PC motivation/character and inadvertant GM authorship of it

[Callan S.]

On the moral side:

Is what you are willing to die for an equal standard for all things?  Does anything you are willing to die for have equal priority?  What does willing to die mean?  

If someone came up and said I will give your family a million gold coins in order to sacrifice you in a ritual, and you said yes, that would be being willing to die for money.  

Hardly! He's willing to die to do with something about money, he'd not willing to die just for money. There is a difference.

Someone says I will give you $10 to go to 7-11 and buy a quart of milk.  Now you live in an area with no sidewalks, and a pretty high urban speed limit, someone could careen off the road and kill you on the way to 7-11, is that willingness to die for money?  No, it is willingness to take a risk for money, you assess the amount of money, and the level of risk and decide if it balances out.  

Eh? That risk is risking your life...for money.

Man, I'll be blunt. IMO those are two awful examples!

Perhaps a more relevant moral question is what you would kill for.  Would you kill for money, or to protect said forest.  Who would you kill, under what circumstances.  If your society, seeing the danger of a growing population on the wilderness killed some percentage of their people in order to keep them from harming the forest, who would you kill?  Your childhood enemy?  A guy you don't know?  Your baby daughter?  

You can ask these questions once their out in the field. These questions don't get them out of the tavern/town/home.

Most of us IRL give up a lot of what we are for money.  Instead of spending all my time with my wife and dogs and friends, I lock my dogs in the garage, vaguely rememer my friends, hardly ever do anything special with my wife, and I work 50-60 hours a week for money.  Money is not a bad choice for motivation, good or evil it is a very real motivation.  

I've said money as a motive isn't a problem. Its money being the recurring motive over and over that is a problem. There are some doctors in real life who could live like you, just to collect money. But some go and do 'doctors without borders' in harsh far away lands. I'm sorry, but these latter people are the interesting ones, and they aren't doing it for the money. In fact this whole damn hobby is full of people who write for it without expecting a huge profit (if any). And yet over and over PC's go for cash? How ironic!

*snip*
Problem is you need internally motivated characters, and of course a GM willing to run a very unstructured game.  

I can't understand how one can put the effort in that a unstructured game requires, but can't spend ten minutes plugging in PC motives before play. I suspect that it isn't the work load and simply an intimidating 'new' technique...which is funny, I see my technique as just being a merc group rip off. And I very much doubt its new.

[John Kim]

This works better if there is some formal structure holding the PCs together. i.e. They all work for the same organization. Then everyone can have their individual reasons why they believe in the cause -- while at the same time work as a group. This might seem terribly obvious, but it is a pattern that is sometimes ignored because it is too simple or "old-fashioned".

Granted, but this presents another dilemma - the almost total absence of procedurals and organisation-based RPG structures.
...
The more characters who need to be individually hooked with tailored attractors to the mission, the more necessarily distorted and implausible the hooks and mission must become, or will likely become.  Furthermore, it seems to me that while a TV audience will happily watch Stringfellow hawk in Airwolf toasting badguys week after week, when playing characters, players are more likely to want places to go, people to see, and new experience that more closely resembles the first person experience of life than the necessary repetition of the mission model.

Why not just have more continuity, then?  It seems to me that the problem you are complaining about is having totally unrelated mission hooks week after week.  The obvious solution to this is to have related mission hooks for many weeks in a row -- a long term conflict which the PCs are engaged in, like a war, a covert struggle, or some such.  

Also, your comment about individual hooks makes no sense as a response to what I said.  My suggestion was to not have individual hooks per mission.  Each character needs a personal reason why they work for the organization.  But given that permanent (or at least semi-permanent) personal reason, a specific mission only needs a reason why the organization as a whole needs to have it done.  

As an example from my own Vinland Vikings campaign, the characters are all related as part of allied clans.  So when the clan as a whole decides to support a raid on the Susquehannock, it is natural that the leading men of Brygjafael go -- including Poul, Kjartan, and Bjarni.  Now, they all have different feelings about this, but they all recognize it as their duty and look for ways to personally benefit from the expedition.

[M. J. Young]

It seems to me, this is worse than the merc group.  Now, instead of a mysterious hooded stranger with a bag of gold, I have to contrive a mysterious hooded stranger with a bag of gold, a threatened forest, and a kidnapped sister - again and again and again.

This struck something in my mind that has been touched on a couple of times in later posts, but never quite clearly.

Let's suppose that we had a first adventure with these guys; whatever the hook(s) was/were, everyone was in that adventure for his own reasons.

Now we need a new adventure. Do we have to hook everyone? Not at all. We have to hook one person, with a serious enough hook that this matters to him and a severe enough task that he knows he can't go it alone. What's he going to do? He's going to turn to the people with whom he worked last time, who got him through, who shared the danger and proved themselves to him and he to them. He's going to find out what he needs to offer them to get them to throw in with him again. In a sense, it becomes his job to hook the other player characters, and his motivation should be enough to get him to do it.

Granted, but this presents another dilemma - the almost total absence of procedurals and organisation-based RPG structures.  I can think of a few jousts in those directions, but even so none to my knowledge have risen above the mission or monster o' the week.  Procedurals normally explore their characters in the contxt of their role, of the formal structure, but RPG inevitably just uses such formality as a club to beat the mission into shape.  Even where people work very closely together - although this is harder than it seems for a group 4 or 5 strong - the organisational structure provides its own momentum, its own need to separate characters from one another, which undermines the utility of the mission structure for which purpose we adopted the model in the first place.

I played in a Star Frontiers campaign in which we were all employees in the security department of a major corporation, put together as a special operations team. Whenever there was an adventure, the referee would arrange for us to be assigned to it. It worked quite well.

I played in another Star Frontiers campaign in which all the characters were cadets in training at something like Starfleet Academy. The adventures we had were related to our training in the sense that we were put on ships together (with some experienced supervisors to oversee what we did) and sent out to learn what we were doing, but at the same time we often faced situations which were unexpected (to us). That also worked fluidly, as I recall.

The point is, if you want party-based play, you have to begin with some basis for their being a party, and some inherent motivation to which you can appeal--your boss says, this is part of your training, you have to adventure to pay the rent. Alternatively, yes, you've got a lot of effort to pull the group together--but it doesn't have to be the referee's effort, if he can find a way to get the players to pull their characters together.

--M. J. Young
[Edit to fix quote tag]

[contracycle]

, what does he tell him. Okay, lets do something really hard and free associate. Well, what do rogues do...steal/take stuff is a basic one. What do forrests have? Exotic animals to be sold, perhaps.

What I was pointing out was the above: the necessity for play to develop into a SHARED goal, and thus the necessity that every individual strand be tied to a central plot.  And all I said about it is that it introduces more variables than the merc structure, requiring more effort, and being less easily reapeatable.

Obviously the next question will be doing this for everyone without it being contrived. I'd cover it, but it seems so easy. Still, make the request and I will.

I am quite sure that for any discreet sceanrio I could nominate, you could come up with some linking device.  What I am challenging is that this is really realistic for the actual demands of actual people.

The device is crude if you make it that way and it is used crudely. The merc one can be used just as crudely, and its repetitive use during one campaign and over several makes it even more likely to be crude.

No, not at all: consistent use of this specific technique works very well, because it rapidly merges into the background.  The merc one can be used very elegantly indeed, and there are numerous stories about merecenary characters that demonstrate the point.  It translates very elegantly from game to game within a campaign, because it is consistent and coherent and unforced.

My argument is that it seems, superficially, like a nice idea to have everyone pursue their own motivations and seek their own goals.  But I think it aint: whenever a member of the A-team gets individually trapped or whatever, the rest get involved.  They cannot not, becuase this is about the A-team, not about that individual character.  The A-team are much better served by being a mercenary group who live in a van than by being a group of individuals who are merely coincidentally cooperating.  This is UNLIKE, say, the Magnificent Seven, which CAN explore each character individually, because they do not have to contrive such a reason over and over again, they only need to do it once and do it well.

[contracycle]

In a sense, it becomes his job to hook the other player characters, and his motivation should be enough to get him to do it.

It seems to me that this is just deferring responsibility for hooking players to another player.  Worse, that player is obliged to use their character to construct a hook for the other characters, not for the other players.  In reality, there is only one player hook: everyone agrees to do what Bob needs doing.  Its the same as the merecenary dynamic in which one player runs the fixer and all the others are their hirelings.

A more extreme form could be carried out at a more abstract level, as I suggested a little while ago: one could agree that the characters are nominally opposed, and yet game time only covers those periods in which they cooperated.  This is a substantially less 'cause-and-effect'-based model that uses the super-hook technique.

The point is, if you want party-based play, you have to begin with some basis for their being a party, and some inherent motivation to which you can appeal--your boss says, this is part of your training, you have to adventure to pay the rent. Alternatively, yes, you've got a lot of effort to pull the group together--but it doesn't have to be the referee's effort, if he can find a way to get the players to pull their characters together.

Yes, I agree with this completely.  This is more or less what I was getting at - the merc example is in fact one in which there is a collective party-based hook, as opposed to a set of individual hooks.  It is overtly a party-based model and, if some attention is paid to the relationships between these mercs, it does not have to be a totally bland universal agreement.  But we have a coherent, up-front, commitment to work as a single body rather than a requirement to hook and re-hook everyone every time.

[M. J. Young]

In a sense, it becomes his job to hook the other player characters, and his motivation should be enough to get him to do it.

It seems to me that this is just deferring responsibility for hooking players to another player.  Worse, that player is obliged to use their character to construct a hook for the other characters, not for the other players.

I think maybe you don't see this clearly as I say it; so let me illustrate.

I was in a fantasy game, very D&D-like, with all new players. The referee didn't say, "you're a party"; he dealt with my character. My character, a kensai with wings, was offered a job, a rather dangerous job, to recover a stolen object for return to its rightful owner. He was offered a reasonable chunk of money. He had just arrived in town, he needed work, and he had the skills to do this--or at least, most of them.

Immediately he approached another character, a fellow student of the martial arts, and asked if he would be interested in going along, for a set amount of the promised fee. He also spoke to a young samurai, saying that in the venture ahead there would be need for someone who could lead the group while my character was doing other parts of it; again, there was money, but more than the money in this case was the suggestion that the samurai would be second in command of the mission. Then I went looking for two more people I was persuaded I would need--a healer to mend our wounds if anything happened along the way, and a thief who would be able to help get the object out of the current holder's possession. Along the way I found several adventurers who held promise--a spellcaster, a druid, another fighter--who were all eager for the opportunity to prove themselves and accepted what I offered as a wage. Then I found my thief. We negotiated. He took half again as much as I offered the others, but he agreed to go. Finally I found the cleric. She needed the money, but she was more interested in the fact that she'd recently suffered some memory loss, and hoped that getting out of the city and seeing things out there might bring some of it back.

In each case, money was involved, but it wasn't always primary.

When that same character had another venture, one for which he was honor-bound, he went to those same people and said, "I did right by you last time; you got a lot more from the venture than you expected, and I got all of you in there and back again alive and wealthy. I need help with this; I'll understand if you don't want to do it, but what can I offer you to entice you?"

For some it was, of course they'd come; for some it was a guarantee of a certain percentage of whatever we got from it; one character dropped out (his player rolled up a new one), saying he was going to pursue his own life. One character wanted more responsibility within the group. After a certain amount of negotiation, a very similar group of characters left the city on the next venture.

It felt pretty realistic, too.

I like the A-Team; I just think more mercs are loners than party people--you hire them individually, not in batches. On the other hand, if you offer a merc a job with a good reward, he'll probably grab people with whom he has worked before, and ask them to come along. That feels realistic to me.

--M. J. Young

[Callan S.]

What I was pointing out was the above: the necessity for play to develop into a SHARED goal, and thus the necessity that every individual strand be tied to a central plot. And all I said about it is that it introduces more variables than the merc structure, requiring more effort, and being less easily reapeatable.

*snipping me*

I agree it is more effort, and how you repeat it requires more than a carbon copy (a bit more work). I'd still rank it in the ten minutes range though.

I am quite sure that for any discreet sceanrio I could nominate, you could come up with some linking device. What I am challenging is that this is really realistic for the actual demands of actual people.

I'll elaborate on what I mean by repeating it without a carbon copy:

The first session: Your fine here if everyone has a link to one adventure. It only seems unrealistic here if you think 'Oh, it's pretty unrealistic that EVERY PC somehow has a link to this adventure...that's contrived'. What's contrived is thinking of PC's as PC's. What's happened is that four individuals (or more, or less) in the game world have come into contact because they have a mutual target (with seperate interests in it). This is commonplace. It only gets contrived if you look at it in a meta game 'Hey, all the PC's are tied into this adventure'.

The second session: Okay, if you do a carbon copy of the previous, it will be contrived. So you use hard links and soft links. Hard links are like those I've already described. Soft links are like 'Well, you might find some info/a contact on what you like there' or such. It's a pretty soft link. The idea is that this soft push and their bonding with the other guys who have hard links, will propel them.

The third and all following: Presumably they are all bonded by now, so you have as many hard links as your group will accept is 'realistic'. Unlike your tastes, some groups would be happy for everyone to have a hard link to the adventure. Some would prefer perhaps just one. Others in between. Regardless, you cycle through PC desires, as the rest will stick with them and follow for friendship and/or because they owe them.

I think it's pretty clear that the latter is the same as the A-team...without having to have a merc group over and over again at the start of each campaign, to get things going in such a group direction.

[contracycle]

Callan, MJ, I think you are missing my point rather.

As regards the hiring of mercenaries, how you hire them depends on who you are.  If you are comissinging the deed, yes you want them in a batch.  If you are a mercenary captain, you take them one by one.

The scenario I alluded to was one in which all the players agreed to be mercs for hire; then we had one character nominated as the fixer who did all their transactions.  So far so vanilla.  All I was getting at was that we up-front consent to agree on what kind of basis the chartacters would cooperate: as mercenaries.

I think establishing such a hard link framework is highly preferential to not doing so, for then you can only depend on the soft links, which often are too challenging to character conception to be plausible.

Similarly, in the scenario MJ posits, regardless of the colour that accompanied the characters decisions, they again all decided to go along for money, ultimately.  And in the subsequent events, they just fell back on familiarity; but familiarity is difficult to justify life and death decisions on, and thus a character retirement was necessary.  This to me is an example of an inadequate hook, not least becuase intoroducing a nrew character means yet more attention to hooking.

[Callan S.]

Up front consent is good. I think what I should say rather than just imply is that, those examples rely on player authorship. Instead of the GM taking sole responsiblity for keeping the whole thing together, the group needs to get together so they can have characters that are/can quickly be attached to each other in some way. Characters who will make friends with the others after the first harrowing adventure, is one example of a hard link authored by the player. Those soft links I talk about are just add ons, so although the PC might go because their friend is, they are also going because theirs a soft link to what they care about as well (which is good because that's what the player wants them to get into to).

Apart from making PC's who will bond strongly, you can have all sorts of other hard links authored by the players. But I realise now, this really needs to be expressed so as to get up front consent to it, since one shouldn't foist new responsiblity (in this case, how well the session sticks together) onto someone without asking them.