Is it a good idea to include an equivalent of gold skulltula tokens in a more open campaign?
Basically a bunch of tokens that give rewards depending how many you have collected. The gold skulltulas in Ocarina of Time are dropped by hidden golden spiders that are spread all over the game world. You get a minor reward for every 10 tokens that you collect and then one massive reward once you find all 100. A version of them exists in most Zeldas and really a lot of games, they're not always drops from hidden enemies. Sometimes they are quest rewards for minor sidequests, etc.
Have you ever included something like that in a pen and paper game? I don't know if it's a good idea. I fear it could lead to a lot of tedium, but it might also be an easy shortcut to keep players engaged and wanting to explore.
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Honestly what you're describing is basically old-school Gold-As-XP, which is the best way of encouraging exploration IMO. The video game Okami also uses this system, where killing monsters gives little to no XP but helping people and finding secrets gives XP. It requires good level design, so an adventure with evenly distributed rewards is necessary.
The milestones you mention that give rewards every certain amount of exploration corrolate to levels. One may remove the "Build" aspect by instead introducing randomness, or instead keep the rewards DM-facing and have an in-universe npc present the rewards. Works for a game with no classes like Cairn, by having NPC's teach players class abilities from other games as a reward for treasures found.
The Okami equivalent isn't exp but the stray beads (which give probably one of the most proper 100% completion rewards in any vidya).
Those are good ideas, but I don't really mean to introduce another meta currency like exp, but rather a long-term goal that the players can gradually work towards. Like, they meet an NPC who tells them how he is cursed and lost his soul that was shattered into 100 pieces. Only if all 100 soul shards are brougth back can his curse be broken, and he can give them a great reward for that. The milestone rewards until that point aren't really that important for that idea, the main draw is having a really, really big carrot dangling on a really, really long stick.
I replied giving the benefit of the doubt because dangling a huge reward behind 100 useless lumps sounds like a terrible idea. The Stray Beads don't even come in until a New Game Plus. So no, don't do that, it's an awful idea. When players find a reward they should be able to interact with it in a reasonable amount of time. If you have useless MacGuffins just keep it to 3 or 4 like a normal campaign, or better yet, just put 100 unique treasures in your game instead of one that they probably won't even get.
I mean, 100 is a placeholder number here. Depending on the length of the campaign, I would do at the very most 20, likely closer in the 10 to 15 range for a campaign or I guess 5 for a one shot.
For a oneshot? You need to get all 5 of X thing in a limited area? That's just your average skirmish game scenario and will absolutely work. But collecting a bunch of stuff that does nothing in an actual campaign is a bad idea.
I think 100 might be too much and the bookkeeping will get reeeeally annoying very quick.
Try smaller bumbers
Im not sure what kind of games you play, but in Dungeon crawl games I can see these working out simply by adding them to the random treasure tables and going them the Power to perhaps buy Magical items.
I hide diegetic rewards all over maps. In my current campaign have had a security office where guards hang out have a weapons locker with high grade explosives, a tollbooth had a very expensive rifle, a pile of debris had a piece of high-tech gear, and a storage container had many times more loot than the job could possibly pay out, among more. Exploring is fun, finding rewards for exploration is fun, but I would never make meta-currency a reward. In fact I would never use meta-currency.
I like to have rare artifact level things for players, something maybe more closely related to your gold skulltulas are elixirs, which raise a base stat by one point depending on which flavor they are.
however usually it's just artifacts in the colliqual sense that are largely hidden in the world, players can find those. if not a useful one, they sell for a hefty price, and might be able to be used in an enchantment of another newly created magic item.
I had posted a similar question here a few months ago and came up with a pretty good answer I think
My question was more about emulating Korok Seeds and Spirit Orbs, and so my equivalent was creating a puzzle format that could be infinitely expanded upon (think something like a small Minesweeper board) where it gave a reward based on performance, and "Shrines" are statues out in the open that have some kind of more open-ended environmental puzzle (like using the surrounding stones or river to solve a problem presented by the statue) which rewards the players with a related treasure.
IDK if this helps, but having similarly-themed puzzles around that give the same reward each time works well for me, it's a lot better than just having them stumble across an enemy with 1 HP which they easily dispose of an get a reward. I guess you could also do Poes from Twilight Princess where they have to hunt them down and they have a unique fight, but that feels like more of a campaign plot instead of a sidequest.
Did you ever implement this in your games? It's similar to what I have in mind. If so, how many "korok seeds" did you have, and did you come up with satisfying puzzles for each of them? I mean, it's easy to have a dozen "put the square block in the square hole" puzzles, but I wonder if players in an RPG will still be intrigued by that after the third one.
i just placed them around, I didn't have an ultimate goal for the korok seed puzzles. The reward itself was a handful of small seeds that could be used as any druidic spell material since my druid doesn't have a focus yet. they did about three of the shrines before they got involved in something else temporarily, but they enjoyed them.
I think the puzzles were satisfying and they seemed to enjoy them. The seeds were like those ads you get on YouTube or Instagram for those games where you have to send colors down a line in the right order to make it match the example. As they did more, the examples became harder to match and required a lot of thinking ahead, especially with certain twists I added to the rules.
You could definitely put a limit on how many there are, but I just intend to keep giving them rewards if they seek these locations/shrines out of their own will. Not to say the shrines weren't story-relevant, though
NTA but the korok and shrines idea are exactly what I do in my game. What I do is offering an evolution point to my player (when they level up, they get a bunch of evo points that they can use to level any characteristic). It works well because my game is open enough to make it a little help for leveling, while not making them overpowered.
The thing is that you have to find a reward that does not make other reward irelevant. And if the player has to accumulate some to get it, consider it as a milestone system that works in parallel as your normal leveling system.
>I mean, it's easy to have a dozen "put the square block in the square hole" puzzles, but I wonder if players in an RPG will still be intrigued by that after the third one.
I generally do the "puzzles" as mini quests to keep the player engaged. It also creates stories so it's a double win. Can be useful when you still have an hour or two for your session but it's not enough to start a big chunk of story : just throw in a quick quest with a smaller reward.
Depends on how you distribute them.
You want finding them to seem PREDICTABLE on the player's side, making sure sure the players know how to get them and how many they'll get each time they do a quest or whatever the method to acquire them you decide on.
Otherwise you're gonna get a lot of unintended player behavior doing dumb/time-wasting activities in hopes it'll get a reward of what looks to them like a randomly rewarded currency. Like if finding the tokens seems unpredictable/random to players, it may lead to PC's checking every nook and cranny and killing everything they can find in hopes of a token, like you could in a video game.
Which sounds awful as a GM. So I'd never have one of these tokens be a random reward. Even the 1st one/set should be known about ahead of time, like on a list of rewards some NPC talks about for doing a task for them - and the players get the explanation of what they're for the moment they ask about them.
Do you want to run a game where you are incentivizing and encouraging players to painstakingly scour every room and town during every fricking session so they can get their meta-tokens and get rewarded, by you, for wasting time and engaging with an RPG in the the least intuitive way possible?
Because that sounds fricking moronic and I think you should punch yourself in the dick for suggesting it.
>adding Ganker game mechanics into ttrpgs
>adding /tg/ game mechanincs into Ganker
>acceptable
>adding Ganker game mechanics into ttrpgs
>unacceptable!!!!!!
In a lot of cases? Yes. Video games are capable of performing bookkeeping and calculations that would bog down tabletop play. Moreover, to use Skulltulas as an example, your ability to find them in OoT or MM is in part predicated on how closely you're paying attention to your surroundings, using both audio and visual cues. Since your primary interactions in tabletop are with the GM's descriptions, that would just boil down to autistically asking after them in each room or--worse--reducing it to a set of rolls you perform whenever you walk into a room.
So, no, not all video game mechanics can or should be ported to tabletop. The porting of tabletop mechanics to video games is much easier, since they're rules simple enough to be adjudicated during play. But video games are themselves limited by the lack of a constant creative presence capable of facilitating actions and decisions outside of the scope of the designers' original plans. BotW and TotK, for all that people raved about them, still don't have any way of handling a player wanting to demolish a building or--Golden Goddesses forbid--venture beyond the borders of the Hyrule map.
I've seen it work, but only on actual large, visual maps with a ton of details and places to hide them strewn about.