PC motivation/character and inadvertant GM authorship of it

[Doctor Xero]

All this is why I enjoy notions such as the UA idea of rages et al.  (It's why interests and motivations are so important in my own effort at a game, the Mageling thread.)  Having such background on the player-character's values and psychology provides me with hooks to offer my players for their characters when I game master.

I also try to make sure there are a number of options rather than only one so that no single choice is vital to my running a game.

I often ask players to construct two characters with different motivations.  For the treasure hunt I might use their greedy characters.  For the murder mystery I might use their altruistic/compassionate characters.  And, of course, some players love it if occasionally their player-characters are conscripted onto missions so long as they get to play-act the character's grumblings entertainingly much of the time ("And I wasn't even supposed to come in today!", Clerks).

At the end of most games, I will ask players what their player-characters will be planning to do next session so I can get a head's up.  Then, if they change their minds, I adapt as best I can during actual play.

Ironically, my last three games, the players have asked me to overtly railroad them into having their first meeting in a bar -- "for tradition!"  < laughter! >

Doctor Xero

[Tomas HVM]

As it is the GM making the hooks in such games, he may as well make them more obvious.

Let the characters be subordinates of someone ordering them around. That way the player could play out his character by commenting the order, interpreting it, opposing it (trying to get the thing look like a honest failure). He may do a lot of things to express his character, while he still may get an adventure out of it.

And the GM may get his kick out of playing the sergeant...

Or you may instruct the players to set up the characters with some believable reason for touring the lands (jugglers, traders, some kind of traveling group), and then let the adventures happen on the road. No need to entice them to go places or discover things; it lands in their lap anyhow!

That's two pretty obvious ways of organizing a campaign, letting the dark hood in the inn rest (Bless him!).

[age_of_dissent]

I mean, weve all been in session where THAT guy in THAT bar hires us to do THAT dangerous job.

And, as we, the players sit there, we know if we don't do it, there is no session.

Probably not too relevant, but I've been in that situation 3 times now.

The first time, one of the PCs was a dragon monk who had taken a vow of poverty, and was so outraged by the offer of money that he attacked the shadowy guy and killed him. After the resulting barfight, half the party were arrested. There then followed a very spectacular high-action jailbreak to get the monk out before he went to the gallows, followed by several weeks of playing the fugitive evading capture.

Second time, we accepted after half an hour of haggling over the payment. (It was cyberpunk, and I wanted a certain upgrade for my bike. So I wasn't going to go on some dumb adventure for any less than $800000, which we eventually got)

The third time, they refused the money and spent the next few days (half an hour, player time) trying their luck with the ladies at the bar, arguing with a gunsmith over a piece that had broken on the last job, and other random stuff.
It then turned out that shady guy with money had found another group of adventurers, but they had killed him and gone on the run with the money. Now the people he was working for had sent a few mooks down to the bar to ask "Can you tell me which mercs my friend was talking to on Friday?"... guess who the barman points to.


I guess what I'm saying is... if the players have the initiative and the GM is willing to run with it, that guy in that bar really is giving you a choice. If the plot bribe the GM is offering fits the characters, take it. If it doesn't, maybe the players can find their own adventure. Their actions when given a free rein should at least tell the GM what kind of goal might work better next time.

[Callan S.]

*snip*
If you don't want to play in games in which you work as an adventurer for other people, then don't play games in which your character is an adventurer who makes his living by risking his life for treasure.

The thing about this, clearly one shouldn't/doesn't have to play an adventurer, for the PC to have adventures. It's almost the same missconception that I'm talking about with those GM's (and myself, in the past as a GM). That if players turn up with a PC and want an adventure, their PC is an adventurer.

Obviously your also saying 'don't play in games where you an adventurer...get in one where its clear its about something else'. Part of what I'm wondering is why the hobby repeats this 'player wants adventure, so the PC is an adventurer' miss advice. I'm also interested in addressing the problem, though I wonder that even 101 hooks can go wrong. Eg, GM makes an estimate on which one fits a PC, but it doesn't fit in play (yet the player is essentially forced to play to it anyway, or no game happens. Thus the GM defines their core values/passions).

In fairness, it sounds to me like the games you played weren't entirely like this. It sounds like your referee was schooled in the trailblazing model--basically, the concept of trailblazing is that the referee lines up the breadcrumbs, the clues that will lead the player characters through the adventure, and the players are committed to following that trail. This is one of the several means of solving The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast: the referee has complete control over the story, because he wrote it in advance for the players to discover; the players have complete control over their characters, because they can do anything they want; the two are reconciled by the player commitment to discovering and following the referee's story, getting through the adventure their own way but following his path.*snip*

Yep, trailblazing describes it perfectly, for what we all have used in the past.

What I'm suggesting, from experience and from impressions gleaned from around the web, is that it tends to create bland characters. Players begin to get uncreative, because they've been trained that you can only play if your PC loves money, thus unless they are offered money, they should remain motionless, essentially. Well, we can be creative, but when you've been through that same money rule over and over, it begins to rub off on to you.

All in all, its a bit of a vicious cycle. The GM looks frantically for a motive, thinks of money and offers it. The players look for a game, but can't play until their PC accept cash for whatever work. The GM has determined their nature, the players accepted it (or else), and the nature re-inforces the play style, because its 'working', it gets games going.

[Callan S.]

Mike Holmes: That's basically what I've recently tried (but due to inexpeirence, didn't pitch it well enough for the players to absorb it) and will be using next game I run.

Essentially the idea is to create a vanilla dungeon or whatever set of challenges. There are bad guys there, but really they aren't doing anything evil until we know what the PC's care about. Then ask the players what they would risk their life for or why they'd take on this dungeon.
Ideally you might get something like:
The greenie PC: Those orcs are tearing down the forrest and slash burning it, they must be stopped.
The family man: They kidnapped my sister!
The thug: Da boss says I'll be a made man if I get widget X from that dungeon.
The greedy guy: I've heard there's a plus 5 sword there!

Naturally the GM might temper some things, like there's really only a +2 sword (which fits the current game power structure) there, rumours made it out to be bigger. And the boss says only a few more jobs and the thug will be in splendor.

Anyway, this vanilla dungeon is suddenly full of meaning...without the GM having to invent it or second guess it (though he does have to add it in...but its pretty easy to chuck a hostage or widget here or there).

This is pretty straigtforward and simple...only took me a decade to figure it out!

Still, it just seems so much better than forcing 'PC's to love cash so the damn game can run' methods. Why is the latter so much a part of this hobbys culture? Apart from the option I've outlined, there are others which are far better than that forced PC love for cash, as well.

We have a lot of thick rule books around (quite a few RPG's are) so combat or whatever doesn't get boring. But why is this habbit, which creates same again PCs, neglected a paragraph or two in these books?

Age_of_dissent: Ah, now those three examples are of PC choices creating adventure. But they aren't really examples of the PC's drives determining the adventure. It's more the sh!t that happened in responce to their briefly displaying what they care about (or what they don't). It almost says 'Display what you care about and I'll make an adventure about you having displayed them'.

I'd actually say that dragon monk over reaction is a reflexive back lash toward the harmonigising 'Risk your life for cash' effect.

I mean, imagine what happens to his concept if he accepted the money? And yet, the pressue of 'there will be no game if you don't accept' is pitted against his having actually developed his personality outside the 'I love money' framework.

[CRScafidi]

After talking with some of my players about the subject of PC motivation, I found the following to be interesting.


Pride as a motivation: One of my players mentioned to me that their motivation was inherent to the game itself. They are motivated by their own characters development. Given that this is only a sort-term motivation (you can only get so good at something before you hit a barrier), I still found it intriguing that their motivation had nothing to do with whats in the treasure chest or who needs to be rescued, but rather with what that players character could become, whether that be the untimate badass warrior or the pinnacle of scholarly knowledge.

- Rocco

[Callan S.]

I get the feeling that players can be quite good at startling their GM with motivations that are miles away from collecting cash for dangerous jobs.

It also saves the GM a lot of work. He doesn't have to write a session that he guesses is appealing. He can write selfishly, lazily. Then he just needs to aquire their motivations and hammer them into the session design, so they are at the forefront. I've really sweated over trying to please some picky people as the GM in the past, with them never really connecting to the session design. It would have been nice to realise back then I could leave getting past their pickyness to them.

[contracycle]

Ideally you might get something like:
The greenie PC: Those orcs are tearing down the forrest and slash burning it, they must be stopped.
The family man: They kidnapped my sister!
The thug: Da boss says I'll be a made man if I get widget X from that dungeon.
The greedy guy: I've heard there's a plus 5 sword there!

Naturally the GM might temper some things, like there's really only a +2 sword (which fits the current game power structure) there, rumours made it out to be bigger. And the boss says only a few more jobs and the thug will be in splendor.

Anyway, this vanilla dungeon is suddenly full of meaning...without the GM having to invent it or second guess it (though he does have to add it in...but its pretty easy to chuck a hostage or widget here or there).

Sorry for quoting a big chunk, but it seems to me this argument contains some implicit problems.  That is, as long as we have the tacit expectation that a) characters have continuous lives, and b) characters experience more than one 'adventure/story', thew above cannot work.

Once the greenie has stopped the orcs destroying the foresrt, they go back to their life as a park ranger.

Once the family man has rescued his sister, he takes her home and they all live happily ever after.

The thug comes back with or without widget X, and gets promoted or not accordingly, but either way lives and dies back on their home turf.

The greedy gets the sword, and then is either satisfied or turns their eye to something else.

In none of these cases is there an elegant model of continuing play.  The mercenary party is expressly designed to circumvent this by establishing the group as a nuclear team, for hire, with just enough morality to be considered the white hats rather than the black.  The great advantage of the vanilla dungeon and the traditional lead-up is that it allowed these 'adventures' to be chained together into a campaign.

Now, I agree that this is rather flat and emotionally empty... but, as long we have a model which is "the continuing adventures of...." its hard to avoid.

[John Kim]

In none of these cases is there an elegant model of continuing play.  The mercenary party is expressly designed to circumvent this by establishing the group as a nuclear team, for hire, with just enough morality to be considered the white hats rather than the black.  The great advantage of the vanilla dungeon and the traditional lead-up is that it allowed these 'adventures' to be chained together into a campaign.

Now, I agree that this is rather flat and emotionally empty... but, as long we have a model which is "the continuing adventures of...." its hard to avoid.

It seems to me that there is room for group motivations other than money -- or even if money is the motivation, that it can be more personal.  For example, you can design characters who all have the desire to do the same thing (i.e. loot dungeons, perhaps) -- but give them all personal reasons for doing so.  Perhaps one is the great white hunter who wants to make a name for himself.  Perhaps another needs the money to finance a cause which he is interested in.  And so forth.  

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".  

In my experience, trying to hold PCs together by simple friendship and coincidental match-up of motivations is unworkable in the long term.  There needs to be some sort of group identity.  And identity through the group (i.e. a family, a cause, or even a career) is emotional.

[Callan S.]

Hi contracycle,

What I think you've missed is this is really no different than 'a bunch of mercs hang around waiting for a mission'. We have a bunch of guys hanging around, waiting for a mission...that matches what they want to do (which is quite easy to know, when you ask and they tell you). Instead of a guy coming along pushing cash toward them, you have a guy coming along pushing a signpost to these things, toward them.

I can't see any difference to the merc group. Just as much as the missions never run out, nor do the number of threatened forrests, threatened sisters, promotion opportunities, etc. In fact, your players are going to do the work of thinking these up for you, instead of you cooking up all of the mission details.

The guy who wants a +5 sword might be a prob if +5 is the best you get. But as I said, local rumour only said it was +5, it was actual +whatever fits.

I can't see how these characters hearts desire (the one the player wants to explore) can so quickly be resolved that it's a problem. And if they do and they PC has no further things he'll risk his life for, well, its the players choice. Retire him or make up a new passion, their choice. Whats so different between that and a rich merc who could retire at any time?

[contracycle]

What I think you've missed is this is really no different than 'a bunch of mercs hang around waiting for a mission'. We have a bunch of guys hanging around, waiting for a mission...that matches what they want to do (which is quite easy to know, when you ask and they tell you). Instead of a guy coming along pushing cash toward them, you have a guy coming along pushing a signpost to these things, toward them.

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.

I can't see any difference to the merc group. Just as much as the missions never run out, nor do the number of threatened forrests, threatened sisters, promotion opportunities, etc.

I vigorously disagree - plausibility is a limited commodity.  Repeating the same crude device again and again is simply boring and repetitive.  All we have done is remove the potentially elegant unified solution.  By use of techniques such as requiring relationships and interdependancies between characters, I have had character groups with quite complex interpersonal dynamics and various motivations - the only requirement being the conceit that, willingly or not, mercenary work is what they do now.

In fact, your players are going to do the work of thinking these up for you, instead of you cooking up all of the mission details.

I can't see any evidence for this at all.  If it were the case that players reliably hooked themselves, the entire question would be irrelevant.

John Kim wrote:

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.  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.

Can it be done?  Sure - by no means am I saying that it cannot be done, if you see what I mean.  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.  (Even then, Airwolf suffered from this plausibility problem too, with nearly everyone and their pet hamster kidnapped eventually.)

So anyway, I think this remains an impasse, and that the only way out of it will be more attention to actual structured play, that is designing movements and actions of play, scenes more or less, that are intended to achieve specific results in terms of setting and situation.    I think this is only likely to emerge fomr attempts to reproduce procedurals, and by abandoning notions of temporally linear play.  How that works exactly I don't yet know.

[karolusb]

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.  

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.  

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?  

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.  

When placed in a situation would your eco friendly hero work as a guard for loggers for money?   Only when two interests directly compete can you get a definitive perspective of where they stand in terms of priority.  

On the gaming side:

I do agree with the heart of the problem, but it is not an easy one to overcome.  Have you tried playing in a game without such forced encouragements?  Finding a group that thinks like you is probably the best answer, but we live in a world of finite resources, most of us take what we get in terms of a gaming group.  Have you considered calling your GM on his Iron fisted technique?  Uncomfortable, especially if you are the only one at the table who complains, and as likely to get you banned as to provoke change.  

Perhaps for a game where the most accepted motivation is greed you should think about making a greedy character.  Or tack a secondary justification on to his actions.  Maybe you want to be famous.  Maybe by aquiring wealth you can impress the father of that girl you always liked.  Maybe an equally telling instance about your moral fiber is when you will bail on your friends.  "Good luck risking your life to clear the sewers, I am gonna go protect a tree."  While there is a reward for clearing the sewers are you not also doing a service to the people?  Rationalisation, just as most of us need it to get through RL our characters can benefit from it as well.

A couple illustrations from Shadowrun one as a player and one as the GM.  

I have a Street Sam, die hard professional type. Would he die for money?  Certainly not.  Would he kill for it? Often yes.  So we get toghether one night GM opens the module and says blah blah job pays 50k total.  There are 8 of us.  My character (already a millionaire) considers the rate of pay an insult.  But to refuse would mean not to play.  It is not that my character wouldn't kill (or endure some risk) for money, but the amount of money.  Yet the question remains exactly the same, do you compromise your characters prinicples in order for the ability to play in a game?  (Side note: This same character would mock fellow shadowrunners who claimed to have grand moral aspirations, pointing out that they engaged regularly in corporate espianage for cash, hardly the most moral profession).  

I was running a game a while back, I told the players that any character concept could fit in the game as long as they could fit in with each other.  I would use this pulp plot generator (from shadis magazine, anyone remember which one?  boy I wish I could find it again) to come up with rumors, news stories, and job offers.  I would throw 10 or 20 out per game, not very detailed, just sketches, the players could persue or not persue at thier leisure.  We ended up with a mercenary, and an anti-government newshound type (among others).  So the Newshound ended up paying the Merc to investigate news stories.  Some days they would not pay any attention to the news, follow up old leads, seek out new contacts, go bargain hunting, the world was pretty much open to them.  The game was very fun for the group we had.  Problem is you need internally motivated characters, and of course a GM willing to run a very unstructured game.  

Trying to run that same style of game afterwards has resulted a string of failures.  The vast majority of players find it to be overwhelming.  They kind of expect some guy at the bar.  As the one fellow said most players are the reactive element in a game, and frankly most GM's and players are used to it and wouldn't respond well to change (though I definately encourage everyone to try it, when it works it is really really fun).

[Rexfelis]

There are a lot of different ways to hook players into the game, and a lot of different ways to hook their characters into the game (2 separate issues), many of which have already been stated. Some of the relevant variables include the degree of player authorship vs. GM authorship of the hook, and the degree of player vs. GM authorship of the goal that the player or his character are supposed to be hooked into. Example: a GM could create the goal totally on his own (rescue the princess from the dragon), while the player could create the hook totally on his own (my character cares about the princess because they're mortal enemies, and he'll be damned if some dragon is going to ruin his chance at revenge).  

I guess what interests me most is the fact that so few games have included GM-authorship of the goal or the hook as an above-board principle, but have insisted on "illusionism" instead (if I've got the terminology right). Me, I see nothing wrong with GM-created hooks and GM-created goals. Apparently, neither do many game designers, because so many games have been designed under the assumption that (e.g.) the players and their characters both value survival and power or wealth, and that this will suffice to hook them into whatever "adventure" is at hand. This is perfectly all-right, but why wasn't this assumption made more above-board? As in, the game specifically says that all PCs are assumed to have these as their main goals, or the adventure starts after the PCs having already accepted the goal/mission as their own. What we have seen instead is indeed the "hooded stranger" effect. (If you have a hooded stranger scene in your adventure, why not just write it as a GM monologue that the players just listen to, as a kind of prelude to the start of the game?)

Some of the old AD&D modules actually do this. The PCs are simply "railroaded" into the beginning of the adventure. Except, it's not railroading, because part of the social contract was that "Yeah, we start every session with the PCs on an adventure which they've more or less already agreed to." What happened is that, somewhere along the line, this no longer became part of the social contract of groups playing adventures written in this fashion. (Hell, maybe it never was, in a lot of people playing D&D, and they were just frustrated.) But if you look at, say, Gary Gygax's "Against the Giants," there's no attempt to hook the PCs into the adventure, because it's assumed they've already been hooked. The play of the game begins with that assumption firmly in place.  

But, sure, if that's not the type of game you enjoy, then try out some of the other possibilities. The GM makes up the goal, the player makes up the hook for his PC; the goals as well as the hooks are created by the player, and the GM just manages the interaction between PCs and NPCs; the GM makes up both goals and hooks; the player chooses the goal/mission, the GM provides his PC with the hook; whatever. Just keep it above-board so everyone knows what to expect.

Rexfelis

[TonyLB]

I know it's not much of an insight, but many successful groups that I've played in and run for are far more thoroughly hooked to each other than they are to any one common goal.

If the characters start off the adventure (either by communal character design or because of previous games) with relationships that motivate them then you only need to hook one or two of them... the rest are going on the adventure to protect the others, or to redeem themself for last sessions blunder, or to show once and for all that they are the toughest member of the party no matter the situation, or... well, a whole gamut of reasons, each intensely individual.

[Callan S.]

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.

Jeez man, I think your initial assessment of this technique lead to hostility toward it and thus your not applying even the small amount of creativity to fill in the gaps. It's a minute amount, I can take hours writing an adventure but this is the work of ten minutes. But I'll do it for you to give a demo.

First, THERE IS NO BAG OF GOLD. Jeepers (yeah, I use the tough words!), I just said were skipping that. Remember, this is what the character will risk their life for (and the player wants them to do)...they don't need a bag of gold to do it (or for the player to be happy for them to do it).

Now, start with your adventure. Write anything you damn well please, with zero forrests in it if you like. It can be some be some back alley theives guild politics romp if you like. It can even just be a ruin full of nasties. Whatever you want.

Now ask each player what their PC will risk their life for and what they, the player, want to see their PC risk their life for.

'Oh, I want to save the forrests' sez one.

Oh no, the back alley rogue politics is ruined. Oh, like hell it is!

There are usually dozens of people a PC knows, from siblings and parents, to barmaids and bar men, to fences and stable boys that you can introduce with no hiccup. Pick one. This guy will gossip with the PC and tell him something.

Now, 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.

"Jeez guvner", says the stable boy, "I've heard that Finnigans got himself some of dem wugga birds for sale. Perhaps he knows who's burning down the forrest to drive them out for capture?"

"Gosh, your right...I think I'd better go on a back alley rogue politics adventure right now"

I'd fill in the blanks on when and where to give info on that forrest burning, but I know you already manage stuff like that.

Okay, next adventure. Again, write whatever you want. Perhaps a romp in a cloud city. Again, ask what the PC will risk their life for and the player wants them to do so.

If the player again replies "Save the forrest!", it isn't boring...your player just asked for it again. Either its exciting for him or he has a mental condition.

Again, go through the other steps. Perhaps even use a rogue who the PC spared the life of (if something like that happened), who mentions a special 'forrest B-back' elixer is in the cloud city. Huzzah and so forth.

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 vigorously disagree - plausibility is a limited commodity. Repeating the same crude device again and again is simply boring and repetitive.

I can not believe you can say this about this technique, while also pushing the merc technique. And all at the same time doing it with a straight face!

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.

But seriously, like all RP techniques, if you remove all creativity from the technique I described, your very right, it wouldn't work. Remove whole minutes of creativity and it just wont work.

For every hour of play I've generally put in an hour of prep work. So for me, I can afford ten minutes. And for those guys who never prep and go off the cuff, they should be even better at this than me.