What’s a Moment of Greatness? Chances are you’ve already been the star of several! They are often their own reward, but also consider reinforcing and encouraging awesome or otherwise memorable play and roleplay with a few simple rewards.
In D&D, we’ve all had those times during the game where the story leaps to life through epic dramatics or hilarious roleplay, problem-solving brilliance, or even a witty gut-busting pop reference to a movie, show, classic skit or fantastic actor. Hey, it’s what we do, we’re gamers, right?
One of the inspirations of D&D Encounters is their Moment of Greatness award. D&D designer Greg Bilsland does something something like it with his Fun Points. Finally, D&D’s new Fortune Cards are yet another way to give out a “reward token” – just give one out or let a player draw and use a Fortune Card as a reward.
In our playgroups, I like to give out and receive +1 poker chips, beads or other tokens (maybe even an orc miniature or whatever monster your players like best! Hmm, just thought of that one, honestly, I like it!) for outstanding play and roleplay – Moments of Greatness. The +1 bonus can be used on any roll, after the roll has been made. I originally got this tip (and many others!) from Mike Shea and Sly Flourish. In particular, this video of his was especially helpful.
The +1 keeps it simple but valuable to manage, remember, and use. You might consider giving out +1 tokens at the start for the folks who are on-time, or who brings extra portions of food for everyone, too, for example. Table management rewards, basically. Or if someone roleplays something especially funny or awesome, write it down on an index card or small strip of paper, and give it to the player as a +1 reward token – one of my DMs across my three playgroups has done this, and I, being a creative writer at heart, love this!
You’d be surprised how impactful and motivating these little bonuses can be. How many times have you or your players missed by one on an attack or brought a monster down just short of zero hit points? That can be pretty significant, especially if that angry orc gets to fight back one last turn and drops your character!
Here’s what I tell my players now at the start of our campaigns; consider setting the tone for encouraging and expecting great play by communicating something like this:
Remember, you can always expect – and I expect from you – a variety of play, encounters and challenges, from roleplaying to combat and everything in between. So organize and prepare yourself, gear up, negotiate, fight, use skills and roleplay with that in mind. And remember – true Moments of Greatness, in all their various forms, are worth Reward Tokens!
What sort of similar rewards or reward tokens do you include in your games? Do you find that they encourage better play and roleplay?
Kilsek
As a recently retired programmer, I can tell you a big reason why development of these tools – and the tools themselves, for that matter – is so slow. (I don’t know this for a fact; but I see a substantial amount of evidence for it.)
There is no D&D database.
There is only a text database that is full of text about D&D stuff. But the database design does not reflect that it’s about D&D stuff or supposed to be able to drive a tool like the Character Builder. The database design reflects that it contains blobs of text, and is barely even suitable for the Compendium – which presents that text for humans, extremely powerful and flexible (but unreliable) text-parsers, to read.
Here’s one easy piece of evidence of that: go to the online Compendium and get a list of weapons that are Light Blades. You can’t do it. Instead you get a list of everything in the Item category that contains both the word “light” and the word “blade” – which includes all Heavy Blades, all enchantments that can be applied to Light Blades, and a few other things.
The Character Builder can’t do it either.
The data in the database about a feat does NOT have a way of indicating, in a way that the Character Builder can use, “this feat applies when the character is wielding a Light Blade”. Nor can the Character Builder look up the weapon the character is currently wielding to see if it’s a Light Blade. Instead, EACH feat that singles out Light Blades has to have custom code written – and tested – that calls the custom code for the weapon being wielded, to ask *the code* – not the data – “Are you a light blade?”.
Now contemplate building the list of feats that a character can choose from at a particular point. There has to be a bunch of code called for pretty much every feat saying “Are you available?” And then that code is calling back to ask “Is the character a Ranger? Is the character a Half-Elf?” and so on and so on, eventually answering “Yes” or “No”. And there are thousands of feats.
If there were a proper D&D database, it would be very easy to get a list of Light Blades. Or a list of feats the character is eligible to take. And if you wanted to allow another race to take the feat Action Surge (currently only for Humans), that would at worst be three rows of data in a table – all of them containing data values that lead to code which previously exists and is known to work. Testing that would be pretty easy.
Here’s another interesting thing: when every feat, power, race, paragon path, item enchantment, etc. requires custom code, it is almost impossible to support any sort of customization as anything other than additional blobs of text. When the overwhelming majority of that stuff can be handled with nothing but data in a database, it’s pretty easy to fully support customization that doesn’t step over the line into custom code – which means that if your custom class is a new assemblage of pieces that are already present, it probably will work.
Now how did that comment get here? It obviously belongs attached to a different article – the one about tool development being so slow.
Ah well, flaky internet connection tonight. Sorry.
Don, thanks your wonderfully insightful comment, and welcome to Leonine Roar! You’re absolutely right about Compendium look-ups. As someone who loves mining the Compendium for just the right feat, ritual, item, or even glossary term, and loves these kinds of encyclopedic look-up tools in general, you’re exactly right. I’ve stumbled into that exact same issue where I can’t specifically narrow down the search without cutting out the “noise,” like your light blade vs. all things ‘light’ and ‘blade’ example.
Would it be worth D&D’s time to go back and rebuild the database in a more mechanics-based instead of text-based manner? One would think, with a solid foundation such as that, going forward would make life much easier for everyone, from coders to D&D players.
(Relevant article here: Why Are D&D Tools Developed So Slowly?)
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