Success is a funny thing in games, particularly as it relates to reward systems. It’s curious, because success is its own reward.

Outside of competitions offering prizes and fame, winning inherently confers pride, relief, and elation. You don’t need to tie a carrot to success to incentivize it: players are already psychologically invested in achieving it.

This is a followup to my previous article: Rethinking Failure.

What is success though?

Within the context of games, I’m going to loosely define success as “modifying the game state in your favor”. You deal 50 points of damage to a monster, and now he poses less risk as you’re much closer to eliminating him. You successfully jump over a chasm, and now there’s one less opportunity for you to fail before the end of the level. If we follow chains of success though, it’s not hard to see how the more success players achieve the simpler the game state becomes, as they eliminate risks, complexities, and obstacles.

Success tends to make games less interesting, and less challenging. This isn't entirely a bad thing though. A big part of the psychological reward for success lies in the “solving” of the problem. If we took that away, creating a game where “success” only introduced more complexity and greater challenges and higher risk, players would interpret this outcome as failure, and would quickly become frustrated with your “impossible” game. Imagine if every time you placed a shape in Tetris, that all other pieces rotated randomly. That would get really annoying, really fast.

Making success meaningful

So success needs to feel as though it is solving the problems presented in the game. But can we keep this benefit whilst also introducing complexity, risk, and consequences to success? Can we have our cake and eat it too?

What if there were such a thing as too much success? Or not enough success? What if there were degrees of success? What if success had meaning beyond the immediate outcome?

Some games have attempted similar mechanics. Apocalypse World allows for a partial success: a “success but…”. This definitely makes for more compelling and varied outcomes, but it kinda feels like success with failure mixed in. Others include “critical successes”, which allow for bonus cool stuff to happen on top of your success. This is a nice bonus, but a bit too binary for what I’m aiming to achieve. So what am I trying to achieve?

My goals for success

Players should want to succeed (easy: they already do)

Success should carry risks

Success should be interesting and meaningful beyond the outcome

Success should make the player feel awesome

Addressing these goals was not trivial. I was stuck trying to figure out what success in general could mean for the player, and their character, and I knew I didn't want to start modelling things like ego and pride and elation specifically. But by re-framing that question, everything suddenly fell into place: what could success mean for the team?

In my game, I’m attempting to capture a certain cinematic aesthetic, similar to what you see in The Avengers; a team of unique heroes working together against impossible odds. I realized that my game, and almost every other game I've seen, was lacking in “team” mechanics. Sure, a healer might cast a healing spell on a fellow adventurer, but it comes at a direct and opportunity cost for them to do so, and they don’t receive a direct reward, only a secondary reward that the encounter won’t become more difficult for having one less party member. I don’t find that particularly compelling personally, but more importantly, it doesn't promote the sort of gameplay I’m trying to capture.

So what does an individual’s success mean for the team? For me, the answer is “Dominance”. It represents your efficiency, pride, morale, potency, and ego. It is how effective you are at exerting your influence over the world. Every point in Dominance represents superfluous excellence, the thrill of conquest, the relief of victory, the rush of adrenaline, and your capacity to handle more. If this sounds like it’s still very individualistic, bear with me.

All for one and one for all

Dominance is represented as a track, and you use a token of some sort to track your Dominance gain. Every time you win a roll, you take the difference and add it to Dominance. So if you roll a 7, and they roll a 4, you add 3 to your Dominance, by moving a token to the “3" on the track. This is what it roughly looks like on your character sheet:

Dominance: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [+] [+] [HUBRIS]

As you can see, Dominance has three parts. The first part is called the “runway”, numbered [1] through [6]. If you have between 1 and 6 Dominance, then at any time, you can spend all your Dominance to add this amount as a bonus to someone else’s next roll. So if you have 5 Dominance, you can spend it all (resetting Dominance to 0) to give another team member a a +5 bonus on their next roll. This represents utilizing your excess awesomeness to assist your friends (like when Captain America blocks a shot that would have hit Black Widow while still fighting his own battles, for example).

The second part is the “target”. It’s the little [+] signs. If you gain 7 or 8 Dominance, you immediately gain 1 “Finesse”, and reset Dominance to 0. Finesse is a mechanic which allows you to offset bad stuff that might affect the whole team (best left for another article though). The important point for now is that if you gain just the right amount of Dominance, you help your team to be more effective more of the time with less chance of really bad stuff happening.

The third part is the consequence of not pushing yourself hard enough: “hubris”. If you gain 9+ Dominance, you trigger hubris, which is to say that your pride and competence has grown to arrogance. Hubris has a good chance of reducing your potential to grow your character; after all, why would someone so amazing as you need to grow in any way? So unless you want to stall your progression, you want to avoid this.

Dominance is the complement to Mettle, which I discussed in Rethinking Failure. Players choose their own level of difficulty, and depending on whether they win or lose, they gain Dominance or Mettle. Either way, they must balance to ensure they don’t gain too much of either, but rather just enough. Like Goldilocks. Failure (through Mettle) can be used to boost their own effectiveness or to grow their character, at the risk of triggering some really bad stuff. Success (through Dominance) can be used to boost others’ effectiveness, or to prevent bad stuff from affecting the team as a whole, at the risk of arrogance setting back their own growth.

Success is for sharing

With Dominance I feel I've developed a compelling mechanic for team interaction. Each member of the team now has a vested interest in the success of the other members. Success on the runway can be used to help another in time of need. Succeed to the target and you can stave off outcomes that threaten the team as a whole. Succeed to hubris and your character’s arrogance gets the better of them; perhaps you should have pushed yourself harder instead of taking on easy challenges?

You still want to succeed, but now your successes can be shared with others, and theirs with you. The degree of success is now meaningful, as it directly translates into a bonus another might receive. Team dynamics are now codified into the mechanics, as players juggle their desire to help the team or to grow their character, and always there is a risk should they go too far. And for me personally, the idea that I might succeed so well that I have success to spare, which I can use to help others, makes me feel so awesome. There’s nothing quite like the feeling when others can benefit from my personal success. I think Dominance captures that, and achieves the goals I had for success.