Carrots n' sticks

[thebitterguy]

The majority of the rules we follow every day are stick rules. Don't speed, or you lose points on your license. Don't kill people who annoy you, or you'll go to jail. Don't come home after midnight, or you'll be sleeping on the couch. File your taxes, or you'll be fined and sent to jail. Do something wrong, or fail to do something right, and you'll be punished.

Occasionally, you get carrot rules. These are a lot rarer. If you do something, you get rewarded. Like charity tax credits. Give money to a charity get some of your taxes back. Don’t have a car accident, get lower insurance (which is really just an inverted stick rule).

Loyalty programs at stores are another kind of carrot; see movies here and you’ll save money and earn free tickets! Buy your gas here and you’ll earn points to eventually do things.

Our lives have a lot more stick rules than carrot rules. Some religions say that good works are rewarded, but usually in the later life, so it's more post-mortem carrots than any genuine carrot. Ecto Carrots?

Anyway, this is gaming and not faith. So, yeah, carrots.

Game rules exist primarily to limit characters (or “in game constructs”, as some refer to them to). So they establish what a character is capable of. Most of the time, they are strict restrictions on what a character can do. If they don’t have skill A, they can’t attempt activity A. If they don’t have magical skill, they can’t cast spells. As you go into less rigidly structured systems, what you can do becomes justification within established qualities (“how does ‘not being seen: 6’ translate into being a good dancer?” “He’s comfortable with his body and can move gracefully.”) as anything else, which has both benefits and drawbacks.

Occasionally, you get stick rules. The biggest category that comes to mind is cybernetics rules. Generally, characters can take as many cybernetics as they like. However, one they reach a certain level (their “humanity”, their “cyberpsychosis threshold”, or their “Con Bonus +1, Minimum 0”) they begin to suffer penalties. They may suffer negative levels, be prone to mental breakdown, lose their capacity for magic, or just die.

Carrot rules are generally rarer among mainstream games. My favourite example is TORG’s approved actions. Actions during combat in most games tends to be either offensive or defensive, with occasional actions based around gaining advantage (setting up a haymaker, flanking foes) but those tend to be purely tactical advantage (extra damage, bonus to hit).

TORG’s approve actions allowed pcs to actually gain a benefit from outside of combat. By performing an approved action you could not only gain tactical bonuses, but you could also gain cards from the drama deck. The approved actions included maneuvering your foes, or intimidating or bluffing them.

I’m fuzzy on the circumstances, such as whether you had to be successful or not to get the drama card, but it was a good mechanic that encouraged players to take advantage of the system’s conflict resolution systems in innovative ways.

Eh. I can’t think of too many other systems that are similar. I’m certain that a lot of the Forge games have carrot mechanics. They’d probably get annoying after a while, especially if they weren’t as open as TORG’s, with a number of different ways to get your carrot.

Comments

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

Game rules exist primarily to limit characters (or “in game constructs”, as some refer to them to). So they establish what a character is capable of.

As in the real world, physics is not a carrot nor is it a stick. ^^