Obviously when playing a paper'n'pencil RPG, there are the XP rewards used for leveling characters and getting access to bigger, better abilities. But have you ever thought about the non-XP rewards that players get from playing games?
Here's an interesting post about just that - metagaming rewards that make players want to come back: http://philgamer.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/metagame-rewards-or-the-different-kinds-of-fun/. It reads like a glossary, probably because it copies a glossary.
For some reason I thought this would be more about giving out dollar store "artifacts" to players...
lol
No, it's about what inherently causes gamers to come back to the game, and ties into the realization that different people play for completely different intrinsic reasons. Good GMs learn what the different people like and feed these non-XP rewards to keep their players coming back.
Yep