Timing new capabilities/Rewards
Here's something that a single-player videogame can trivially do that's hard in a tabletop RPG:
Give a new capability to the player at the very moment they've proved their mastery of the old one.
You're probably familiar with this from games like Zelda and Okami: you need to use a particular tool or brush-stroke just right to beat a boss. When you win, you get the satisfaction of having grokked the tool, and then the game hands you a new tool as a reward. Bang! You're off on a new learning adventure while you're still high on completing the first one.
This is tough in a tabletop. You've got three-to-five players who grok at different rates, and little control over the content. If the group wipes against the tricky boss, they can't just try again, and even if they could, the time investment is much larger (particularly since time at the table, where four-six people have been coordinated to show up for four hours or so, is far more precious than the same amount of ad-hoc videogaming time).
It'd be cool to see a reactive system that let people learn at their own pace without balance gaps opening up between the players. I want to think about that, but it's probably not practical in the space I'm currently working in. I think if you're not exercising a tight control over the game, you've got to average things out, picking a pace where the biggest slice of players will run through their learning loops without getting bored. I think that's probably a minimum of three scenes of capability use between new capabilities.
But what that implies is you can't use the capability-as-reward mechanic technique. New capabilities are absolutely rewarding, but you want them coming out at a controled, constant rate for everyone. What I want to explore is putting reward/incentive mechanics in the fiction layer (as well as the resource layer, like Exalted), and I suspect that indie games have a lot to teach me there.
"Congratualtions: for being awesome, you've won a Colour Scene."
"Congratulations: for kicking ass, you've won the right to determine who the Princess is actually in love with."
Give a new capability to the player at the very moment they've proved their mastery of the old one.
You're probably familiar with this from games like Zelda and Okami: you need to use a particular tool or brush-stroke just right to beat a boss. When you win, you get the satisfaction of having grokked the tool, and then the game hands you a new tool as a reward. Bang! You're off on a new learning adventure while you're still high on completing the first one.
This is tough in a tabletop. You've got three-to-five players who grok at different rates, and little control over the content. If the group wipes against the tricky boss, they can't just try again, and even if they could, the time investment is much larger (particularly since time at the table, where four-six people have been coordinated to show up for four hours or so, is far more precious than the same amount of ad-hoc videogaming time).
It'd be cool to see a reactive system that let people learn at their own pace without balance gaps opening up between the players. I want to think about that, but it's probably not practical in the space I'm currently working in. I think if you're not exercising a tight control over the game, you've got to average things out, picking a pace where the biggest slice of players will run through their learning loops without getting bored. I think that's probably a minimum of three scenes of capability use between new capabilities.
But what that implies is you can't use the capability-as-reward mechanic technique. New capabilities are absolutely rewarding, but you want them coming out at a controled, constant rate for everyone. What I want to explore is putting reward/incentive mechanics in the fiction layer (as well as the resource layer, like Exalted), and I suspect that indie games have a lot to teach me there.
"Congratualtions: for being awesome, you've won a Colour Scene."
"Congratulations: for kicking ass, you've won the right to determine who the Princess is actually in love with."