In a piece last week, I make the comment that “At my tables, XP also result from making things better for the other people at the table, something I’ll talk about in more detail later on (but probably not today).” This, being a different day (although today on whatever day you read it), seems a good one for talking about one of the “making things better for other people at the table” I have tended to reward with additional XP; I have often had players vote for the player other than themselves whom they felt did the best job of roleplaying at the table that session, and I’ve awarded that player premium XP for the commendation of their fellows (usually something like one-fifth to one-third of the “regular” reward for the session).

In practice, it was a small thing, just a collection from those at the table of slips of paper with someone else’s name on them and counting up who got how many votes. In effect, however, it proved a powerful motivator. As I remark in the earlier piece and as is clear to most who have sat to table, the promise of a reward spurs quite a bit of effort and action; most any time XP are up for grabs, players pay attention and go out of their way to get the reward. As is also clear from experience, in many if not most cases, people are motivated by the acclaim of their peers; having evidence that those in a person’s acquaintance value the contributions made does a lot to spur more such contributions. Since in this case the “contributions” being rewarded were particular at-table behaviors, those at the table largely regulated themselves to that end, pushing further into character development and narrative engagement, even if occasionally at the expense of mechanical effectiveness. That is, they would go further into role-play as opposed to the roll-play that I have seen take over tables and towards which many who come to the older tabletop roleplaying game from the more ubiquitous and younger massively multiplayer online roleplaying game or from similarly structured single- or limited-multiplayer games tend.

I’ve not implemented it with my Hanlon players yet. I think I’ve remarked before that the program that has given rise to Hanlon is something of a pilot; there’s one more session to play that I know of, and I do not know if matters will continue afterward. I hope they do, and if they do, I think I will put the practice back into practice at my table. It’s a good one, and with such young players as I currently have, I think it will do much to help them learn to do more than come up on the rules (which is not a bad thing to do, in itself, but the game is more than the rules, really). I think it will help them get better at finding and filling their roles, and it will make them better players at the next tables they join.

I try to be helpful. Sometimes, it even works.

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