Incentivising Memories
This year started as my OSE year. I had never played any retroclone of BX and when I found out that 'The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford' was being published in Spanish I thought I could give it a try.
Currently I'm running two different groups through that module, one of them just playing vanilla OSE without any modifications or house rules yet. This was the first time I got to see Gold as XP in action, which really incentivized my players to go ahead and do a sort 'All You Can Ransack'. For the second group I decided I could use some Journaling XP to see how things changed.
My friends and I played some games 10 years ago and we still remember those moments very fondly. We used to do some sort of West Marches we named 'Flashes', because they were short adventures, we designed ourselves and everytime the GM would be a different person. We even have an excel with the player characters, the number of games they played and also the ones who died.
I thought it would be nice if we could have some sort of tactile chronicle. So I set up the template for the Journaling XP and used it during play. It worked very nicely, we had a lot of stuff written down for our 4-5 hour session and I feel it will be a good thing to keep using this sort of idea. The players were able to go back and see what they had done, who they encountered and what places were important. Such is the power of writing!
The very best invention of humanity, I guess.
A good thing about bluesky is that there are a lot of interesting and nice people and when I talked about using this sort of XP, Ktrey from d4 caltrops mentioned how their group used to write down moments they enjoyed as a tool to give XP and how they still keep a box full of those writings.
So, we did that and it was really nice. And I believe this goes beyond XP leveling and the game itself, I think what we are doing is incentivizing strong memories of nice times.
I hope to be able to hold these notes we wrote down and enjoy remembering our adventures in 10 years time.