One of my biggest weaknesses as a GM is my lack of proper preparation and focus when it comes to rewarding my players for a completed adventure or campaign. To play the campaign I prefer intrinsic motivation of the players/characters and as a GM, I am quite content if a story was fun, the climax satisfying and everything worked out well. For the players I haven't found a solid system to reward them to make it more memorable, give them a proper sense of achievement and make the character more "their own".
There are the usual suspects like experience points (I play tde, not sure how dnd handles that) and riches, but both are sort of expected and not really rewarding, as characters get more experienced by default and need money to live.
The next level of reward system for me is customized improvement options, meaning I give the players the option to improve specific skills or talents of their characters for a "cheaper" price than usual. E.g. If the adventure at hand involved lots of wilderness skills, these could be skilled more cheaply afterwards. I prefer that to immediately give them improved stats, as I believe that to be too hard to balance sometimes and also prefer to put the choice of character development into the hands of my players.
As a third option, I sometimes award players with specific artifacts that give them access to specific skills or spells (this is rarer occurrence in the world of tde). For me this is tricky, because I want these artifacts to be interesting (yay a staff that can shoot fireballs, very creative...), useful (yay, fireproof candles...) but still not overpowered or too gamebreaking (yay, a black hole in a box) and also fitting the story, lore and context (yay, the wise and nice white mage gave the spellbook of doom to our rogue).
Finally, there are player-based rewards. If a player wanted to be knighted, be accepted into priesthood etc. then it can be a nice reward to "give" that to the player for a job done well. These are my favorite rewards, as they help develop the character, can be used to thicken the plot and enrich the world the characters live in. Still, I rarely find occasions to do something like that, because not every character has such a explicitly defined goal. Some just like to go on adventures and I don't want to force them to go into one direction or another.
So, what do you do in terms of rewards or are your murder hobos happy with just playing for the story?
There are the usual suspects like experience points (I play tde, not sure how dnd handles that) and riches, but both are sort of expected and not really rewarding, as characters get more experienced by default and need money to live.
The next level of reward system for me is customized improvement options, meaning I give the players the option to improve specific skills or talents of their characters for a "cheaper" price than usual. E.g. If the adventure at hand involved lots of wilderness skills, these could be skilled more cheaply afterwards. I prefer that to immediately give them improved stats, as I believe that to be too hard to balance sometimes and also prefer to put the choice of character development into the hands of my players.
As a third option, I sometimes award players with specific artifacts that give them access to specific skills or spells (this is rarer occurrence in the world of tde). For me this is tricky, because I want these artifacts to be interesting (yay a staff that can shoot fireballs, very creative...), useful (yay, fireproof candles...) but still not overpowered or too gamebreaking (yay, a black hole in a box) and also fitting the story, lore and context (yay, the wise and nice white mage gave the spellbook of doom to our rogue).
Finally, there are player-based rewards. If a player wanted to be knighted, be accepted into priesthood etc. then it can be a nice reward to "give" that to the player for a job done well. These are my favorite rewards, as they help develop the character, can be used to thicken the plot and enrich the world the characters live in. Still, I rarely find occasions to do something like that, because not every character has such a explicitly defined goal. Some just like to go on adventures and I don't want to force them to go into one direction or another.
So, what do you do in terms of rewards or are your murder hobos happy with just playing for the story?