you sayingShower: the Scrubbinatingwould be a fun game to play? ;)

Especially so depending on who the other players are! >8}

So I've been thinking about this, and I think everyone is wrong :)

The reward mechanism that Christian is proposing isn't actually really related to the game at all. That reward mechanism, the networking/power/social thing? That's an outcome of all social interaction. It's true of a discussion board like Story Games as much as it is true of freeform roleplaying. It's even true of regular roleplaying.

Think about it, you know that your friend Jill is really, really good at this sexy Russian accent. If you're playing a game like Universalis then you're going to default to giving her the characters with the sexy Russian accents. Now maybe that new guy Jack is actually better at the things than she is, but you don't know that yet. He's new! Maybe after you've played with him for a while you'll find out and then you can give either of them the sexy Russian characters.

So, I'm going to suggest that there's something else at work in why people engage in freeform play. Well, multiple things actually.

1. It provides a locus of socialization on the internet. In the same way that Story Games or the Forge or RPG.net or #indierpgs or the Foundry do. The internet is a fascinating social tool for all sorts of reasons, but here's a couple of them: it permits people to connect with niche interests that are not large enough to sustain a local social group, and relatedly it tends to span time constraints due to the size of the group, you can generally find someone to talk to.

2. It provides a place to create fiction (or, perhaps, a place to create shared aesthetic experiences). This is why I think people are involved in freeform rather than hanging out in Story Games. There's something that freeform does that Story Games doesn't.

That's my take, and it's not really pointing toward a reward mechanism (yet). I've got more thinking yet to do.

NOTE: I consider almost every use of the term 'freeform' in this thread to refer to the subset undertaken online, and most references to refer to a subset of that. Face-to-face freeform has different, if similar, dynamics. Also note that there are numerous examples of online freeform play that are not indefinite. They play through cycles with characters retiring and plot lines being set aside. Admittedly these sorts of things are rarely codified and generally just happen as things 'feel' right, but that's been pretty functional in a number of places I've looked.

Thomas

Christian, I paraphrase your post to say that social dynamics are a major underpinning of narrative say in free-form (online) gaming. Is that correct? It matches the descriptions I've gotten from others about they dynamics you see on these forums, and also what has been described to me as happening often in live action free-form situations. New people on the fringes have a hard time becoming involved in plotlines because they are not part of the social in-clique, therefore their character has less access to experience that can allow them to progress etc. Also, folks who don't have an intuitive understanding of the kinds of informal procedures in action get sidelined big time.

This is 100% system matters and the lumpley dealio in action. In the absence of agreed upon procedures, the social interactions between players become the defacto system.

Thomas, are your suggestions part of in-game reward cycles? Or reasons why people play? They, along with Christian's example, point to informal cycles I've seen in play.

creativity: free form play, of whatever stripe, has as its primary reward the creation of in-game events, material etc. Think about how allocation of narrative rights have become a huge part of mechanical systems: people want to be able to be creative, and giving them the right to do so is a powerful reward. How this is allotted and allocated in free-form is not as regulated by reproducible procedures, though, instead it often comes down to things like the informal social networks that Christian points out. Because of:

reinforcement and mirroring: what is real in a game world is what gets played/with. If everyone else ignores or doesn't know about what you've made up, it may as well not exist. So, the people who are the most "powerful" creatively speaking in freeform, are the ones whose ideas get picked up on and incorporated into the play of others. Those whose actions affect others and who end up having them reverberate around the shared creation. This can be done via any channel depending on the type of play: character action, background creation, informal discussion out of character, or "gming" (which in free-form, means setting the parameters of play, use of props, dissemination of information, creation of guidelines and intervention/adjudication. damn, online gms can do a hell of alot, more even, than tabletop ones, in a way, because there may be so many more people involved. same with large larps).

positioning: this is a wierd one that seems to arise out of the way that narrative control is not parcelled out in a regulated way in freeform. Other folks may have had very different experiences, so take it with a grain of salt. Anyway, what it is is setting up in-game events and interpretations to support your following (character) actions. For example, if I want to shoot your character with a gun, I have to first establish that there is a gun present, that it is loaded etc. If I want to kill your character, I will have to establish, and get others to collaborate with me in establishing, that my character can keep yours from escaping, that mine has the ability to successfully shoot yours, that help will not arrive in time etc. Instead of a die roll, based on various things that represent all this stuff, it has to be negotiated, or simply spoken and accepted as "what has happened" in order for it to occur. So in freeform, you may be thinking (even unconsciously) three moves down the road, in order to back yourself up on future actions.

Well, that's a couple anyway. Sorry to go on. It is a big thing for me, though, that there are systems in there, even if they are unspoken and little understood.

best,
Em

Um, JD, see my post above about development not requiring an increase in scale. That's a D&D fallacy.

JW, I was replying to the idea that D&D had no reward cycle because there's always something bigger to fight. That is only true if gaining more cool toys isn't fun to you.

Then I wanted to discount the idea that this could be easily applied to freeform games, which are often about relatively static source material - TV shows, movies, comics, etc.

So all I can say is "Yes! You got my point exactly in that post! Congratulations!"