On encounter design, combat and incentives

After writing the third Hexember post, I couldn't stop thinking about two blog posts regarding incentivized behavior, the first by Luke Gearing, and the second by Zedeck Siew. Did I unintentionally incentivize players to act diplomatically rather than violently through how I designed the hex's points of interest? And if so, is that really such a bad thing?

COMBAT & MODERN ELFGAMES

It's no secret that 5e has more rules and guidelines for combat than anything else, and while I'm not trying to start a discourse on "eliding", it's my personal opinion that if most of the tools bestowed by a system are related to violence, then you shouldn't be surprise when violence becomes the players' default approach to every problem or situation. That incentive is baked into the game, and while most OSR games are better about this, there's still a prevalence of combat-related rules in them.

Paradoxically, OSR combat has been frequently touted as a fail state, particularly when it's fought fairly. The maxim "combat as war, not sport" is also a mainstay in these discussions, even if the rules don't always reflect it. One could argue that the high lethality found in the majority of OSR games supports those points, but that lethality usually ceases to be a problem once characters have enough experience under their respective belts. Some games have done their part to mitigate that power creep (shoutout to Into the Odd, Cairn and CY_BORG!), but when it comes to older games, well, character advancement tended to lead to HP bloat and/or disparity, as seen with the good ol' linear fighters vs. quadratic wizards conundrum.

If combat is the baked-in solution to most problems, then rewarding it would only worsen the issue at hand. This leads us to the crux of my encounter design philosophy: if the players want to maim and kill everything in their way, they are free to do so. The world, on the other hand, won't reward them for committing senseless violence. Most of the time, they'll only be wasting their resources and risking their lives by acting that way — just like in real life.

STICK VS. CARROT

Let's face it: if rewarding violence is the carrot, and if most of the rules are combat-oriented, there's an argument to be made that not rewarding it is akin to punishing the players for playing the game as written, or as it was intended to be played — hence, the stick. This could lead us to an entire discussion about setting expectations, the importance of a session zero and so on, but that's one rabbit hole I'm not willing to dive into today, lest this post completely loses its original purpose: discussing incentives in play.

So what's the solution here? Should you just play a different game if you don't want to reward violence?

Well, not necessarily, no. As mentioned above, setting expectations before play is an important part of literally any game, and unlike 5e, a lot of OSR/NSR games have plenty of rules for approaching the world in many different ways. But then again, rewarding players for engaging with those rules could be seen as just as bad as rewarding violence; you're just signaling that diplomacy, careful exploration and scheming are the optimal ways to play the game. 

While there's nothing wrong with that playstyle (some would go as far as saying that the ideal OSR playstyle looks a lot like what I just described), it can become stale. Once the characters start doing what's optimal rather than what their backgrounds and personalities dictate, are the players still roleplaying them, or are they just gaming? Going too far in the opposite direction is just as bad, mind! "It's what my character would do" has traumatized countless GMs, including yours truly.

Me, I advocate for balance in all things. Naturally, that goes for encounters and their rewards, too.

BALANCING INCENTIVES

Balancing what you incentivize with your rewards is simpler than you might expect. When you're writing any situation, encounter or location, consider what's logical. Sometimes, violence is the best answer, one that may wield the best rewards. Oftentimes, it isn't. The secret here is letting whatever makes the most sense happen, rather than trying to direct your players and their characters towards being kind and diplomatic or bloodthirsty murderers through in-game rewards. Let them do what's natural for them and reap the consequences, good or bad.

The first three Hexember posts actually have relevant examples of logical consequences, rather than incentivized behaviors:

• Fighting (and killing) the sickly giant from the Stinging-Tree Canyon won't lead the party to a tomb full of gold, and it may even lead to a few PCs getting sick, too. On the other hand, they'll have put an end to the poor giant's suffering, and that counts for something. A party that sneakily avoids the encounter entirely won't risk contracting the disease, but the giant may still be a problem for anyone who passes through the canyon in the future. No obvious rewards here.
  
• Combat isn't really much of a concern in the Chronal Wastes, but if the party does end up in a fight while trapped in the war zone, they'll actually benefit from defeating the enemy squad, gaining access to firearms that won't be invented anytime soon. Violence would be rewarded, but only because looting a superior force's advanced weapons is a logical conclusion to fighting them.
• The Crimson Crystarium is what brought us here in the first place, so it's a little more ambiguous than the examples above. The vampire packs encountered in that hex can be approached in several different ways, and one pack actually initiates combat in a "honorable" manner (sport and war, yadda, yadda). Outright murdering that pack turns the others hostile, yes, but only because it makes sense. Hell, murdering any pack would have that result, even if I didn't outright spell that. Meanwhile, there's another pack that won't even directly engage the party, and if attacked, will leave combat as soon as they've gotten their share of blood. Finally, killing the "diplomatic" pack could potentially lead to an even better reward (as many weird healing crystals as the party can carry), with the consequence of making every other pack hostile. But would ridding the lands of bloodsucking monsters be such a bad thing? No easy answers here. No simple solution.
  

And that, I guess, is what I've been trying to get at: when designing a situation, encounter or location, consider the logical consequences of each possible outcome. It shouldn't matter whether those consequences would be beneficial or prejudicial to the players and their characters, as long as they're organic. 

The world is your character, and playing it straight can do wonders for your campaign's verisimilitude.