5 Million Ghosts

Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies Part 10/10

Welcome to Part 10 of Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies. You can find Part 1 here. In this series we discuss how games affect the behavior of their players, using Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set (1981, Ed. Tom Moldvay) as our example text. Part 10 drags us out of the dungeon into the blinding light of day, scarred, wiser and, hopefully, richer.

If you’ve made it this far, collect 2001 experience points.

Experience Teaches Us What Exactly?

As we draw to the conclusion of our investigation, what secrets have we gleaned from this edition of Dungeons & Dragons? We have found a collection of interlocking systems that enforces a bloody logic on its players, almost tricking them to believe that they are brave and strong when they are in fact vulnerable. At the same time, the interaction between those interlocking systems provides a secret economy that incentivizes players to behave like robbers, tricksters and treasure-hunters. While initially obscure, once they discover the truth, players are nudged by the game’s heuristics to investigate the value of other aspects of its systems like exploration, negotiation, magic and clever problem solving. Which points to a productive, effective motivational economy—even if its implementation is a bit devious.

In fact, its deviousness is key. In terms of our premise regarding the influence of the game’s motivational economies, the designers display the power of applying disincentive over incentive. Fighter X’s 5 million ghosts will attest that here is a game that unapologetically disincentivizes combat. As we have established, the encounter system represents combat as difficult to win and costly to lose. Each skirmish essentially requires each player to stake their current pot of 100, 500 or 1000 experience points to earn just 5 more. Grisly work, but also a clear lesson for us erstwhile game designers: Disincentive is a powerful reagent we can mix into our experiments. 

To return to the concept of establishing heuristics, the game extends its depth of play and creates more opportunities for learning by inviting players to invent their own heuristic trees—simple conventions as well as more subtle traditions that they develop through extended play and exposure to more situations and scenarios. By providing a seemingly simple answer, players leap to an obvious conclusion—if experience is rewarded for fighting, fighting must be good, but after playing enough to discover the hidden costs players realize that the disincentives to fighting are so strong that their early, simple heuristic was wrong. Disincentive in this case acts as a tool for guiding players through this learning process. And this negative reinforcement then creates the opportunity and incentive to explore the game's other systems and find a better heuristic for approaching combat (flight? parley? sorcery? trickery?). Thus the game system’s economy adds nuance and complexity to the heuristics tree, which in turn adds depth to the game and makes it more engaging for continued play.

Of course, this type of multi-session discovery carries a risk of obfuscating the core rules of the game and ejecting players before they’ve learned the full cycle of possibilities. The game can frustrate its players by asking its players to bring so much to the table, while slowly revealing that there are hidden and advanced play patterns hidden in the interplay of the rule systems. And the interaction of the game economy and player heuristics can add confusion for the new player who joins a group and learns from the other players at the table that no distinction is made between convention and rules. For good or for ill, the metagame of the group can replace the actual rules of the game as the source material that provides incentive and disincentive.

Some designers might ask why the game economy provides any reward for combat at all, if the procedure is otherwise so punishing. Why not instead award experience points directly for desired behavior, such as for “exploring” or similar dungeoneering activities that it represents? We submit that this is an elegant misdirection on the part of the game’s designers. If their game is an emulation of the fiction found in fantasy novels, they must admit that combat is something of a necessity, even as a last resort. However, they’re also pointing to a forbidding tower in the distance and saying to you, dear player, that both danger and reward lay within—literally and figuratively. And in confronting those dangers, exploration is not the end, but the means. Therefore, by placing an outsized value on acquiring treasure above all else set against a significant risk to combat, the designers create an incentive to carefully explore, navigate around traps and evade patrols as means to the ultimate end of acquiring experience points to increase in level, because at the successful conclusion of such maneuvers one should find a dragon’s hoard of treasure (and experience points). 

That said, the designers very much want the players to undertake dangerous risks and deadly gambits in desperate, last-ditch attempts to win whatever grail it is they seek. And, as a this is a roleplaying game in which players inhabit avatars rife with personality, the designers of Dungeons & Dragons understand that players need space in which to make *ahem* suboptimal decisions. Playing a roleplaying game is rarely about choosing an optimal path. When we play, we frequently make emotional decisions based on bad information. And if we seek to emulate the conventions of fantasy fiction, we must allow for the characters to make bad choices. To support this type of emulation within the game’s motivation economy, the designers make a most devious and subtle choice: while they set a high cost to thoughtless violence they also provide a small reward to players for making impulsive, dangerous decisions. Defeating the goblin, while hideously risky, is not entirely pointless. Hopefully, it advances the character toward their greater goal of treasure and, at least, provides the consolation prize of 5 experience points.

As the game itself attests, it contains many a perilous adventure, and so by its very nature, the designers can not prescribe a path for you to earn your reward. To do so would defeat its stated purpose. Instead, they invite you to choose from many routes, and learn strategies as you go, perhaps over many lifetimes. Their cleverly designed system guides you, no matter the path you choose. And, in the end, the glory and tales retold shall be the greatest reward. 

Next week, we begin a month of reflections on the game we’ve so thoroughly interrogated. We’ll publish a collection of lighter essays recounting pivotal moments of play and instrumental rules in the game that lead us down the path to our investigation of the game. First in the series, is the truth behind our exemplar, Fighter X.

If you’re eager for more, you can listen to episode 2 of our companion podcast, The Hypothesis, here or anywhere podcasts are syndicated.

Until then, we are your Ludological Alchemists.

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Thank You

We would like to thank our patient readers who provided copious amounts of feedback over many iterations of this article: Laurent Doan, Chloe, Tommi Brander, Quincy, Thor Olavsrud and Tommy DiPiero.