The Incentive to Kill in Dungeons & Dragons

Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies Part 1

Welcome to the first series on Ludological Alchemy, Motivations in Roleplaying Game Economies. This idea began as a footnote in another piece that metastasized into this 10-part series. In it we discuss how games can affect the behavior of their players, using Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set (1981, Ed. Tom Moldvay). Part 1 paints our thesis and sets up the framework for the discussion. Installments will publish weekly on Fridays. We hope you enjoy the read. It gets pretty gory—both in terms of dissecting games as well as the viscera of many dead D&D characters.

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All games have rules, whether they are written as a text, known as a tradition or conveyed verbally in the moment prior to play. Rules provide the framework necessary to play the game—to operate its systems and produce results that you would not otherwise, in another context. They are necessary to guide player behavior and create experiences.

While rules texts instruct, insist, implore and perhaps even inveigle, they often lack force. A game’s text cannot police its players’ behaviors. Though we believe most players attempt to operate the game according to its rules, a certain subset of players seems to love ignoring them for their benefit, while others innocently forget rules in the heat of the action of play. Is it possible for a game’s own rules to motivate players to use them? More specifically, is it possible to build systems within roleplaying games that create incentives for following the rules or behaving in a certain way? It certainly is. 

Motivational Economies

Player motivations are many, but a simple motivation in games in general is that of competition. Thus most game rules provide motivation to win, whether simply for bragging rights or, in gambling games, to take home the pot. Roleplaying game rules do not typically incorporate competition conditions. They are most often cooperative or collaborative exercises. Without the idea of competition, what other resources does a roleplaying game designer have to draw in their prospective players into engaging with their game’s systems?

Game economies provide the most powerful motivators for players as they weigh moment-to-moment decisions in roleplaying games. These economies are systems that present incentives and disincentives to player choices. The most basic version of a game economy rewards a player for one type of choice and penalizes them for another type of choice. These rewards and penalties in the rules create suggestions of optimal play which players internalize. Thus incentivized, players typically choose actions for which they are rewarded (and often cry foul when that same economy penalizes other actions). 

While the rules may present to the player a menu of options, players still must choose from that menu. To facilitate such decisions, players often bundle choices together into groups or sequences called “heuristics.” These bundles then become conventions that players follow in order to rapidly operate the game in an optimally perceived manner. Thus, a game’s rules can imply optimized play patterns and behavioral conventions that become player practice. 

For example, a simple heuristic for the classic game of chess is to seize the middle of the board. Players learn it early, as the actual rules of chess make it a generally advantageous strategy. 

Further play can modify, contradict or add new heuristics as players become more experienced with the impact of their choices. Player practice and convention can also create modified environments, or ‘metagames’, that bundle existing conventions and even invite new heuristics to counter common play patterns that emerge from collections of heuristics. 

In a community of play, as heuristics achieve wide adoption, new rules of practice arise that are tuned specifically to the environment created by this play community. In a small chess-playing community, if most players believe they must seize the middle, playing to establish a castled defense and attack the edges of the opponent’s territory becomes a new optimal play pattern. The interaction of these heuristics creates a metagame with new traditions that are not a part of the game itself, nor specifically implied by it. In a game economy, players can establish conventions that modify the reward structures to engage community play—such as players of a cooperative game evenly dividing all rewards so players are incentivized to do the best thing for the group, rather than the best thing for themselves.

With all that established, we intend to examine how economies in roleplaying games create incentive and disincentive. To begin our investigation, we select perhaps the earliest motivational system developed for roleplaying games: earning experience points. In this type of system, during the course of a roleplaying game session, players undertake certain actions with their characters to meet predefined criteria. These actions trigger a system-driven disbursement of reward points which accumulate in a bank or reserve. When the accumulated point total reaches a certain level—often determined by the character’s profession selected in character creation—the character gains some skill or power. 

Even this simple system of accruing points to track progress is subject to numerous interpretations and variations. Most obviously, each game states its own criteria to earn experience points in its setting. In the Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set (TSR, 1981), the text assigns experience point value to two categories of game objects: gold coins and monsters. Gaining, capturing or stealing treasure earns experience equal to its value in gold coins: 1 experience point per gold coin carried out of the dungeon back to town. Whereas defeating a monster earns experience points equal to a formula present in the rules but, broadly speaking, the higher level and more powerful a monster, the more points it is worth. However, the rewards for violence are comparatively paltry. Defeating a goblin is worth 5 experience points, the equivalent of five gold coins. What would you rather do, fight a goblin or scrape a handful of coins out of some slimy dungeon? This question is not an idle one. It’s key to understanding the game economy and attendant player decisions in Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set.¹ 

In this edition of the venerable roleplaying game, the amount of points required to advance in character level ranges from the low 1200 for thieves to the high 4000 for elves. Fighters fall in the mid-range and require 2000 experience points to reach second level. Improving in level grants more hit points, special abilities and spells for each class.

By setting these values within its experience system, Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set creates the central cycle of its economy: accumulate experience by defeating monsters and collecting treasure to increase the effectiveness of your character. The values the designers assigned to these criteria hint at heuristics for player behavior, informing player decisions as they engage with the game’s other systems like combat, magic or special abilities—though how the player’s actions relate to the experience point disbursements is not immediately clear. For example, the thought of battling monsters in their underground lairs is an exciting one. The imagery it conjures harkens back to primal stories like Beowulf crawling into the lair of Grendel’s mother to end her draconic reign of terror, or Bilbo sneaking into Smaug’s lair. Does the game’s reward economy match such expectations that its players bring to the table? Do the heuristics the game suggests help players establish productive play patterns?

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Find out the answers to these questions and more in our next installment: What is the D&D® Game All About? In which we discuss what D&D’s text says its about as opposed to what the rules demonstrate. Subscribe below to get the next installment!

Knotwork skull art by Darlene.

1. Our article uses TSR’s 1981 publication of the Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set text as our primary source for an example of an experience point system and motivational economy. A passing familiarity of the game’s rules and concepts is recommended for the reader.