~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Being a Game Master is hard work. Not only are you creating and sustaining an entire world for your players to mess around in, but you also have to spend a lot of time before each session doing all your prep work. Add on to that the effort of hosting a group of people in your house, apartment, or parent's basement and possibly procuring and preparing food and snacks or everyone, and you've basically got yourself a full-time job. Plus, you have to buy books, modules, dice, battle mats, minis, props, and all the accoutrements of GMing. Nonetheless, running games for your friends is a rewarding hobby. But if you are like me, you may be wondering: how can we make it more rewarding?
It's time to bring tabletop RPGs into the modern era! Mobile games have completely changed the gaming landscape, not only by opening up gaming to a broader spectrum of players, but also by popularizing the microtransaction economy. What are microtransactions? Basically, they allow the player to spend a small amount of money to purchase items or unlock special benefits in the game. If that sounds annoying to you, you're wrong: if it were annoying, it wouldn't make any money, but in 2014 players spent 1.33 billion dollars on microtransactions in the game Candy Crush Saga. The free market has spoken! Microtransactions are by no means limited to games you play on your phone - they are an increasing presence in console and PC games as well. Heck, in the free-to-play massively multiplayer RPG Dungeons & Dragons Online, players had to pay to unlock fan-favorite races and classes like drow, warforged, monks, and druids.
So what's to stop us from applying the microtransaction business model to our tabletop games? Ask and ye shall receive, dear readers. Presented below is the microtransaction system I'm implementing at my table starting with today's game.
The Metacurrency
Metacurrency is a technique that a lot of games use. This is a type of in-game currency that you buy. Basically, it's a second level of abstraction to help your brain forget that you are spending actual hard-earned legal tender on fake stuff in a game. I've implemented three different metacurrencies in my game: Dungeon Bucks, Hero Coins, and Magic Gems. Dungeon Bucks are the basic metacurrency that you use to buy Hero Coins. Magic Gems cannot be bought with Dungeon Bucks or Hero Coins, and have to be purchased separately or won in-game. Here's the breakdown:
Of course, I give each player a starting pool of 500 Dungeon Bucks and 10 Hero Coins - gotta give them a little taste so they keep coming back for more.
Now you may be wondering: how does this system interact with the in-game gold economy? Can you spend in-game gold to buy Dungeon Bucks? Of course not. But you can buy keys that unlock...
Loot Chests
This is another key use of metacurrency. Loot Chests are treasure chests full of random loot placed throughout the dungeons. These chests can only be unlocked with special Treasure Keys that can be purchased from NPCs for 2,000 gold or from the GM for 6 Hero Coins. Within, the lucky heroes might find any number of random treasures, ranging from gold, magic items, dyes to customize their outfit, or even Hero Coins!
Games like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 and even the real-life company Loot Crate use a similar model. Instead of buying a specific item that you want, you buy one or more boxes, each with a chance to have something you want in it. It's kind of like playing the slot machines, only you don't have to be near chain-smoking septuagenarians.
But this is a tabletop RPG, a world of imagination and creativity more immersive than a hundred Overwatches or a thousand sad casinos. What kind of things can a player loaded down with Hero Coins and Magic Gems buy from the GM?
In-Game Unlocks
If I turn up the difficulty on all my encounters by just a little, the players will be looking for any edge they can get. If all goes according to plan, they will come to rely on purchasing in-game unlocks from me with their hard-earned Hero Coins and Magic Gems. What are in-game unlocks? There are two main kinds: practical and cosmetic. Cosmetic unlocks just change a character's appearance, like by giving them a different colored cloak, a shinier weapon, or a sweet collectible hat. Practical unlocks actually change how the game is played, whether it be a more powerful item, extra lives, or access to new abilities. Of course, these unlocks are up to the GM, but here are some examples of what I have in store for my players next session:
One thing I'm trying to work out is how to implement cooldown timers. Every game - especially roleplaying games - is built on an economy of actions, where the player has a certain amount of actions they can perform before their turn runs out and they have to wait until their next turn rolls around. All the best mobile games have figured out how to profit from this by drastically increasing the wait time and letting players pay if they don't want to wait 24 hours to keep playing their "free" game. How to transition this model to the tabletop? First I thought of letting players pay a nominal sum to act outside of their initiative order, but that might be a step too far. I also thought of letting spellcasters pay to use their spells again, but then I wouldn't be able to take money from non-spellcasters. What I need is a system where every class operates like a wizard, with artificial daily limits built in to each of their abilities. Maybe I should switch to 4th Edition...
Finally, we have the question of how to keep players interested enough to keep playing despite the fact that I am essentially monetizing every element of the game. My research indicates that, at the height of Candy Crush's popularity, when it was raking in over a billion dollars per year, it had 245 million active players but only about 2% of them actually paid for microtransactions. With that in mind, I have decided to expand my weekly gaming group from 6 people to 475,000.
-your unlockable d20 despot
No comments:
Post a Comment