I assign homework for my (mostly) weekly game. It's not mandatory, of course, but I offer one Karma per non-lame assignment completed. I'm looking for short essays, nothing too fancy, although if someone is inspired to write more than a paragraph or two, I'm cool with that.

I was writing some homework for my weekly game and it occurred to me that some folks here might find such questions interesting and/or useful. So rather than just start posting, I thought I'd ask. Well, that and take the opportunity to play with the poll interface.

I give extra rewards for Players who do things for the game - keep the journal, maintain the calendar, bring munchies.

Takes the load off me, and gets people involved.

Are you posting the homework questions or the actual homework itself? If it's the questions, can you give a quick sample so we know what exactly we're being asked about?

I don't reward my players for doing out-of-game 'homework' as it would be a bit frustrating for them to miss out if they have too much going on in RL that week to get anything done. Still, there are two players in my game who consistently work on projects outside the game. One of the players is usually looking at the day to day crunchie stuff for our group. He's the one that works on building things, including the new hideout/HQ. The other one does great fluff as his character is a teenaged technomancer that keeps a blog. If there is any reward for him, it is probably that I go in after he's posted the blog and add comments from readers. Here is the text version of one such posting (which excludes some of the cooler features the player adds such as the Owie List - a series of related to how much hurtin' various members of the party received during the episode). You can see where I use the blog comments as a perfect place to introduce or keep up with metaplots, and in this case make references to material found in Emergence that ties in with a minor story arc.

G-ournal

Well I want to welcome you all back for another issue of G-ournal. It’s been another few typical days in the sprawl. There were bad guys, (well badder than us anyway), bullets and even a boom. Uncle M ‘s note holder gave us a job. It seems someone took something of his and he wanted us to get it back. Naturally all was not what it seemed (when is it ever? You know that should be chapter 1 in the Shadow handbook, “They Lie�). The one who we thought was the heavy turned out to be sort of a ghetto version of Robin Hood. Anyway we went to “D’s� and had a disagreement with some less than pleasant persons in the parking lot, it’s a sad comment on our society that people have no manners. On the upside Uncle GB got us a couple of boom sticks. Boys are so easily entertained. A little while later Uncle M & Uncle RS started arguing, I mean the sounded like my parents. Maybe they should just get a room and get it over with, (Oh wait, they already live together. How weird is that?) Then Uncle P & M had an Italian lunch, the rest of us had to make do with a big doggie bag (Trolls can really pack away the pasta). But Uncle RS and I got pretzels it was so chill. Then we went to the without apparel gyration station. There we had a discussion that of course involved loud noises and the usual resulting loss of bodily fluids. I went byte to byte with a Trixter. My friends and I kicked his ass. Then I grabbed a metal man. While all this was going on My Uncles were giving and receiving owies, again with my, the boys are so easily amused theory. Uncle M’s note holder got RTFRM’d (reduced to fine red mist), no big loss there. We got some loot and a little cash too. We might have a new roof over our heads soon. I still haven’t been to school, yet. I’ll give the boys a little while longer before I pout.

PS. Mystery visitor you’re welcome here too, for now


TAGS run, pretzels, owie list, Robin Hood, boom sticks, possible homo-erotic relationship, RTFRM :: Previous Tag Versions

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> first!!!1!
> throwbackh8r

> Can we ban that guy?
> Super Trouper

> I don’t mean to be a thread-jacker, but we’ve got some news on your “Mystery visitor� GG. It is hard to be sure, but it appears to have been a very well coded agent. We haven’t tracked down the hacker that created it, but from its complexity I’m thinking it is military. The whole thing freaks me out, considering all the talk of anomalies floating around the Matrix right now. Just keep your eyes open and your head low.
> Rayne Report

> You want weird? Check out Evo’s node. You might have to search the cache if they’ve already scrubbed it, but the whole home page was covered in some strange haiku.
> Glitch

> I’m getting really damned sick of all the Troll stereotyping there is on this site!
> Horny Vegan

> Get a life, Vegan! Geeze. Some folks actually do fill the stereotypes…I know I’m your typical asshole elf that would like to put his foot up your warty ass.
> The Joker

> So, anyone seen the news? That weird story about the kid in the cab? Maybe that’s what crashed this site a little while ago?
> Dream Catcher

> I’ve heard someone murdered that little boy. Cut the top of his head right off and scooped out his brain. That true, or just another urban legend?
> Chuckles

> Dude, don’t spread nonsense BS like that around the tubes…
> Dream Catcher

> You’re much better suggesting that cab-jacking-freak had something to do with the G-ournal?
> Chuckles

> Boys, enough!
> Glitch

Guess what I voted.

Will the victims participants come here to get their feedback?

Edit: (Since someone did take the last option, no, that would be a wrong guess.)

Good idea

Sounds like what Franktrollman would vote

1) Enhancing the world you play in should be reward enough.

2) Anything that makes the GM's job easier makes the GM happier and generous.

As a GM I amble somewhere between 1) and 2), and tend to reward players who don't go overboard in the OOC hunt for karma points.

I do this too!

It's useful to do things that might prove helpful, like "Design the layout of your home" which gets interesting when I send a hitman round, for example. Like you, I award a karma point - enough to be an incentive, but not enough that people will get resentful if they miss out, and they can always catch it up when they want to.

Actually you've already seen like eighteen of them, if you've read the Twenty Questions in Runner's Companion. My most recent one looks like this:

Everyone has teachable moments. A teachable moment is that point in time where circumstances and disposition align such that a person will take to heart a particular lesson that is suited to the circumstances. It is always unplanned. There is always a teacher involved, although in rare circumstances the teacher is simply the circumstances or even the student. For example, a student asked yesterday how a computer could get "something from nothing" when we were writing code; it was the perfect opportunity for me to talk about compilers and assemblers (and ultimately Turing machines).

Choose one of your character's skills and write an anecdote about a teachable moment your character had at some point along his or her learning path for that skill. Try to include what brought your character to the teachable moment, and what s/he took away from the lesson.

You can see some others in the game logs of one of the players in our group, which is linked in my signature below.


I quite agree. I mean, one of my regular players is a freelance writer; I reckon he's got enough writing to do over the week. My solution to this problem is I don't have due dates. You can answer whichever ones you like at whatever time you want, and the Karma is still there waiting for you. My players don't always answer them, but they bug me for a new question every week.


I'm guessing you chose the stealing one, although I'd buy the answer one. And I already know who opted for the last one, and I know it wasn't you. =i)


I totally dig where you're coming from. That makes plenty of sense. I can't speak for any other GM in the world, but my goal when offering questions like these is to a) differentiate the character's personality from the player's and b) to get the player more invested in the character (as one would with a character in a TV series) and so increase the enjoyment of the game. But I make sure to keep it optional; as Mark Twain wrote, "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

Also, when I read Dumori's and pbangarths posts in this thread, one after the other, I was amused to see that both had exactly 909 posts.

I'll start a new thread for homework assignments (and comments) starting with the next one, since I already posted the one above. =i)

I wasn't aware that I was that transparent.

(My opinion, though genuine, is not personal; it is also independent of my belief that no one should use a word processor.)

~J

I do the same homework assignments. 1 karma point per 20 Questions question answered, if it's a good paragraph. It gets my players thinking about their characters as more than just kewl killing machines.

I've always run my games with a parallel message board for time in between sessions. Besides game rule discussions, I would post in-game news that could lead to other runs. Anyways, I also would award karma per session for in character journals...the first week, everyone did one. Then it dropped down to one person, but he only maintained it for another month or so.

I like the idea of homework questions.

My display shows 910 each. It would have been even freakier if each they had been 911.