Revisiting Judges Rewards

on the issue of getting more GMs … I’m all for it.

But I would note that several times I have volunteered to run at Origins and not had a table of players. This includes the first BI at Jappa (Where is your God Now), a slot last year, and both of my Friday slots for this years Hard Point 8 this year. So it seems to me that either I’m just unlucky. Or there is a surplus of judges at Origins – my guess. (Or maybe the slot marshals don’t think I’m a good judge…hopefully not, but you never know).

Ultimately I think the issue of rewards is a very minor component of finding or encouraging judges either at big cons or closer to home.

I’m of mixed opinions on your statement about GMs for Origins. On the one hand we did release judges pointing to have more than we needed for given slots. On the other, I don’t typically GM at Origins, but because of how hard a time they were having of getting judges I volunteered to run. Maybe that’s just the natural cycle and I hadn’t really noticed before.

In terms of how big of a deal it is to get rewards or not, I don’t know. It may in part depend on whether your general inclination is more run or play. You’re more on the run side and it shows at your tables. You’re well prepared, people have fun and I’ve never heard anything but praise for experiences with you. I am more on the play side of fence and hope it doesn’t show too much at my tables. If you’re more on the play side, the character advancements tend to matter more.

One of the advantages of the old 3.5 days is that people were generally familiar with the system and there was a low to no threshold of investment needed to get a local group set up. Once you got people hooked on the setting, all of the additional materials and crunch were enticing. There was more of an opportunity to get people hooked first. There was a lower barrier to giving it a try.

As for how to get more groups started / GMs I expect it’s a combination of factors that could help improve things. I guess we’ll see how things progress.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

Ok, I’ve gone back through and reviewed the CPs vs. the VCPs for the released mods. There are certainly mods where there are more significant discrepancies. Overall though, someone who has eaten every mod will be in roughly the same place XP and gear wise as someone who played it all. There are some minor unusual items and some story items that have little to no monetary value that you’d miss out on. The other place a GM misses out a bit is in fame, though to date fame has had little to no bearing on the game.

There have been a few mods where the Volunteer cert makes a special allowance for a GM that eats the mod with good reason. As long as those kinds of exceptions continue to be included, things are probably fine as they are.

For items that are truly story / plot moving rather than valuable or mechanically advantageous, it might be nice to let a GM who eats a mod get a copy. Having a particular map or other found item doesn’t have any impact until it comes up in a mod again, and that may be one they play rather than run.

One other thing I wanted to comment on was Volunteer vs. Replay. Of the 46 mods I looked at, only 8 had replay certs vs. separate volunteer and replay certs. Of the 8, 6 of them are in the 2nd story arc, though not all 2nd story arc mods have RP certs.

It certainly seems to be the trend to add more RPs rather than just VCPs.

Anyway, thanks to the staff for doing a good job of managing the rewards, even if it isn’t always clear to the rest of us that it does balance out.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

I really like Josh’s solution. Make it simple, make sure judges get equivalent rewards, and make it much less of an impact if you play with the “wrong” character (most of the time it’s not a big deal but occasionally, there are rewards that are much better for a different character (which are then impossible to get on said character)).

Hi all

Just following up on a question I asked earlier on Judge rewards

When, as a judge do you get a replay cert. The campaign Guide does not state when replay certs are passed out at all. I have been assuming as a judge you only ever get a volunteer cert, and you only get that if you have not played or ruin the adventure before.

In regards to rewards.
Some of the CPs I have noticed have a line stating you only get access to these items if playing the mod for the first time.

If a blanket statement is passed that replays get the CP but only favors/reputation; XP and cash. No items or relics, then separate CPs would not need to be made.

I’m pretty sure you only get a CP or VCP if you play/run something for the first time and a replay CP all other times (so RCP if you play or GM a mod that you have played or GM’d before).

In general, RCPs only give xp and cash (no fame, no items, no story awards, etc).

Personally, I like Josh’s suggestion of just having a single CP that you get regardless on if you are GMing, playing, re-playing, re-GMing, or whatever. The only thing that would need any sort of statement would be how many players to use for “share of xxx” cash amounts (and a limit of 1 1-item-per-table for GMs (which I consider self-evident but would be good to spell out)).

After I started playing regularly in the current Legends of Arcanis campaign, I thought about the likely reactions to the volunteer (GM) reward system. Living Arcanis had no such system and relied upon the intrinsic joy of GMing (with some extrinsic rewards for GMing a lot at larger cons), but I do like the idea of rewarding GMs. A player new to RPGs who tried playing Arcanis with me earlier this month immediately realized how much time it takes to prep a mod well.

The current reward system encourages GMs to run a given module once or twice and then move on to GM another. A GM who runs a module five or six times can benefit 5-6 PCs, but how many of us actually play that many characters regularly? In contrast, a GM who runs five or six modules once each benefits one character a lot, and that’s more likely considered beneficial to a player. From the campaign society standpoint, however, we will wind up with better-run adventures if each GM runs one module multiple times and gets especially familiar with it than if every GM runs every module once. Thus, the personal and campaign goals are misaligned with this reward system. Some players who with the old (no reward) system might have happily run one or two mods a lot might now think that they’d rather reap PC rewards by running lots of mods. Taken to extreme, I suspect it’s hard to find GMs for old Crusade mods because few GMs will benefit from volunteer chronicles (since all their PCs will either have the chronicle sheet already or started with the 1.5 cert which prevents applying most Crusade chronicles).

On the other hand, any alternate or new system needs to be considered carefully in what behavior it promotes and results it will yield. For example, giving a GM 100 XP flat for each module run might seem reasonably low, but when half a dozen people have Tier 5.10 PCs compared with non-GMs having Tier 3.5 max, that will reveal a troubled system. Once balance in the current reward system is that it keeps GMs from advancing their PCs past the level of non-GMs’ PCs.