Rewards and Items

One of the most important things in a ttrpg is the rewards you get for completing your quests. I spent some time overhauling how items work and settled onto some stuff I'm pretty excited about.

My philosophy with consumable items is that... well I usually hate them. I've played some campaigns where the players are all holding 20 healing potions and fighters with enough Fly scrolls to cast higher level spells more often than wizards. The natural solution is to just not give your players that many items. Or challenge them with things that require they need to use that many (very tricky). But, the reality is often that players love getting items so much and as a DM you tend to feel bad when they search boxes you just placed to make your environment look nice and have nothing prepared to put in them. Also, even when you give players items, they refuse to use them and hold onto them for the perfect occasion that never occurs.

If you want to limit how many items a player can carry or use to avoid an infinite chain of healing potions, you dabble in more areas nobody likes. Weight limits.

Weight limits aren't always bad, in my opinion, but they need to be automated to the point where they do not need to be actively thought about. Currently equipped items use a weight system in Myriad that I would compare more to my fond memories of the old Armored Core games -- it is a restriction on how you build your mech rather than true encumbrance. There are abilities that increase your accuracy for every empty weight, but obviously equipping some heavy armor comes with its own benefits. Anything not equipped does not impact weight.

With all that in mind, I revisited the item system with the goal being to be able to randomly generate packages of rewards and have pre-made rewards I can hand out whenever I need to as a DM that are consumable. Consumable is nice for the DM, because you can give that dopamine reward of finding something, but know it is not permanent power the player has forever. This already goes against some of the stuff I said earlier, but I think its fine to accept a portion of this as a necessary evil when it comes to being more consistently prepared.

With that goal, I stumbled upon a few cool solutions within the maptool framework that make using items simple and intuitive -- as well as making rewards much cooler than before. I've split these two concepts into different types we'll call "Rewards" and "Items". Each of these macro types (Buttons on a players character they can click) will automatically function and delete themselves after use. Lets take a look at one Reward:

This creates a clickable button for the player on their character so they can interact with the reward at their own pace. Each tier of success or failure has its own sound effect so you can hear the disappointment from your gacha lootbox gamble failing to give you any reward. Above all things in Myriad's design I value choice. So, what better than giving a choice when receiving rewards.

These also have the benefit of including a randomly generated text string of what was inside the case itself (which scale a little if the reward is higher). How things are presented is important -- its crazy how much more interesting it feels to give a player one of these than simply say "You find 5 wealth" and handing it over, despite this essentially being the exact same thing. Also adds a lot for viewers to follow along.

As I flesh this system out a bit more it should fully loop in itself. I could very easily make a Mystery Box that contains a random "Reward" or Item from the full table of pre-made items. This wouldn't be possible without all the improvements to backend I've been able to accomplish during this downtime -- I've had ideas like this in the past, but no idea how they would actually be capable of being created.

The real benefit here is that all of these pre-made rewards exist in easily referenceable places in the code so that ideally down the road I can create 'reward bundles' that generate multiples of the options of appropriate reward. For example, defeating a boss is worth "100" reward, it would pick # of rewards to add up to the total value of 100. I'm not there yet, but it wont be hard once the database of all these just has enough options. This is no replacement for a cool hand-crafted unique item for the party based on what they've accomplished, but I believe you can see how useful they are.

Items themselves aren't too complicated, but they function on the same backend that has made the rewards possible. The "Item" category that holds the clickable macros for a player character will be able to house items the player has found until they are used, just like their armor and weapons. The restriction is that by default players will only be able to hold 2 items - there is a limit to how many macros can appear in that category. I was originally going to have each item take up 1 weight.... but we've already gone over that being an issue.

I'm not completely happy with that solution of item bloat, but I think its in an acceptable place. Its easy to manage, intuitive for players to use, and limiting in a way that doesn't bloat characters forever. I still like the choice of what items you will hold onto, and between multiple party members I don't think they will have completely full item slots very often. I love the idea of a player taking the time to prepare their item slots before an adventure and being rewarded for having those items later on, but loathe the idea of them needing to micromanage and obsess over tiny details of their choice.

Thanks for reading, look forward to the return of Aegis Recruits campaign on January 12th!