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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8169172" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, there could be a few ways to approach that. I outlined what sorts of things, and sometimes why, that happened in one of my 4e campaigns. Mostly the players established what they wanted to do, or at least what their motives were, through background, class, and questions they asked or answered. Because it was 4e, this wasn't super formal and only followed general suggestions and our own ideas about how to run a fairly player-focused game.So, the warlock's motivation was to find out about his father and why his father had a book which the PC read and then became bound to his patron. The eladrin wizard was just running away from her family. The rogue was providing intel to her family and sometimes carrying out missions. The dwarf was trying to rescue his father and brother (I think he found the father eventually, but the brother was still to be rescued). The priestess of Lir got wrapped up in the mythology of the King who is supposed to return, now carries his shield, and has a prophesy (she was also raised by a temple). These are probably fairly conventional D&D character backgrounds for a lot of games. The players wrote them, and then during play I sometimes either tied them to some feature that came up in play, or the players asked about it or added the connection themselves. Lots of stuff emerged simply by suggestions of the mechanics. At one point the PCs went to the Feywild and ran into a powerful hag. The warlock hit paragon IIRC and as part of that he added a second patron (I think that is feat) and made a pact with the hag. His relationship with his primary patron was always described as somewhat of an involuntary kind of thing, so in this case he was elaborating on his personal conflict with that. I think the dwarf was the simplest and most straightforward PC, he just kept relentlessly going after his family members, and this was played up as him being a 'super dwarfy dwarf'. IIRC he took a PP that established him as a really super defendery sort of character (I'd have to go back and look at the particulars on that). I would say with 4e that this was a really major aspect of establishing who and what PCs were, and I tried often to make things like leveling and acquisition of items provide lots of inputs into that. For example, the dwarf finally met his father, who forged an axe for him, which was especially effective against demons. Later, when the PCs were in the floating castle fighting demons the axe took on the aspect of an ancient dwarvish weapon, the Axe of the Balrog Slayer. This made it an artifact during that story arc, although this aspect faded at the end of the story and the axe simply became a really good axe with demon slaying capabilities. In fact I think the whole thing culminated with the appearance of a 'Balrog Gate' which the PCs had to close (IE a fun skill challenge). Some of the PCs build options that happened during that time reflected this part of the story, and undoubtedly this theme would arise again during epic play (if we ever got there). One thing I will say, a lot of these techniques evolved a lot during play. While I rapidly started to 'get' that 4e wanted to play like an action adventure movie, it took several years of play to fully evolve the whole set of techniques for letting the players drive things, and for making the game really fully "amped up". Nowadays I tend to run my own more hacked up rules that make this stuff easier, but the gist of it is that I don't even bother with classic D&D-style location/map type stuff anymore to any large degree. Every fight has significant plot ramifications and takes place in a way where there are goals, subgoals, dynamic terrain, etc. At no point do the PCs simply go to a place and fight something they 'just find there' to the death simply because its there, and might have treasure. If a fight probably wouldn't show up in an action adventure movie, it probably won't show up in one of my 4e sessions either.</blockquote>

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