Hey all,

This is a quick one to address GM techniques like 'keeping em poor keeps em motivated'.

Not the stingy part of it, but that identification of motivation and what it forces by acting on it.

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.

I just have to wonder, if part of the mind numbing boredom of games like this (well, potentially numbing. Some like it) is what it's done to your character.

I'll submit that a good, solid way of judging character is what a person will risk their life for. What you'll risk your life for is what your life tends to revolve around.

So, what happens when you as a player have to have your PC accept the job or there isn't any fun to be had.

Well, despite your particular plans for the personality of that character, you just made him risk his life for cash. It defines a pretty big chunk of him.

There's nothing wrong with that. Except every time that dude in the tavern turns up, that notice board with sewer clearing jobs appears, that whatever cash 'hook' happens, your defining him the same way. Again and again and again.

And your pretty much blackmailed into it via the GM's design. The GM is even usually well meaning when doing this, trying to find a way to attract your PC into the fun. Which means either your PC accepts the cash, or nothing fun happens for you as a player.

A bunch of people at the forge and others already recognise problems similar to this, but has this particular one been discussed before? A good intention usurping player desires and leading to characters who's core passion is the same, over and over again? A repeating problem that could be solved by probably just one paragraph in any given RPG.

Certainly, I think I now realise my groups gaming history has been colored by this. Years...a decade. Ouch.

Clearly you can just ask players 'What does your character care about enough to risk their life for, and they'd just have to pursue', then build it in. It was in Vallamirs RPG.net rant awhile ago, its actually built into the system of TROS and suggested elsewhere.

Is there a way to crack this 'Someone hires you for a life risking job, thus defining you greatly.' recurring problem, that's recurring in RPG culture? That is, if it is indeed a problem as I'm seeing it. I'm pretty certain it is, but let me ask you the audience, what you think. :)

I had a buddy who was a gamer junkie who suggested that the situation was actually a result of the PCs running up huge bartabs during their downtime. Basically, mysterious stranger came into the bar, asking for rowdies that need work and the bartender point out our "heroes". Either way, the bartender is ahead. If the PCs succeed, the heroes pay their bartab and hopefully break off the bartender better than expected. If they fail to return, the bar takes a loss, but at least those guys aren't around soaking up free suds anymore...

The solution that I typically use to the "Quest from the Bar" or "Man's Dying Wish" scenario is putting the PCs into a situation that they cannot control.

Take this scenario for instance:

Your players wake up, one by one, bound and gagged on a cold basement floor. They were drugged and kidnapped in their sleep, they didn't even see it coming. As they wake up, they vaguely hear orders to the guard to kill them after interrogating them. The guard, in order to "keep himself going", accidentally overdoses on cocaine, and now lay dead or convulsing on the floor.

Now, your players have to act, otherwise they are dead.

- Rocco

Hi Callan,

Actually, quite a few games already deal with this issue in full.

First, any game that gives players direct input into the conflict being generated handle this problem quite well. Sorcerer's Kickers, Trollbabe's scene request/conflict declaration, octaNe, the Pool, etc. The key point is some level of input, which can range from a declaration of conflict(kickers) to narrative control(octaNe).

Second, some games make it the POINT of play, clearly in the text, about the "mission", such as Donjon. Taking it from the unspoken agreement to the actual text tends to help in that regards.

In both cases, you'll see that the tendency is to avoid GM tricking, conniving, or otherwise forcing the players into action, and aiming instead towards group agreement about what action is about and would be more entertaining for everyone.

As far as the overall issue, I believe it comes to the texts themselves. As long as the primary form of play supported in texts is Illusionism (Preplanned story, "illusion" the players into believing they have input), you'll see this happen again and again. You cannot tell people they have free will and can do anything, and not expect someone, at some point, to actually attempt it.

I don't believe there is any feasible way to shift the mentality of gamer culture, and I'm sure many people are quite happy with Illusionist play. The real problem is that people aren't aware that there could be other ways to play games.

As far as individuals who have that problem, who want something different, I run Inspectres, and give them first hand experience of what I call Anti-Illusionist play to break some ingrained beliefs on their part.

Chris

Hi Bob & Rocco,

Actually those solutions are exactly what Callan is pointing to as the problem. GM's forcing, tricking, conniving, or otherwise controlling player decision is one way of playing, and a way that many people do not find fun or functional.

For those that do, they are already out there using those methods and having fun. For those that don't there's very little support in terms of texts in games that you'll typically find on the shelves at your FLGS.

Chris

Hey Chris,

I don't know if you over generalized Callan's point too much. He may or may not be complaining about "GM's forcing, tricking, conniving, or otherwise controlling player decision is one way of playing" specifically.

However he was complaining specifically about cash being the sole and only means of motivation and, in my opinion (which could also be wrong), was searching for other opportunities/motivating events that a GM could bring to the table. Whether or not he is seeking to empower his players to make those decisions or whether he was seeking to increase the repertoire of situations at his creative disposal is yet to be determined.

What say you Callan?

If you are seeking to increase the tools in your story telling pouch, as a DM, I can point you in a couple of very useful and fruitful directions. You can start with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and George Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations

Best of Luck!

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume

Bankuei wrote: Hi Bob & Rocco,

Actually those solutions are exactly what Callan is pointing to as the problem. GM's forcing, tricking, conniving, or otherwise controlling player decision is one way of playing, and a way that many people do not find fun or functional.

For those that do, they are already out there using those methods and having fun. For those that don't there's very little support in terms of texts in games that you'll typically find on the shelves at your FLGS.

Chris

Silmenume got it. I'm surprised I didn't get my point across well.

What I'm talking about is the fake choice offered by the GM that causes a character to be defined by it. By fake I mean that if you don't accept the cash, there is no game for you as a player.

I'm suggesting that you've then gone and made your character almost the same as all the rest who will risk their lives for cash. It's either that or not game.

For example, you make a character who cares about the forrests not being logged. He's willing to put his life on the line to save the forrest. The GM then starts a game where your offered cash to risk your life clearing a sewer of orcs. If you don't accept it, there is no game.

So, what exactly happens to your character then? Apparently you wanted to have a character who cares passionately about something...willing to prove that passion by risking his life over it. Ah, but now he's risking his life for cash.

Really now, forrest or money, they're both equal in terms of passion. He's just proven that he'll risk his life for either. Therefore his passion for anything else is demonstrated as being no stronger than his lust for cash. The same lust every other character demonstrated, because the GM put all of them through the same fake choice. The same thing, over and over.

I guess one school of thought is 'Oh no, my greenie PC can do the sewer clearance and still care more about the forrest, because I know he does and that's all that matters'. Well, if your playing by yourself your fine. But when your with others, the only way to demonstrate a characters individuality in terms of passion is to walk the walk, he can't just talk the talk and say the forrests are his love. He's got to demonstrate it, and in action games you do that by putting your PC's life on the line. But how can you do that when you've already 'put out' for cash, and really seem to care more about the forrest? How can he differentiate himself from every other character that demonstrated a love for cash? He can't!

Think of it another way, where the GM takes up the PC concept in a skewed way...the character is offered cash for saving the forrest. The GM designs it so the PC has to go through a scene where he can 'accept the cash to do the mission'. This is directly screwing up character concept, insisting they accept cash to do what they care so much about that they'll risk life and limb for it! Clearly, you'd find most/all characters declining the cash or only accepting enough for much needed resource purchases, and still the less accepted the better!

This should clearly highlight how a player would want no confusion between cash and his passions, and which his PC loves the most. So why has the forced 'choice' of taking cash jobs become so prevalent in RPG culture?

Rocco wrote: Another way of doing this would be to simply ask the players what it is that they want, but that seems a little direct, and when they find their group actions moving towards one of their personal goals, the effect that it has seems a bit dampened.

Noon wrote: Is there a way to crack this 'Someone hires you for a life risking job, thus defining you greatly.' recurring problem, that's recurring in RPG culture? That is, if it is indeed a problem as I'm seeing it. I'm pretty certain it is, but let me ask you the audience, what you think.

If I had the time, I could probably offer up a hundred hooks that I have used or seen used to effectively draw player characters into an adventure. The king offers a reward for whatever the task is. The characters are shipwrecked together in the wilderness. A merchant hires the group to help open a new trade route. A company is looking for security guards. There's a rumor that a girl you knew years ago is now a wizard's apprentice in a city fifty miles to the east. Someone hands you a medallion he claims is a lost heirloom from your family, and it points to some fragment of a nursery tale your mother used to tell which you had forgotten as childhood nonsense but now find may have some significance to it.

The problem of which Callan is complaining is peculiar to a very narrow type of play, and is only a problem if you're playing in that niche and you don't like it. Let me illustrate that by taking a step back and describing what he seems to have overlooked.

My character is an adventurer; he has learned a profession, for one reason or another, in which the best jobs are all essentially working freelance for whomever will pay for people to risk their lives. Hopefully, I'm good at that; if not, the only way to get good at it is to practice.

I'm in a bar, but it's not just any bar--I'm in a particular kind of bar. I'm in a place where adventurers hang out when they aren't working. Everyone knows this. There's a notice board where jobs are posted--businessmen seeking caravan guards, bars seeking bouncers, trade guilds seeking various types of assistance. Sometimes someone comes it specifically looking for someone like me. If I've got a reputation, he might be looking for me.

I don't have to take this job; I can sit here and wait for the next job. If I'm in a big city, there will be another job within the week, and if my money will hold that long and my crew won't kill each other out of boredom in that time, I can see what the next job looks like. Or I can take one of the jobs on the notice board, settling for a safer salaried position or a riskier venture.

All of that was part of the only game I ever played in which waiting in a bar for something to fall in our laps was ever considered. Even then, that wasn't the way it went. We were looking for work. When a prominent businessman sent a note asking me to meet him for lunch, I went to his office. When I realized that a trip to which I was honor-bound would take me through uncharted territory, I contacted import/export traders to discuss a financial deal for establishing a new trade route. Remember, I was a professional adventurer--that's what I did for a living. It is incumbent upon me to find ventures which would pay, and pay worth the risk, for my own economic survival and, as I became a prominent leader of others, to fulfill a moral obligation to them to keep us all employed.

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.

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. Trailblazing is a valid and functional way of playing, but it is dissatisfying to players who want to write their own destinies. Many referees can't handle players who aren't actively trying to follow the story; that creates dysfunction, usually in the form of referees raising the level of force until they've changed from trailblazing to illusionism (in which player choices don't matter, the referee's story will be told), occasionally in the form of the game fizzling because the players have left the referee's story and discovered that there are no sets or characters a hundred yards away from the intended trail.

I run Prisoner of Zenda as a Multiverser world. It generally is intended to play out that the player character will take the role of the "play-actor", that is, he is the spitting image of the king, and when the king is incapacitated the player character is pressured to take his place. There is only so much pressure the NPCs can put on him to do this, though. If my player wants to walk away from it, I have to let him. That means that wherever he goes, I'm going to have to be able to recreate the story in response to his actions.

A lot of referees are completely unprepared for this. We as referees are often taught that we're to create the scenario and the players are to respond to it--referees act, players react. But in this sort of play, it's exactly the other way around: players act, referees react. The referee becomes the player who has the difficult job not of creating what is going to happen but of responding to what happens; he has to create his world on the fly, because no matter how meticulous his original preparations, there is no way he can pre-guess every possible move the players might make. The world now truly is one of the characters in the game, revealing facets of itself and expanding its identity as play progresses.

So there's nothing wrong with the concept of starting your adventures the way you've described, if you've created characters whose livelihood depends on going on such adventures (and the typical player characters are generally exactly that sort of characters); but there is something wrong with the standard paradigm of the referee dictating to the players what the adventure is going to be about in a completely linear fashion.

Does that help?

--M. J. Young

I probably read too many comic books as a kid, but I usually use their plot devices to force someone into an adventure, like having the bad guy kidnap a PC's kid sister, or they need the money to pay the cleric to heal their dear old Aunt May. Sometimes I'll use the tendencies of a PC to get them in trouble. One of my favorites is a few warriors attacking some peasant girls just as the PCs round the bend. Jumping at the chance to play hero in front of the peasant girls, they kill the warriors only to find they are the boisterous sons of the local noble. So the characters can either go to the Dungeon of Doom or face the gallows. But still, the players end up feeling forced and that their character has no choice in the matter. Perhaps simply more player input on how they want their character to be motivated is a good idea. I think experimentation helps find some you like, too. I'm beginning to think that character motivation for play should be a part of character creation.

It seems to me there are only two solutions to this problem we've identified so far.

In the first method, as orriginaly pointed out, the GM has to make some pretty big assumptions about who the characters are and what they're interested in. Now this can be done in mores subtle and co-operative ways. I prefer to tell my players up-front what my general assumptions are going to be about the characters. this signposts to the players what kinds of things are likely to be important in the game. I even suggest some sample characfter sketches, that the players can then interpret in a number of ways while still ensuring that the characters will match what I need for the game.

The other way is to give the players complete controll in generating their characetrs, but remove all their freedom when it comes to the situation they are in - they're shipwrecked, or drugged and bound, etc.

We could generalise this and say that as freedom in character design increases, freedom in character situation decreases.


Simon Hibbs

simon_hibbs wrote: It seems to me there are only two solutions to this problem we've identified so far.

FWIW, there's another funcitonal method that some people use here. The GM sets up the situation, and then asks the players to invent a reason why their character's are interested. Instead of just offering money, the GM says, "Why would your character do what the PC is asking?" It's then the player's responsibility to figure out a reason that they can live with as to why they're interested.

But easiest of all is what Chris pointed out above. Have the system mechanically record the characters motives and then just have all "hooks" appeal to those motives. That way the player defines things, and play proceeds normally. For instance, if the one character has on their sheet that they want money big time, then money works fine. If they don't then the GM has to find something else on the sheet, and appeal to that.

Essentially make the adventures about the PCs priorities, instead of the reverse.

Mike

As a GM, I range from "tight" character concepts to hew to the game environment... to much "looser". But I start campaigns with a lot of thought and a clear premise. Sometimes that limits character archtypes a lot, sometimes, not so much.

Some examples that are all in the same fantasy world.

Brothers Avery: I told the three players that they could play any fantasy type they wanted, except that their last name was Avery and that they were brothers and heirs to the dockworkers guild of the city. Lots of freedom in some ways, not so much in other ways. For the record, I got from oldest to youngest; A Priest of the Sea goddess, A Privateer captain and a young Mage.

Life During Wartime: There is a city that is going into its 2nd year of being captured and a seige by the "good guys" to reclaim i keeps everyone in. All the characters are stuck in the city and will become the resistance. Character type and class is WIDE open. You'd just had to be stuck in the city when it was captured. I haven't run this one yet. I keep this one in my back pocket in case I need it.

Reclamation of Myth Drannor: PCs need to be elves or very much involved with elven politics. The ancient city of Myth Drannor has been found and their is a call to all the elven enclaves to send people and resources to rebuild the city to new heights of glory. For the record: I got an ex-spy seeking a purpose and a an ex-senator seeking to rebuild his political life, both from the same elven enclave.

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

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!).

Noon wrote: 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.

M. J. Young wrote: *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.

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*

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.

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

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.

Noon wrote:
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).

contracycle wrote: 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.

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?

Noon wrote: 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.

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".

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).

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

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.

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

karolusb wrote: 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.

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

contracycle wrote:

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.
...
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.

Gareth a.k.a contracycle wrote: 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.

Later, he wrote: 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.

Noon wrote:

contracycle wrote: , 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.

M. J. Young wrote: 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.

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.

contracycle wrote:

M. J. Young wrote: 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.

Contracycle wrote: 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 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.

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.

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.