Award System

While I didn't like Rolegate's method of PbP in general, it gets a lot of things right. One thing I liked of theirs was their award "coin" system.

Every user gets a handful of "coins" per month that they can use to award certain posts. There is a variety of premium coins that you get based on your tier of membership. Players (and DMs) can award coins if they like a post for some reason. The coins do nothing. You can't buy or trade them, you can't turn them in for any award. It's just "I liked that", and both you and other users can see how many coins, their variety, and what post you received them for by clicking on your public account page.

I don't like everything involved there, but that's how they work. What I do like is the ability to give a quantifiable token of some kind. Maybe everyone gets 10 "ribbons" or something every month and can award them to players/DMs. You can see how many ribbons you have total in your public account page. If it ends up being popular, maybe it can be an incentive to donate to the site, you get a handful of gold ribbons to give out each month, but that can be a different discussion when the time comes.

I liked how it awards people with something more persistent than "here's inspiration, nice post" or something like that. I know it's not the traditional barebones forum system that a lot of old-school users prefer, but it's a small feature that might help bring users together a little bit and encourage them to compliment one another.

Here's an example of how Rolegate does it.

No thanks.
I would not participate.

Apologies Stun, you're on your own on this. Even though a *positive only* reputation system could be of some use I guess, this seems to be against the GP way of things from what I've perceived so far.

Gotta be honest. I wasn't a fan of reaction emoji (or whatever discord calls them) when I DMed on discord. I felt under pressure to react to everything. But the idea of making it a scarce resource is interesting because it removes that pressure.

Also - I don't care about seeing how many awards people have on their profiles. I find the idea of "good DMs" or "good players" horrifying.

What I am interested in is comments across the community - perhaps as a scroll in the homepage or something.

e.g.
Adam awarded QuantumRiot ? "Epic post dude! I can't believe I didn't realise the hag was recounting my backstory until the end."
Jabes awarded Bowlofspinach ? "Saddest thing I've read in ages"

That might be interesting and might also help stop us from being so siloed and cliquey.

I'm going to try and keep an open mind.

Not all of the changes in v1 will make it into v2. I think Keleth has suggested we might want to experiment with some ideas - if they don't work then they can be removed again from v1 or just never make v2.

Yeah... and on the profile page perhaps it'd take one of your random awards and display it like a quote - y'know like the sort you see on a movie or big airport book. It's the idea of ranking people I'm uncomfortable with.

"That one got me right in the feels."
by Adam - Wild beyond the Witchlight

I think @adam covered most of what I wanted to say. Anything that could translate in ranking or make people think "she has more coconuts, so she must be a better GM/player" is something I'd prefer we avoid, except if it gets the popular vote.

(Or Adam gets the most coconuts)

I'm not sure on this one. A trial period is a great idea to see how it feels in practice, or determine if it changes behaviors

I don't agree that people would use it to compete (any more than they do with karma on Reddit, where everyone agrees the number is nonsense), I can see the reasoning behind keeping the number of awards a person has received private.

@Adam, regarding your idea: Would the scroll show the original post that received the award, the reaction to the post, or both?

But people do compete for karma on reddit and try to game the system to get it.
The way Adam described it, I'm less not-okay with it than originally but I still don't think I like it. What if you're in a game where everyone keeps regularly getting Ribbons/Coins but you don't. Would make you feel like you're the worst player there and probably be discouraging.
As GM, I'd feel pressured to try and award each of my players Ribbons equally so nobody feels favored or disfavored, making the whole thing kind of pointless. And other than that, most rewards would just go to bad jokes and dumb puns anyway, because that's how the internet works.
And while I like any system that encourages punnery, I dont want to drive Harrigan off the site completely (plus, it wouldn't really help the site in any way).

I wouldn't promote my idle musing to the status of "idea" yet. I'm soaking in the question.

But in my head under a post there'd be something like (? 6) to give an award and showing how many you have left to give.
Clicking the ribbon would prompt for an icon/emoji (maybe... but I'm going off that idea, so maybe no emoji) - but it would prompt for a sentence. It's the sentence that's really the award. That's what appears on the homepage.

Ugh... I'm in danger of writing an essay. I'll try and be brief.

Boiling it down - what social function are we replicating from IRL?

I play IRL club games. Sometimes there's a shout of excitement from another table. "CRIT! Cleric just exploded!" or "LOL! The bard just set fire to paladin". I suppose I'm seeing the awards more like shouts than ribbons. They connect us with people in other games. We meet up during smoke breaks - time is limited (like your awards) - but we might exchange a highlight from our games.

There's a whole social theory around this stuff that draws analogies with IRL communities. What is Gamers' Plane if it were a real social space? It feels like we arrive unseen in a lobby, and then file off to our various rooms to play. But where's our central cafe (general chat? no - it's discord)? Where's the bench where you can sit and watch the comings and goings? Where's the high place to look out over our landscape?

Then definitely dont call them ribbons. Call them spotlights or something, make them temporary and then display a random currently spotlighted post on the front page. Maybe multiple spotlights extend the duration but don't show a count.
Just make sure the entire system is a "this is a fun moment I'd like to highlight", not a reward system.

I get what you're going at and I like the idea of increasing interactivity between games and the outside of those games. But I'm very, very hesitant to add in any sort of karma/award/'this post is better than others' system

I still do not like it.

As bowl points out above: People do compete, and people (maybe only GMs?) will feel pressure to hand out praise equally (which I will achieve by handing out exactly nothing, to everybody).

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If we are trying to emulate the "spontaneous ejaculations from nearby tables" then it sorta needs to be spontaneous, mechanising it is not spontaneous.

We already have people posting cute quotes from games in various places. We can encourage that, but the people need to do it, not the software.

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Making it easier to read other people's games (sort out the public games problems) does a lot of this organically. We can see what it going on at the other tables, and if we had a place we could chat about what we see, it can work.

That's going to happen with the front page update, isn't it? Which I like much better.

I generally don't like down-voting systems, but if there are pun rewards, brothers and sisters, there better be pun down-voting. ;)

I'm a fan of simple systems where you don't have currency or down-voting, just basically a cheer, cheers, or applause at some cool moment. Anything beyond that, eh, and there are probably a bunch of unforeseen consequences lurking downstream.

I’m calling time of death on this one and moving it to the dead subforum