This is where improv comes in. I’m sure I don’t need to describe improv to you. The basic point is this: you need to have just enough random facts at your disposal that you can deploy them as necessary in a yes, and situation. If this becomes a crime scene, you need to have some stats for cops. If this becomes a fight, you need some stats for mooks, monsters, what have you. If this becomes a criminal conspiracy, you need some criminals, and so on.
The great thing about these improv stats is, you don’t need them for one scenario. You need them for all scenarios. Which means you can re-use them as needed.
Money Heist
It’s not often you see an armored car taken out by bank robbers armed with anti-tank weapons.
A while back I mentioned Improv Stats. What does that look like?
In any game, no matter the setting or system, there is some kind of law enforcement. Someone represents The Man. In some games the players fill that role (hello Mutant City Blues, didn’t see you there) but in most cases the police are potential antagonists, or at least complications to a scene.
I’m going to use Night’s Black Agents in this example, but this could apply to any system or setting.
Night’s Black Agents, the spy v vampire thriller espionage RPG, does provide stats for police, dogs, vehicles and weaponry. A quick cut and paste makes an easy cheat sheet for those moments when it’s all gone a bit Pete Tong and you have to run a combat or a chase on the fly. A few extra cut and pastes make more cheat sheets for chase complications (is the street busy? Narrow? Is that a busload of nuns?). Is that what I meant by improv stats?
Not exactly.
Don’t get me wrong; I loves me some cheat sheets. They have saved my bacon more times than I care to count. But when I mentioned Improv Stats I was talking about how a potential actor in a scene might Act or React.
Think of it like this:
When someone Acts, they take the initiative. In this case, they do a thing that complicates the scene.
When someone Reacts, they take the back seat. Because you complicated the scene, they had to do something.
I deliberately chose that scene from Spanish crime thriller Money Heist because the Heist writers are very good at sketching in characters who they use again and again. Colonel Luis Tamayo (Fernando Cayo) from the clip is a case in point; he barely appears in the early seasons, then shows up as the main police antagonist in the remaining seasons. Meanwhile his predecessor Colonel Alfonso Prieto (Juan Fernández Mejías) features heavily in the early seasons but still shows up in the later ones as the man you love to hate. You know who these people are the minute they walk on screen, and what they’re likely to do.
There’s a quote that has been attributed to several different people and which may be apocryphal, about German officers and their qualities. It goes like this:
I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.
Once upon a time I talked about things to steal from D&D, and I’m going to add another thing to steal: the social map, in which non-combat encounters with NPCs are affected by whether or not that NPC is Hostile, Indifferent or Friendly.
With those two things in mind, Improv Stats: in which everyone can be classified as Clever, Industrious, Lazy, or Stupid, with the qualifier Hostile, Indifferent or Friendly.
Physical stats – how strong they are, how charismatic, what pools they may have in Scuffling and similar, all are irrelevant to Improv Stats. Those are things that might affect player versus NPC tests – combat tests, effectively – and that’s not what Improv Stats are about. Improv Stats are about giving you, the (Director/DM/What-have-you) something on which to base your portrayal of the NPC in question.
Let’s say the policeman is Friendly, Stupid and Industrious. In any given encounter with your players, that’s what this policeman is like. These three qualities ought to give you enough to portray the NPC in any given situation. It doesn’t matter if the policeman is also, say, bald, or gangly, or wears an ill-fitting uniform. That kind of thing isn’t useful. It might lend a bit of spice, but that’s all.
With those qualities, you have Inspector Clouseau. That’s exactly what he is: friendly, stupid, industrious. If he were friendly, clever and industrious he'd be Inspector Zenigata. Either one can Act, or React, depending on those characteristics. What happens next can be developed in play.
You don’t need a character sheet for this or a spread of stats, or potential pool spends. That kind of thing is helpful but not critical to your portrayal. But if you know he’s friendly, stupid and industrious then you have a rough idea of what this particular policeman will do in any given situation.
You can add more to Improv Stats, of course. It might be great to have a picture, or a list of potential names, a standard equipment list. But you don’t need any of those things. All you need is a brief description, with that list of qualifiers giving you the bare bones of the character.
Let’s say that this is a heist, and your players are walking out of the bank in the dead of night with their arms full. Bags of cash. Swag. The getaway car is just a few steps away.
Into the scene walks Friendly, Stupid, and Industrious, either Acting or Reacting.
What do you think he’d do? Because that determines what will happen next.
Life, mostly. Anything and everything can be turned into grist for the mill. I've taken inspiration from a church fete, from Greek myth and a dozen other things besides. It's all there for the taking. Which is why, in my collection, I've books about train wrecks, ghost towns in British Columbia, about New York, London, Paris, the Lusitania, flying aces, domesticating drink, flim flam, stage magic - the list goes on and on, but the point is you need to absorb as much as possible, even if all you take on at first reading is the skim version. You need to have a decent grasp of what's out there before you can start work.
Sin eating is an old funerary practice. The eater takes on the sins of the dead, symbolized by eating a ritual meal handed to them over the coffin of the deceased. Munslow got into the practice when his children died and carried on as a service to the community. Given that Munslow died in 1906 it's reasonable that the practice is still well known in the 1930s, prime Bookhounds territory.
If adding a bit of mythos to the ritual, charnel god Mordiggian is the best fit. The progenitor of the ghouls, that ancient symbol of decay. The main book gives several versions but I'm going to use this one:
Mordiggian, the Charnel God, appears as an enormous, worm-like mass of death, darkness, and corruption. Its idols resemble limbless, eyeless, rotting corpses. Its exact form shifts like time-lapse photography of putrescing flesh and is hard to determine, not least because the Great Old One absorbs all heat and light in a room.
With that I give you:
A Hearty Meal
du Bourg's has suffered a financial reversal and a tragedy: the eldest of the family, Edouard, has passed away at the grand old age of 42. Nobody's entirely sure about the cause of death; only the family know for certain and they're not saying.
However, there's no storm without a silver lining and this time the silver is a sale: du Bourg's is clearing out some of its older material at bargain prices, in a keep-the-lights-on blowout. The auction is to be held at do Bourg's, after hours.
To get in, prospective buyers have to pass one simple test: they must eat a portion of Edouard's sins, passed to them in pie form over Edouard's open casket. Nobody knows for certain what's in that pie. Except that's it's packed full of meat.
As the Bookhounds approach du Bourg's on the appointed day they see one of their rivals stumble out of du Bourg's, retching. The rival flees down the street rather than answer any questions.
Now it's their turn at the pie.
Option 1: Charnel Meat. This, the investigators will realize (potential Mythos spend), is a ritual to Mordiggian. It's not clear why Edouard's brothers and sisters chose this ceremony to honor their departed brother. What is clear is that the meat is Edouard's. A nibble is enough to get entry to the auction; a hearty bite earns them a special scene with Mordiggian itself, as the room gets colder and darker by the moment. Of course, they could fake it; Filch may help them pretend to have a bite. Faking it may fool Edouard's brothers and sisters but Mythos old ones aren't so easily betrayed, and Mordiggian will mark the defaulter down in its own special charge book.
Option 2: Rashomon. Eating the pie puts the eater in a temporary dream state in which they relive Edouard's last day on earth. They discover that Edouard was murdered; the question is, by who? Was it his sister Eloise, who wanted advancement in the family business but was never going to get it while her brother was alive? His second-in-command, Marcus Shelby, who was afraid that Edouard had finally realized that Shelby was fiddling the books? Was it his brother Daniel, who was afraid that Edouard's worship of Mordiggian had taken him down a cannabalistic path that could only end with a death in the family?
Option 3: Adulterated Meat. The pie has been unknowingly dosed with some of the Elixir of Kathulos, prized by the Hsieh-Tzu Fan. Edouard's sister Eloise did the dosing; she found the stuff amongst Edouard's possessions and mistook it for an exotic spice. Edouard wasn't an enemy of the Hsieh-Tzu Fan but he was hardly a friend; he'd been hired by one of his more eccentric clients to acquire the stuff and acquire it he did, but the Hsieh-Tzu Fan found out and killed Edouard. The cult wants its Elixir back and there's still a good portion of it left; anyone who ate some of the pie can find the rest. Of course, eating strange elixirs found in funeral meat has its own complications ...
This week’s post comes courtesy of something I disliked.
Fuss! Fume!
I was reading an article about low-level encounters for Dungeons & Dragons groups, encounters which weren’t just ‘go kill the rats in my basement,’ and, while I appreciated the sentiment, the suggested alternatives were … dull.
Unbearably dull.
As in, I would leave the campaign if you tried that crap on me, dull.
The big difficulty Dungeons and Dragons has is that it’s still dragging around Chainmail’s corpse. At heart, it’s a skirmish wargame. Its mechanics, spells, equipment and ethos is all about reducing the other fella’s hit points to zero as quickly as possible.
Other fantasy games do this. GUMSHOE’s Swords of the Serpentine does this. But the difference between Dungeons and Dragons and Swords of the Serpentine is, Swords doesn’t start you off at level 1 and say ‘go forth, hero, and do great deeds.’ With Swords, and games like it, your character starts pretty much at the peak of their career and things can only get better. Whereas in D&D and its iterations you start with a handful of hit points and a gleam in your eye.
A gleam which is quickly extinguished if, say, a goblin punches you in the unmentionables. Fury of the Small is not to be sneezed at.
Other games choose other solutions. Ars Magica deals with this problem by giving you a half-dozen characters or more per player, so if one gets chewed up by a rampaging beast there’s another four or five behind them to fill the gap. Ars also focuses on story goals rather than combat goals, because it didn’t start life as a skirmish wargame with dreams of grandeur.
But Dungeons and Dragons is a skirmish game which means the solution to any problem posed in the campaign is often ‘hit it till it falls down, then hit it again.’ It’s the wargamer mentality. Nobody asks a Civil War tabletop gamer to hug it out; Lincoln didn’t defeat Davis in a spelling bee. Though it would have saved a lot of lives if he did.
Which is why ‘kill the rats in my basement’ is such a popular trope. Rats are small. They have almost no hit points. Their damage output is minimal. It’s a quest that can reasonably be achieved by even the most incompe … the most inexperienced group.
Still, there are only so many basements to go around. Eventually your band of pest controllers will run out of rats. Or get bored hitting them. What to do?
Before I start talking about scenarios, let’s nail down some basic principles.
1)Keep the combat to a minimum.
Yes, there will be combat. It’s still a combat-focused game. But the characters only have so many hit points and short rests plus clerics working overtime is not going to solve that problem. Plan for one or two thrilling fight scenes, not The Game Of Death.
It’s fine if the combat is nonlethal. Particularly in an urban setting where there’s active law enforcement and the death penalty (also known as hanging, drawing, quartering and there goes your weekend) it’s perfectly reasonable for the average ne’er-do-well to prefer nonlethal over lethal violence.
2)Make sure there are exciting things to do.
This ought to be obvious but time has taught me that the obvious is anything but. These are heroes. They need to be doing heroic things. Sure, Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables, but he did it in a heroic way and it was one of his twelve heroic tasks. It wasn’t his Sunday second job.
3)Make it fantastic.
This is a fantasy world where Gods, Devils and things beyond imagining walk the earth. Where physics and chemistry take a back seat to mystics in tune with the mythic forces of the universe. One of the reasons why busting rats in basements gets boring is that it’s just rats, just a basement. Where’s the drama in that?
With all that in mind, let’s talk scenario ideas.
The Laughing Cat
Type: investigative; murder mystery.
This adventure location is a burnt-out travelers’ inn on the high road. When it was still an inn, it was a popular spot for wayfarers on a well-traveled path. The reasonable thing to do would be to rebuild it but it has a bad reputation. Word is, it’s haunted. The [guild/monastery/family/noble house] which owns the land would appreciate it if someone deals with that problem before the inn gets rebuilt. Generous financial reward offered.
Journey: 2-4 days across forest terrain to get to the Laughing Cat. The heroes may encounter a faerie dragon on the way there which, if treated with respect or properly entertained (it likes music) can provide a clue as to what might have happened at the Laughing Cat. Otherwise, combat.
The Laughing Cat is a burnt-out shell. Preliminary investigation (DC10 investigation, history, perception) indicates arson. Someone set the main room on fire while everyone was asleep upstairs. If History is successful, the heroes remember that this happened about ten years ago and there were three survivors; everyone else perished, including the Awakened cat which gave the inn its name.
A DC15 check remembers that the three survivors were Myria Whispermouse, a roguish Halfling who’s gone on to become a renowned hero; Aramil Caerdonel, an elf paladin (now fallen) whose whereabouts are unknown, and the innkeeper Bron, who was badly injured in the fire and now lives with family far away. Among the dead were Proserpine, a renowned Tiefling bard, and her half-orc companion Morg.
That’s all that can be seen during the day. At night, the Laughing Cat comes back to spectral life once more. All of its people go about their business as if no time had passed – which, to them, it hasn’t. It’s always and eternally the last night of their lives. To them, the characters are just other guests at the Laughing Cat. The survivors are also there, as their dream selves; a nightmare none of them can escape.
At which point the Cat enters the picture. Peridot is the only one out of all of them who knows that they’re all dead, and Peridot has a proposition: if the heroes can find out which of the three survivors did it and why, the haunting will stop.
Was it Myria, whose greed for the party’s loot got the better of her?
Was it Aramil, whose unrequited love for Morg tempted him to do something catastrophic?
Was it Bron, whose drunkenness finally had disastrous consequences?
By talking to those present, finding out what they saw and how they died, the heroes can gather the clues needed to reveal the killer.
Potential combat encounters:
Skeletal rats in the cellar (they guard a clue to the villain’s identity, a fossilized memory that will only reveal itself once they are destroyed)
Bar-room brawl with the dead (nonlethal, but Morg has a punch like a mule’s kick).
The imp Pazzu, whose temptations pushed the killer over the edge. Pazzu has a stake in the game; if it can drag the killer’s soul back to the infernal regions, it gets the soul coin that the villain’s misdeeds will mint. But until the killer dies, Pazzu is trapped at the Laughing Cat with the rest of them. If the heroes reveal who did it, the killer will die that night of a heart attack and Pazzu will be free to collect the coin. If the heroes squash Pazzu before that happens then Pazzu won’t have time to collect. Pazzu is a ‘hide-in-the-shadows, rely on invisibility’ kind of miscreant, but Pazzu can’t resist boasting about their clever scheme. This may trip them up in the end.
Immortal With A Kiss
Type: social, romance, urban
The heroes are hired as extra guards at a rich man’s villa, one week only. The eldest daughter Olympia is getting married and valuable wedding presents are arriving every day. It’s the heroes’ job to make sure those presents don’t go missing and that Olympia’s privacy is respected before the big event. No visitors, no scandal; everything’s being coordinated to create the big event of the social season and there cannot be even the slightest hint of hijinks.
This is particularly important to the family because Olympia is magically Blessed; all her life she’s had the Bless spell effect as a permanent, but according to fortunetellers and prognosticators that Bless effect will pass to her true love, when she kisses them for the first time. This story is well known; how true it is, is anyone’s guess.
The villa is besieged by wedding tourists daily. Bards looking to try out their latest ballads; dressmakers wanting Olympia to wear their designs; cake-makers and confectioners who want Olympia to choose their treats for her wedding; ‘friends of the family’ who haven’t been seen in decades who turn up unexpectedly looking for a place to stay, or a short-term loan, or just a quick word with the bride-to-be. The heroes have to manage all of this discreetly.
Among the wedding tourists are a peculiar band of warlocks and astrologers who, day in, day out, prognosticate the wedding based on Olympia’s birthday and that of her husband, Kairon, the handsome and famous Ranger whose exploits and treasure retrieval bought him instant access to high society. These guys just won’t go away; they fulminate and gibber in the street, producing alarming magical effects, incense, smoke, dancing mice – you name it, they’ve got it. Their omens and portents cover the entire wedding from break of day to the last breath of nightfall.
The heroes soon realize (DC10 insight, perception, deception) that Olympia’s younger sister Callistra is up to something, but it’s not clear what. She’s seen chatting with the astrologers and passing them insider information – but to what end?
Further investigation (DC15, and this can involve bribing Callistra’s cat familiar with treats) reveals that wizard Callistra plans to use Disguise Self and Friends on the day in question to pass as her sister on the wedding day. She figures she can get away with it because she physically resembles her sister (size, bodyweight) and most of the day the bride will be wrapped up in veils and dresses. The heroes may work this out when they realize that she’s feeding the astrologers her own date of birth and personal information, not her sister’s.
She thinks she’ll get away with this because Olympia’s planning on skipping the wedding and embarking on her own heroic career as a Thief. Her lover is an important member of the local Thieves Guild who taught her a few tricks. [The guild member may or may not be her true love; they may just be a seducing scoundrel.] The family would be appalled if they knew, and it’s exactly this kind of hijinks that the heroes were hired to stop – if they want to stop it, of course …
Olympia intends to make her getaway on the wedding day, as that’s when there’ll be the most confusion.
What nobody appreciates (except possibly the heroes, if they’ve been paying attention to those astrologers) is that the prognosticators are actually burglars. They’ve been casing the joint all week under cover of magical hoodoo. They know how to get in and how to get out without getting caught, which is exactly what will happen if the heroes don’t intervene.
Potential combat moments:
Brawl with drunken aristocratic youth who think it’s funny to sing romance ballads under Olympia’s window every day up until the wedding.
Chase/combat with the astrologer-thieves as they make their getaway. They prefer nonviolence, ball-bearings and tanglefoot bags to cover their retreat, but they may confuse things by running through a rough tavern hoping that the ensuing bar brawl will help them escape.
Near the village of Three Hills there is a magical well that has become a popular spot for those on pilgrimage. (Life, Light, Nature). The village is within the fief of [noble/church/monastery] and its patron rakes in a small but not insignificant amount of tolls from those on the pilgrim trail. A nice extra comes from the sale of trinkets and medals organized by a small hermit community near Three Hills. It’s also a well-known fact that horses bred near the well have special properties, and the sale of those horses is a nice earner for the family that breeds them which in turn pays the fief holder a tidy sum for the benefice. In short, there’s a fair amount of cash at stake, which becomes a problem when the pilgrim trail is shut down by druids. Angry pilgrims complain to the fief holder, and the fief holder reaches out to reliable third parties to investigate and (hopefully) solve the problem. Enter our heroes, stage right.
The druids, a trio of halflings, (Garth, Morrin, Gynnie, all novice members of a far-off circle), say that they have the right to shut down the trail when it is clear that the balance is negatively affected, and further that this right is in writing. Three generations back the fief holder agreed to this is negotiation with the druids’ circle, when a blight threatened the land. The druids cleansed the blight and extracted this promise as payment.
The druids say that the horses bred near the well do not have special properties; quite the reverse, in fact, which hasn’t stopped the breeders from selling them at inflated prices based on reputation alone. Animal Handling DC10 shows this to be true; DC15 shows that this condition is being disguised by the breeders who use magical feed mash to pep up the stock before sale. The feed makes the horses seem great for a week or so; after that, not so much. The DC15 also shows that the older horses, which the family keep for breeding stock, are still as magical as ever; it’s only the current sale stock that is affected.
The druids say that this shows the well is being over-used, threatening the balance. They demand that the well be given time to recover – perhaps a year or more. This proposal will not please the fief holder, which conveniently lost the paperwork on that druid deal as soon as possible after it was signed. The fief holder isn’t pleased to hear that the druids kept a copy.
What nobody realizes is that the source of the problem is the hermits, who have become warlocks, tempted to more-than-mortal power by a devil who wanted access to the well for its own purposes. The hermits knew how to bypass the magical wards put there by the druids and they let the devil in. The devil did what it wanted and then left a few infernal serpents behind to watch over ‘its’ property. The serpents allow the devil to come and go as it pleases, bypassing the wards. The serpents can be defeated in combat but can also be instantly defeated by one of the magical horses, if that horse is brought to the well (Religion, Insight).
If this is revealed then the druids can restore the protective wards and, after the serpents are dealt with, the well will recover. If the devil is left in place then the well will become permanently affected within a year.
Potential combat moments:
A fight against infernal, poisonous snakes.
A nonlethal brawl with the horse breeding family, or angry pilgrims.
A potentially lethal scrimmage with the druids, or the warlock-hermits. The warlocks are likely to take to their heels if discovered; they got into this for power, not to get stabbed.
The devil, if encountered, will insist on a battle of wits (Arcana) – a riddle challenge. If the heroes win, the devil promises to leave. If the devil wins it will remain at the well for a month. This challenge can be attempted more than once; the devil likes playing games.
OK, it’s end-of-session. The characters have triumphed. Or at least they aren’t dead, which is a triumph in and of itself. The time has come to divvy up the good stuff – or whatever passes for good stuff in your campaign.
What does that look like?
Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy games have a definite advantage here. Everyone knows what the good stuff looks like. It’s shiny and spendable, glows with magic power, or increases your character’s level and therefore prowess. It’s all easily quantifiable. A +1 sword is a +1 sword, which by default is better than that nasty old ordinary sword you were using five minutes ago. Gaining 500 experience points is an undeniable rush, particularly when you can look at your current totals and think ‘I’m only a few hundred more points from the next level!’
Call of Cthulhu has a similar reward system, where at the end of the scenario your characters get Sanity rewards depending on what they did and how well they did it. Sanity, for those not in the know, measures the characters’ mental state and can be reduced to 0, through various shocks and trauma. 100 is the theoretical human maximum. 0 = time to book you into a long-term-stay at Casa de Soft Walls, from which you shall not be returning. Nobody’s ever explained what 100 =; I presume you leave your physical body and ascend to the heavens on a cloud of sunshine and rose petals, at which point something quite nice happens beyond the ken & barbie of mortal folk.
Point being that, in theory at least, if you gain enough rewards you can exceed your original Sanity total. Which in a game like this, where Sanity is the oil that keeps the engine going, is a reward prized above rubies and titles.
However, there aren’t any other rewards. That’s pretty standard for horror games. You’re not meant to be the dashing hero; you’re meant to be the weedy academic, or similar. Victory for you means survival, not advancement. Sometimes you get to save someone’s life, which is great; saving lives is a good thing. However, it doesn’t fatten your wallet.
Nor does it have the same impact as that +1 sword or those 500 experience points. It’s not easily quantifiable. The gold you swiped from that dragon all adds up to a total which can then be spent on goods and services. The fuzzy warm feels you got from saving little Suzy from the shoggoth cannot be spent on goods and services. Not unless your in-game economy is radically different from the norm.
So, to the question: in games where the reward isn’t easily quantifiable, what will make those rewards fun?
Sometimes the game makes it easy for you. Bookhounds of London is a little like that. You have a shop, which your players are constantly trying to improve. That shop has stock, which your players are constantly trying to get. The obvious reward there is more stuff for the shop, more stock to sell. Replace that dingy little cash box with a shiny new cash register. Design custom book covers for your collection. Thanks to your efforts the shop now has a valuable collection of grimoires on vampire lore (effective increase 2 points Occult). That sort of thing.
However, as a rule rewards can be characterized as one of three things:
Reputation
Resources
Shiny Things
Reputation is a bit like pornography. Nobody really knows what it is, but they know it when they see it. There’s a really good reputation tracker in 13th Age which has since been ported over to Night’s Black Agents and other GUMSHOE systems: the Icon system. There are a number of Icons – powerful entities or organizations – whose favor brings a range of powerful rewards, and whose enmity can bring terrible destruction. Your reputation with that Icon helps determine whether or not that Icon will lend aid.
Point being that reputation is useless without someone to acknowledge it; if, however, the CIA knows you and respects you that could mean you can rely on the local station chief for aid, or get a cache of weapons at just the right time, or transport, or whatever it may be. Reputation = tangible reward.
This can apply to pretty much every gaming world. Cyberpunk has its corporations, gangs and medias; City of Mist has its avatars and proto-demigods; Troubleshooters has world governments and sinister organizations. Any and all of these can become Icons, which in turn reward gains in Reputation.
But! It follows that a gain in reputation for one Icon results in a loss for another. If you gain reputation with Scotland Yard because your actions helped foil a cult conspiracy, those cultists are going to have an unfavorable view of you. That can lead to future plot – conflict often does. But it’s something worth bearing in mind.
Resources are those things that the characters can use either in the current adventure or in future adventures. GUMSHOE has a habit of reducing these things to pool points rather than specific items, which is useful. Pool points can be anything; a gun can only ever be a gun.
Night’s Black Agents has a fun idea which could probably be ported over to other systems: excess funds. For whatever reason your characters have money to burn. Maybe they had a good run at the local casino; maybe they stole it from some luckless villain. However they got it, they have it and more.
In fantasy this is often the reward that a swords and sorcery campaign gives. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were always rolling in excess funds after a job, and by the start of the next story they were broke again. Easy come, easy go.
The great thing about this kind of reward is first, it can be abstracted, but second, you can make it more concrete by asking the players how they want to represent this resource. It’s one thing to say you have excess funds; something else to say you have a bag full of cash. That bag can be stolen. It can break open mid-chase, scattering bills all over the street. It can be given to someone else. It can be gambled at the casino.
Alternatively, it’s one thing to say you have transport; something else to say you have a cherry Ford Mustang with custom detailing. One is an abstract. The other is style.
Bullitt
Let the player choose the physical representation. They’ll have more investment in something they chose as a resource reward. You can abstract it initially if you like, or need, but they give it form.
Finally the Shiny Things.
Those are a little bit like Resources in that they have value, but really, they’re trophies. Let’s say that the characters come away from an alchemist’s lab with a half dozen jars that contain God Knows What, but it’s glowing and has little eyes. Fine. It probably has value to someone. But really, it’s the in-game equivalent of a lava lamp. Pretty, meaningless, and there’s a non-zero chance it might explode showering hot wax everywhere.
It’s often the case that characters choose their own trophies, but it can be fun to design a few as rewards. The hat made entirely of shadows. The golden spider pendant. The illustrated scroll with alchemical writing on it that nobody living can read. The crystal skull that glows in the dark. The mirror that shows your reflection as it appears in an alternate dimension. The framed Nosferatu poster signed by Bram Stoker. These are the meaningless in-game things that players find attractive; they make excellent rewards.
I started by asking: in games where the reward isn’t easily quantifiable, what will make those rewards fun?
The answer, ultimately, is by giving those rewards weight and attraction. Reputation has weight: it confers easily understood in-game benefit. Resources also have an in-game benefit. Shiny Things are a bit different but can be equally useful, because they have attraction. The cool tchotchke that they put in their office, to impress visitors. Nobody asks why the hell Batman wants a giant Lincoln penny in his cave; but all eyes go to it whenever they walk in the room.
