Felltower: Fun Should Drive the Game

I mentioned yesterday that Felltower is just a dumb game designed to give the players a chance to have fun.

But the XP system doesn't reward meta-fun, but in-game loot. Treasure, followed by exploration (which largely is intended to lead to treasure) drive XP. XP drives PC improvement. But PC improvement is not intended to drive the game.

PC improvement is just there to provide an in-game reward for in-game actions. It's meant to drive what decisions people generally make in game. The players know they need loot to gain XP, so they tend to aim for loot. But if we have a session where people laughed, and chatted about stupid non-game things during break, and made silly jokes and had fun comments . . . I'm sure I don't care if their was a lot of looting and experience.

The actual doing of the thing is the fun part. The rules just drive what thing we generally do. I don't care if success or failure in the game occurs so long as we enjoy ourselves. Generally it's more fun to succeed, but not always. And we've had sessions where PCs got lots of loot but it wasn't an especially fun session. Still good, but not, "THIS is why I game!" fun.

It's all subjective, which is fine with me. I only want objective measures for in-game objective rewards. But they're not why I game.