Treasure and Rewards

I'm new to the game so please forgive me if I am asking naive questions.

I am a bit confused about "rewards."

When should I give rewards to players and what kind of rewards should I give?

Right now I am still in D&D mode to some extent. D&D makes this kind of thing very clear. Players find a room full of monsters. They kill all the monsters. They get the treasure. This is the pattern that often propels the game forward.

In Apocalypse World, I don't know. Should I give rewards when players make progress against a Front? How much and what kind of treasure/rewards makes sense? If 1-barter is the basic unit of measure, what amount of barter is healthy for loot? 1? 3? 100?

What kind of special items should I offer? I could just adapt some Dungeon World magic items to Apocalypse World but does this make sense? For example, I could make a flying carpet into a jet pack or magic plate mail into riot gear.

I am not trying to turn Apocalypse World into a poor man's D&D but I do want to keep my players motivated. Treasure and rewards gives players that proverbial carrot to move towards as well as validating a job well done. How do other people handle this?

Brilliant Scheme

Give your characters reasons to keep on living, when death is so much easier. If they triumph over all of the filth and shit you throw their way, allow them a brief moment of respite before the world comes crashing down on their hopeful expressions like a rain of scalpels.

Apocalypse World can be played in the way you are alluding, with clearly defined threats and a parade when the group works together and wins the day, with magic baubles all around, but I think it really clicks when you tell your players to invest in the story rather than their specific characters. Playing Apocalypse World is like getting to be in control of your favorite character in a movie--sure, it's fun to see them win and get pretty, shiny things, but it's also fun to watch them get beaten down and lose everything. In my (admittedly limited) AW experience, I've found the carrot is the threat, the danger, the broken promise, rather than the reward after the fact.

Barter is boring. It's a number, it's a statistic. It doesn't mean anything by itself. Give Shadow a smile from Joe's Girl, to show her that everything isn't all rotted, that some things are worth cracking your shell for. Give Colonel a water-treatment facility, so that his people aren't constantly shitting blood back into the murky waters they drink out of. Give Rex the big gun she saw III holding onto like a healthy child, pried loose from a severed hand. Make the rewards tie into the specific circumstances that follow the narrative--shortcuts make the world seem arbitrary. Keep it real.

This is all just my opinion, so take what you will and toss the rest.

One of the central premises upon which Apocalypse World is built is scarcity. In an environment where scarcity is the order of the day, "treasure" takes on a whole different meaning. It also means that something (anything) only has as much value as people ascribe to it. A whiz-bang fusion rifle is a nearly worthless club without the right high-tech ammo-packs to fuel it, for instance.

Furthermore, if people have something of value, they are usually using it. There aren't really "piles of valuable loot" lying around waiting to be scooped up. What makes Rolfball such a badass? Well, he has a tank. That he's riding in. Right now. Sure, you might be able to kill him and take it, but killing him might necessitate blowing up his tank first, which sort of defeats the purpose.

Perhaps a better solution is to have rewards be internally motivated rather than externally motivated. That is, rather than rewarding them with stuff you think might be cool or valuable, look at each character's wants and desires. Then, find things that speak to those wants and desires and sprinkle them into the world (and the characters' knowledge of that world). If the players really want them, they'll find a way to go get them.

That way, the next time the Hardholder is having trouble keeping his hold oerderly and secure, maybe one of his NPC henchmen says, "Geez, Major, I wish we had a tank like Rolfball. Nobody messes with that fucker. Yeah, a tank would keep this rabble in line..."

AW really shines when the characters' motivations are internal rather than external.

No. This is not how the game works.

You should play the game, as the book describes. Sometimes, because of your principles and your agenda and your and the players' moves, the PCs might get more stuff. Or less stuff. Their stuff might break, they might fix some broken stuff. They might do a job and get paid, whatever the job's worth (as per the extremely straightforward descriptions in every playbook) or with something weirder if it makes sense for whoever's paying them. They might decide to go scavenging somewhere where they heard there's some specific thing, and they might find it. Or not.

But they do not get treasure, you do not give them rewards. That is not why you do any of the things described above; you do them because it fits your principles and it makes sense given what's happening in the world. Because the characters earned it with their moves, or because their players' took it with an advance. But not because they need a 'carrot' or because they solved some problem. The carrot is playing the game which is fun to play; the carrot is getting to see their characters in action, being sexy and dangerous and fucked up. It's pretty good, as motivations go.

^ agreed with Daniel.

When they take out Rolfball and you want to give them some kind of treasure, instead reveal the contents of his heart and barf apocalyptica at them. You know, show them that trunk Rolfball has among his belongings containing, like, some dead Old Worlder's love letters. Let them find his stack of comics, mostly tattered and burnt but still readable. Or the ash and charcoal portrait sketches he has hidden away under the seat of his truck. Whatever.

edit: oh, and tell them to write it down! Like, they look down at their list of things and it says 'oddments worth 2 barter, an assault rifle, a stack of Old World love letters' and I'll just bet they'll be trying to find some way of introducing that back into the fiction some time later.  Which, you know, just makes it that much more of a cool thing to have found. Way better, imo at least, that finding 'treasure' in the D&D sense.

I admit to being a newbie at this game but I am a little surprised by some of these responses. Rewards are definitely mentioned in The Master of Ceremonies' Principles - "Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards." This is how the game works according to the rules.

Unless your players are gluttons for punishment, the MC has to reward the players some time. It can't all be fuckery. While I am in favor of players making thoughtful characters who have motivations beyond material gain and who will feel rewarded by a great story alone but those players are the exception, not the rule. That does not make them bad players. They just don't think on that level. So I am thinking that there need to be some "superficial rewards" for superficial players.

I have been thinking that a series of ironic rewards might be a good compromise. For example:

• Suitcase Full of $100 Bills
  The currency from the old world has no value now but it could be good for starting a fire.
  Suitcase is worth 1 barter.
  
  
• Leather-bound book
  You haven't seen one of these in ages.
  Page 50 is bookmarked with a photo of a smiling man, woman, and their two children.
  The Prince by Machiavelli. Maybe you can pick up some tips.
  
  
• Bottle of Champagne
  Dom Perignon Rose, 2055 Vintage. You have no idea how old this bottle could be.
  Worth 1 barter until opened.
  

What I am trying to do is have stuff that would be treasure that barfs forth apocalyptica. It's not a +5 sword but the players will still feel like they "got" something.

I am open to other ideas but "no rewards" is not an option.

That's not what they were saying... well not exactly. Let me try to frame their answers and your question in a different way. And the best way to do this is by putting a narrative example around it so that it makes sense implicitly. Also, your list doesn't actually include a reward yet, but we will get to that.

Yorn's Hollow is a gutter dump of refugees living in the squalor of some big urban rubble-pile no body bothered to remember the name of. Since most of the buildings are a wall or two with bent and rusty rebar and there isn't anything left resembling a road, the people pretty much live in ramshackle bombed out ruins with tarps, hides, plastics, and bent metal doubling as patches on their hovels. In this little camp, there's hardly any color and barely anything grows. When it does grow--its bleak, shriveled and tastes like tar. There isn't much in the way of law, and the strong pretty much take what they want--but no body crosses the local warlord, Beans or his gang of misfit savages that call themselves the Bones. In this land, that's where your players live.

Its important to know where you players are, and make them feel like its bleak, or in need, or desperate in a way that doesnt simply ruin the game. The people in place have food, it sucks, but they aren't dead yet. They have ruins, mostly picked through and mostly destroyed, but there's stuff out there they could find. The weather might suck, it might be permanently be overcast and feel like winter when it isn't raining radioactive acid rain--but thats okay, the people alive have a good tolerance to radioactive shit.

The "Quests" go from lets go kill the monsters and take their looted stuff some we can return to the village and be celebrated as heroes---to something more like, your neighbor is a drug addled whore that fucks around for whatever she can scrap up so she can keep getting her fix of that Bleat-Drug. Yeah that's made out of some poisonous plant that grows in the dark puddles in the cracks of the city still flooded, but maybe the couple of guys that grow it are looking to expand their pool of addicts.  Maybe the character doesnt give a damn, cause if it wasn't this thing bugging him it would just be something else. But... She's got herself a daughter. And that daughter doesn't really have a home--she isn't unloved, she's just mostly without purpose. So when she isnt going around and stealing stuff when people aren't looking (to buy food or candy or whatever else is innocently kid like in this abysmal place), she's hanging around Your house. She's always looking to trade her loot that isnt worth mention for stuff they got in their place that is barely worth mention. Its not the trade that matters, (think a quarter for a gumball, I'll give you a neat bundle of shoestrings) its the fact taht she is there with the player and appealing for soemthing more then she's got. Maybe the player beats her down and drags her back, maybe they ignore her like the trash she is, or maybe they decide to get involved in her life and see her smile. Or maybe when those drug dealers find out the mother robbed them last night and come to kill her and her kid, you're there in between. The reward? Saving her. Her smile. Her trust. The color in the world. Maybe if they achieve this, sometime later the girl that's now living with the player says Hey, I think I found something. And leads them out into the ruins where no one thought to look, and shows them a patch of green grass, some wildflowers growing in the mix. That might not mean anything to a guy that wants to stab a troll and take its collection of beads, but maybe the implications that something green can grow... or that shit might be better if they.... [enter information here], or that they know a grower from the golden age that spends his days lamenting at the bar over the lost green of the world, and his stories about how he was a farmer back when food was taken for granted. Maybe then, they can take what they heard some time ago and suddenly see this and go to him and say, look... I want to show you something. And when they get there, have the guy says something like... yeah... we can. I have seads from the old world... if we (workshop style) clear the area of the debris, keep it guarded, and spend a season; then we might be able to grow something real here. That real thing isnt the end reward, it will certainly come under threat, but--it is a reward. It is progress, it is More then what was, it can be used to sway people to their side, to give people hope, or to marshal people to take over the place. It could be a sign the world is getting better, or that there is something around here that prevents the death of everything from happening.

It provides another stone in the water for them to take a step onto. Metaphorically speaking, they'll be further from the shore where they started, probably wading into more dangerous waters; but they will have taken a step. A step for the world, a step for them, a step in the narrative. Good things snowball just like the bad. The reason that line says fuckery with intermittent rewards isn't that half the time things go to shit and half the time they don't. No. It's because everything, the good and the bad are temporal, they are good for now, they are a good thing; but always under threat of the badness in the world. So that good thing can die, it can be taken, it can get people killed who fight over it. It may not last forever. That doesn't mean the good thing is a trap--there will be lots of good things spread intermittently through the narrative of their decisions.

Maybe they save a guys life. Maybe they find a flower. Maybe they start to love an npc for the fun that they bring. Maybe they take wnat they wanted. Maybe their enemy bowed down in shame. Maybe maybe maybe. But a reward isn't a gift. Its something they went out and got, its something they protected, and its something they've got to keep fighting for if they want it to survive. That is what they meant above.

A leather bound book isnt a reward. It might be a hook into a story, or a thing thats worth barthing forth, but it's just that. If its more the PC will make it more, you dont need to force the issue. Its not you job to step up quests like the above knowing where they're going to go. You can have that kid and her mother there without ever deciding until some fateful hard move (if they already cared) or just some stop gap for the boring period (when they didnt care before but you want to provide them an opportunity to) would cause misfortune to fall of them. You didnt pre-plan the flower. You dont have to do much more then know the nature of of the characters and play to that in any given moment.

Rewards in barter are really a sure whatever. If a guy hired you to do a thing and says in return I'll give you this old broke down tractor. You go.. eh? can I do anything with it? Maybe some savvyhead in the nearby might take it off your hands for a barter or two of other junk. Maybe you're savvy head can fix it and has "plans". Whatever, they get to decide, do we do it for the tractor, or not.

I imagine you dont need a loot table. Loot in D&D is materialistic because the only things that change in D&D are the materials used to level up, and the materials needed next. Everything else gets sold, and the gold from that gets turned into the former or in the rare case some guy wants to also level up a SIM village/castle/knighthood/guild status whatever. In AW, the reward isnt defined, the quests arent defined, because what makes them real is the reason they matter. If some guys are attacking random guys a, why should the "party" care? If they do, well, you've got the first step to making it rewarding right there. Why do they care? Ask if you dont know, if its to save people then saving them is the reward. If its so they can take the fuckers guns or bullets? Where there you go. If you want to make thigns complicated or interesting? Do it. Make things hard, make things easy--you're a fan of the player characters though. So dont make literally everything touch turn to shit, let them get to stand in the way of it going to shit first. If they fail, they know why it gone. If they succeed, they know why its there, and probably so do other people. Make it matter, and it will be rewarding.

[edit] I have lots of typos above, if you cannot understand it or need clarification. I'll go back through and edit it and make it clean, but I don't really want to right now. Sorry. I hope it's legible enough to make the points clear, if not ask questions.

If your game was a movie. Would it make sense they the main "hero" was getting paid on screen all the time? Probably not, we would be far more interested to see: Did they earn what they got? Did they take it from someone? Did the local hard holder forgive the money they owe this month for "protection" cause they did a thing for him? Was it the things that mattered, or a gratitude and power that stems from the success of...[whatever]. Look to cinema for ways to reward and fuck with characters, there are far more examples there then what we can provide to you on a list.

But don't worry, when I started... I made a barter list too. It failed miserably, and I learned from it, but I did start in the place place you're trying to start from. You don't need that prep, it isn't whats important.

I admit to being a newbie at this game but I am a little surprised by some of these responses. Rewards are definitely mentioned in The Master of Ceremonies' Principles - "Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards." This is how the game works according to the rules.

This is a confusion of terms; in AW the word 'rewards' is just being used like any other English word. It is not being used as the mechanical/conceptual term-of-art that you are referring to and that is specific to D&D and games inspired by D&D. Rewards as you describe them and as they exist in D&D do not exist in Apocalypse World.

In D&D rewards are the basis of mechanical progression, and part of an extremely important out-of-game system by which the players and their characters become more capable so that they can address greater challenges, etc. The motivating power for these rewards comes from outside the game world -- it is first the case that there must be rewards, and only then the case that those rewards find their way into the story. The rewards are consequently almost always extrinsic to the in-game reason for their existence: e.g. the players rout the evil orcs from the abandoned tower, and so therefore they happen to find an appropriately powerful magic item in the loot the orcs left behind.

This is just not how AW works. The rewards being referred to in 'respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards' are fictional rewards, in the colloquial sense; they are the direct consequences of the PCs actions and only that. The reward in AW is that you actually cleared the orcs out of the tower without complication, despite any number of other opportunities for things to go wrong (i.e. the 'fuckery' that is the counterpart.)

The reward is a slightly better life for you and yours, because those things you did are actually working for now. It could also be, yes, a super rad hi-tech gun -- but only because the thing the character decided to do happened to involve a hi-tech gun and they happened to end up with it at the end of whatever happened. (This could include the player with a workspace being like 'I wanna make a sweet hi-tech gun!', incidentally.) But the reward could also be something like 'Now Rolfball's gang respects you' or 'the water filtration system is working again' or 'nobody around here believes in the Whisper Cult's teachings anymore'.

I hope this makes sense. Consider that last example. In D&D, the thing you would do to get the reward would be 'break the influence of the Whisper Cult over the local townsfolk' -- and if you did that successfully, then you would get something else as a 'reward'. The townsfolk would pay you some gold, or the cult would have some sweet magic items, or one of the cult members would turn out to be a powerful wizard who can enchant weapons, or whatever. But actually freeing the townsfolk from the influence of an evil cult would not be the reward (in the way you are discussing rewards.)

This is weirdo logic when you actually look at it from the point of view of the fiction. It is weird but we are all used to it from playing so much D&D and reading so much D&D-inspired fiction. But in a story where the local town is the place where the PCs all live, and is full of all their friends and lovers and people who can fix their broken car and scavenge food from the wastes so they don't starve to death... getting rid of the cult is a thousand times more rewarding (and more motivating!) than getting some kind of magic weapon at the end. The successful completion of the dangerous, necessary quest IS the reward, once you throw out the demands of the D&D meta-game.

--

This doesn't mean that sometimes these two things won't turn out to look alike. If you have some idea for some super-rad technology, or think the idea of a suitcase full of obsolete bills is hilarious* -- that's great! Put it in your game. Heck, give it out as a 'reward' in some classic D&D style, if you really want. Or just put it in the game and assume that the players will or will not end up with their hands on it, at some point; play to find out if they get the treasure.

But don't conceptualise this as you providing necessary 'rewards' to 'motivate' the players -- that's going to start fucking up your game, because you're going to overlook all the really important rewards and motivations that the game already has: the Fronts themselves, the general scarcity, the PCs' role in the community, the relationship with NPCs they like or depend on. Focus on that shit first, focus on making it feel real and important to the characters. Don't make it some kind of hoop to jump through so you can get some other 'reward', because that will not work. There is no D&D challenge-ladder to climb, there is no 'next dungeon' -- the PCs are living in the dungeon. The dungeon is where they have to figure out how to live and survive and maybe be happy. So some ray gun that helps them do that? It's great, sure, but it's not the reward. The reward is another week or month of living, and things being better because something they did worked out.




* I do too. I once had a Touchstone in my game who picked a suitcase full of USD$ as his symbol of the future and it was amazing.

I admit to being a newbie at this game but I am a little surprised by some of these responses. Rewards are definitely mentioned in The Master of Ceremonies' Principles - "Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards." This is how the game works according to the rules.

You've read the full citation right?

• Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards. As in
“fuck around with,” not “fuck over.” This is like when you barf
apocalyptica onto someone’s answer, but do it all the time. How
about an example?

Okay, so here's the example of Fuckery:

Marie makes it super clear to Roark that she doesn’t care who he
kills, but he’s to bring Joe’s Girl (an NPC) back to her alive. For
“questioning” or “examination” or something — Marie wants
access to Joe’s Girl’s living brain. So Roark goes out, murders
a batch of people, and comes back with Joe’s Girl alive. Here’s
where I fuck around, though: he’s beaten the SHIT out of her.
Marie has access to her brain (because always give the characters
what they work for) but she’s in a coma, her back is broken, her
face is smashed in. Joe’s Girl is alive for now, but ruined for good.
I gave Marie what she worked for, but not really what she hoped
for. See it? Throw curves. Put your bloody fingerprints all over
everything you touch.

And here's Rewards:

Intermittently, though, right, give one of the players’ characters
exactly what she hoped for, and maybe go a little beyond. Do it
just enough, and not when they expect it, so that they always
hope that this time is one of the times that it’ll work out. A third
of the time? Half? Not rare, just not predictable.

So Rewards is basically giving them what they want without putting your bloody fingerprints on it. How do you get from that to a leather bound book? Or a bottle of champagne? If you want them to find a bottle of champagne have them find a bottle of champagne, but it's not an Intermittent Reward unless it's exactly what they hoped for and maybe a little beyond. Is a bottle of champagne exactly what they hoped for?

The last time I played apocalypse world my reward was that I was able to keep my promise and get my friend's daughter out of town safely.

Here's a fairly specific example from my first few sessions in my very first AW game.
So Specialist Burke has just woken up from cryo-sleep to find Tammy Jackson has also been awoken but she's missing. Boom! My goal is to get Jax back. She's the only other person who can conceivably relate to what Burke is dealing with in this crazy, fucked-up world. With the help of a friendly Savvyhead (both of them talking through their respective Augury machines) he determines that Jax has been taken by a gang of about 8 thugs. So that's both fuckery and reward. "You know where Jax is. You know how to get to the local friendly-ish Hold. Do you want to try and play one man wrecking machine with a negative Hard and already wounded from coming out of cryo?"

Burke manages to make his way to the local Hold where the rest of the PCs are. The goal is still "rescue Jax". First, though, he needs medical attention, a silencer and a scope. With those, Burke figures he can snipe, since I had +3 Cool for Going Aggro. So now the goal is "find hi-tech gear", which is fairly close to your D&D-ish goals. That involved a bunch of chasing down leads, figuring out how Barter works, finding low quality crap (fuckery) and eventually someone who could make a silencer and someone else who would part with a scope (reward) but none of it involved the normal go to dungeon, kill things, take their stuff. It was just the people who lived in the Hold, their normal abilities, wants and problems. All of that culminated in running into a member of the gang that had Jax (fuckery) who was mostly just trying to do her thing and keep her head down. So now what, Burke? Take her hostage? Kill her in cold blood? You can't let her go because the whole damn Hold knows what you're planning and now so does she. Its not like there's a jail in town.

The sniper thing actually went down fine (reward) and most of the gang surrendered without being killed. One of them even wound up becoming an Ally due to advanced Hot, that's how long this took. So now she's alive but there's also half the gang who surrendered (fuckery). What now, Burke? You gonna put them on trial? How's that gonna work? The law is whatever the Holder says it is today. The police are his thugs. He said you can kill the gangers if you want. Oh, and by the way, the guy with the shiny rifle and invincible armor is now a local legend for dropping the gang single-handed. Oh, and he still never got medical attention because who has time for that shit?

So I got the rewards I was looking for (gear and rescuing Jax) and even some I didn't (the first Ally in the game, the gang's jeep) but Burke stirred up a ton of shit doing it. The Savvyhead wants a look at the Quarantine facility. Jax still has basically no understanding of how the world works while Burke has halfway gone native, she's more of a problem than a competent ally, the Hardholder and the Battlebabe both want Burke on their side but see each other and Burke as dangerous and potentially destabilizing. People are talking about these crazy ideas the new guy is spouting like "fair trial". There's now a power vacuum on the hold's northern flank and its only a matter of time before the crazy scientists of The Institute come looking for the Quarantine facility.

^^^ This.