Spes Magna Games

Are you a DM who wants a little more oomph from your players? Do they need some incentive to play their roles with more feeling? Even if your players are bona fide thespians, there’s likely still room for improvement. But how?

Many DMs award extra XP for “good role-playing” during gaming sessions. This can be a fine thing to do, but in my experience these rewards tend to be inconsistently awarded and most often follow the Squeaky Wheel Maxim*. In worst case scenarios, “good roleplaying” XP awards may hurt feelings. What seemed like a good idea may turn out not being very fun, and what’s the point of playing a game if you’re not having fun?

If I’ve learned nothing after more than a decade as a classroom teacher, I’ve learned that praise and rewards best motivate desired behavior. For rewards to be most effective, they need to be tangible and linked to specific criteria. The latter is key. Tangible criteria put the burden of success on the one seeking the reward.

Rewarding Roleplaying uses three criteria to encourage and reward better roleplaying. Best of all, the responsibility for establishing these criteria belongs to the players. They set their own roleplaying goals. When they meet their goals, you the DM hand out the reward in the form of an Action Point, which is then used by the player to achieve greater levels of success in the game.

Rewarding Roleplaying isn’t just geared toward DMs. It’s main focus is you, the one running a player character. You’ve created a character for the game. Your character has stats and abilities and all sorts of bonuses, skills, and feats. Clever use of these statistics during gameplay is key to your character’s success and acquisition of XP, wealth, and magic items.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were criteria by which your character could receive specific rewards that aided your character’s in-game success doing those heroic, exciting things that adventurers so often do?

As noted above, Rewarding Roleplaying uses three criteria to encourage and reward better roleplaying. Best of all, the responsibility for establishing these criteria belongs to the players.

You set your own roleplaying goals. When you meet your goals, the DM hands out the reward in the form of an Action Point, which you use to achieve greater levels of success in the game.

*The Squeaky Wheel Maxim states that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In RPGs, this can be seen when the loudest, most insistent player gets the lion’s share of the DM’s attention.

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