How different PC motivations support sandbox and campaign play

[Doug McCrae]

There are two main PC motivations in rpgs. Firstly, the pursuit of personal gain, usually money and/or magic items. Secondly the desire to defeat evil.

The first motivation, personal gain, works well with sandbox play because the game world typically contains a great many opportunities to acquire wealth and magic items - there are lots of dungeons. The second motivation, defeat evil, doesn't work so well because the amount of evil beings within easy reach of the PCs and also actively and obviously causing harm will be far fewer.

A third possible motivation is the pursuit of glory, like the heroes of the Iliad or the PCs in Pendragon, but this is unusual in rpgs. A fourth, thrillseeking, is also unusual.

Once the PCs have achieved significant wealth it's hard to justify why they would want more. Or at least, why they would expose themselves to great danger in pursuit of more. So the first motivation, personal gain, doesn't work well for long term campaign play. The second motivation, defeat evil, does as there will always be more evil.

How does one successfully combine sandbox and campaign play? The answer, it seems to me, is PCs who are motivated by personal gain but, if they ever successfully acquire fortunes, immediately lose or quickly squander them, in the manner of Conan.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think a game works best when more than one motivation is present. Preferably several different motivations. So the PCs may be motivated as a group by one main focus (such as accumulating wealth or fighting evil) but then each PC also has their own goals.

Revenge, the pursuit of knowledge, the restoration of a clan, the reclamation of a heritage, the desire for power....all of these are present in my current campaign, aling with both of the main goals you sited. Most are unique to a given PC, but since they all also share a bond of friendship, they’re all willing to pursue the various goals.

This variety gives me a lot of different ways to take the story, with a good amount of material offered by each player.

 

[Sunseeker]

There are two main PC motivations in rpgs. Firstly, the pursuit of personal gain, usually money and/or magic items. Secondly the desire to defeat evil.

The first motivation, personal gain, works well with sandbox play because the game world typically contains a great many opportunities to acquire wealth and magic items - there are lots of dungeons. The second motivation, defeat evil, doesn't work so well because the amount of evil beings within easy reach of the PCs and also actively and obviously causing harm will be far fewer.

A third possible motivation is the pursuit of glory, like the heroes of the Iliad or the PCs in Pendragon, but this is unusual in rpgs. A fourth, thillseeking, is also unusual.

Once the PCs have achieved significant wealth it's hard to justify why they would want more. Or at least, why they would expose themselves to great danger in pursuit of more. So the first motivation, personal gain, works well for sandbox play but not for long term campaign play. The second motivation, defeat evil, works well for long term campaign play, as there will always be more evil, but doesn't work well with sandbox play.

How does one successfully combine sandbox and campaign play? The answer, it seems to me, is PCs who are motivated by personal gain but, if they ever successfully acquire fortunes, immediately lose or quickly squander them, in the manner of Conan.

The basic motivation every character needs is simpler and less specific:
Whatever they want isn't wherever they're at.

Wealth? It's over there.
Wisdom? That way. ---->
Knowledge? Heard it's out yonder.
Power? We're fresh out at home.
ad infinitum...

I've had the occassional player who makes a character who fundamentally isn't the adventuring type. No interest in risk. No interest in obtaining something they don't have, no interest in doing anything beyond what they've done every day.

The problem with your answer is that if you apply it to anything beyond money, or apply it to money more than once it becomes trite, real fast. I've had DMs do it. Where you achieve greatness only to have the DM strip it away from you arbitrarily. No matter how wisely you use your power, no matter how cautiously you spend your money, no matter how freely you share your knowledge; the DM has one plan in mind: take it all away.

It strips motivation because once the DM does it, you've learned the formula. If you achieve greatness, the DM will take it away. So why bother?

At it's root, what every player wants is the same thing: something they can't find here.
That's how you combine the sandbox and the railroad. The sandbox is the train station. You get to pick which train your take. But the train is leaving the station, so choose quickly!

 

[Doug McCrae]

One way to combine the two, which I think fits the 'standard model' of D&D quite well, is that the campaign starts out as a sandbox, with PCs motivated by wealth and then, once a clear enemy or enemies are established it becomes an adventure path where the main motivation is to defeat that enemy. It will be someone who is not easy to deal with such as a lich or demon prince.

EDIT: My take on the 'standard model' of D&D, taken from a post from 8 years ago -

The campaign itself would start off with the PCs fighting orcs in caves and bandits/slavers in ruined forts, gradually moving up the D&D monster chain, taking in some undead along the way. One of the PCs acquires a talking magic sword that has an irritating personality. Over time the existence of a Grand Alliance of Monsters is revealed, the cause of the increasing number of raids. It turns out, of course, that the drow are the leaders of the Grand Alliance. The campaign moves to the underdark, the monsters get weirder and more Lovecraftian and the PCs get involved in drow politics. A good-aligned drow PC joins the party. Eventually it becomes clear that an evil god or demon prince or arch-devil is the true BBEG. The PCs undertake a quest for the Macguffin of Many Parts, which is the only means to defeat the big fat bastard. At last the PCs confront and kill Iuz/Orcus/Asmodeus. Then they loot his body.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The problem with your answer is that if you apply it to anything beyond money, or apply it to money more than once it becomes trite, real fast. I've had DMs do it. Where you achieve greatness only to have the DM strip it away from you arbitrarily.

I think the GM has to get player buy in. Make it a clearly expressed rule that's established at the start. Once the campaign is approaching its end I think the rule can be rescinded so the players can get a 'win' - retire rich, win a kingdom, or whatever.

 

[Lanefan]

First off - I think you might have missed one in the OP: A fifth PC motivation is level advancement, which in-game means the PC just wants to get better at what it does and sees adventuring as the fast-track means of doing so. This one works with any kind of play, provided of course that the game system being used has an advancement mechanism (not all do).

One way to combine the two, which I think fits the 'standard model' of D&D quite well, is that the campaign starts out as a sandbox, with PCs motivated by wealth and then, once a clear enemy or enemies are established it becomes an adventure path where the main motivation is to defeat that enemy. It will be someone who is not easy to deal with such as a lich or demon prince.

Agreed.

And those first few sandbox-y adventures are where the party cuts its teeth, as it were: they get to know each other, get to know their surroundings in the game world, make some contacts, sort themselves out, find ways overt or covert of ridding themselves of undesirables, etc., so by the time the "real" stories get going they're halfway settled in to being a party.

Another trick for later is to have the later "adventure path" overlap with or lead into another, e.g. during their pursuit of the lich lord they become aware that the space-based Githi are planning an invasion and the world's defenses are in dire need of repair...stuff like that. And, throwing in some side-treks or non-story-related adventures can be a nice change of pace particularly when they're caused by (or IME in rare cases, written by!) one or more players.*

* - obviously if a player writes an adventure she doesn't then turn around and play it through; she has to sit that bit out, or play in a different party or group.

As for PC motivations: wealth acquisition IME never fails - it doesn't matter how much they have, they want more. Sometimes they retire with it; other times they just keep on bangin' away, hoarding as they go.

And with a story-based game, whether said story is driven by the DM or the players (see the various worldbuilding threads if you want to dive into that argument) there's a sixth motivation that applies to players rather than PCs: they want to see how the story ends.

Lanefan

 

[Sunseeker]

I think the GM has to get player buy in. Make it a clearly expressed rule that's established at the start. Once the campaign is approaching its end I think the rule can be rescinded so the players can get a 'win' - retire rich, win a kingdom, or whatever.

What, exactly, is to stop that player from retiring their PC before the DM arbitrarily takes away their hard-earned loot?
Is the DM going to force you to play that character?
Is the DM going to boot you from the table if you say "Nah, Fighter Bob's had enough, he's gonna buy a farm and quit the adventuring biz."?
-Is the DM going to cruelly murder everyone Fighter Bob loves just for force The Player to bring Fighter Bob back to adventuring?

The problem with railroads, especially railroads where you take things from players, is you have to ask yourself: how far are you willing to push it?

Because the players are going to get sick of that a whole lot faster than the DM likes.

EX: One DM I play with I now refuse to play low-level games with because he does exactly that. With high level characters, we're actually capable of holding our own against the stupid stuff he pulls on us. Our low-levels would regularly end up stripped of their gear, their wealth, their homes, for really no reason at all other than to shove us all back on the loot treadmill.

I finally blew his mind by rolling a Monk. Then after that character died when we were all forced into a horribly unwinnable scenario, I refused to play any further low-level games with him at the helm. I flat out told him I wasn't having fun, I wasn't interested in making more characters, and I wasn't interested in the style of play he put us through.

So yeah, the "work hard, win big, only to have the DM take it away for no reason" is something interesting for a story, like Conan, but terribly unfun to play.

 

[Doug McCrae]

EX: One DM I play with I now refuse to play low-level games with because he does exactly that. With high level characters, we're actually capable of holding our own against the stupid stuff he pulls on us. Our low-levels would regularly end up stripped of their gear, their wealth, their homes, for really no reason at all other than to shove us all back on the loot treadmill.

That DM does seem to have a similar attitude to the one I expressed in the OP, but it's clear the way he was going about it was heavy handed and wasn't working.

Like I say the GM needs to get player buy in at the start. In the same way that everyone accepts that in a D&D game they roll a d20 to hit, and that the world they live in is full of crazy magic, then ideally the players in such a game would accept that they are engaged in a Sisyphean struggle - constantly pursuing wealth but never attaining it for long. It's a rule that needs to be made clear to the players at the beginning. One way it could work in practice is simply beginning every adventure with the PCs owning very little again. It doesn't need to be explained how the wealth was lost, relative poverty is simply part of the scene framing. I think this would work better than describing it in a detailed way, which makes it seem like something the players can fight but can't. This imo, is an important distinction between railroading and scene framing. Railroading looks like normal game play where the players get to make decisions, but has actually been predetermined.

I played in a years long 2e AD&D campaign (it went from 1st to 8th level) where the DM wanted to keep us poor, for a similar reason to my OP - he thought it was implausible that wealthy characters would be motivated to go on adventures. The mechanisms he used were: not hand out large treasures in the first place, allow us to buy magic potions, and (I think) at one point he had my PC fined by the authorities. I didn't mind because I knew why he was doing it. But I think if a DM pulled the kind of thing you describe in a typical 3e game, without any warning or explanation, and didn't seem to have taken the PCs lack of magic items into account when constructing challenges then, like you, I wouldn't be happy.

 

[Sunseeker]

Like I say the GM needs to get player buy in at the start.

Player buy-in isn't a band-aid for bad GMing. Eventually the strain of doing un-fun things takes a toll on people and generally speaking it takes a toll on players a lot faster than it takes a toll on a DM.

It's a rule that needs to be made clear to the players at the beginning. One way it could work in practice is simply beginning every adventure with the PCs owning very little again. It doesn't need to be explained how the wealth was lost, relative poverty is simply part of the scene framing. I think this would work better than describing it in a detailed way, which makes it seem like something the players can fight but can't. This imo, is an important distinction between railroading and scene framing. Railroading looks like normal game play where the players get to make decisions, but has actually been predetermined.

Things like this work in movies and books because they can be taken in a vacuum. We can read one Conan book, and then put it away. We can empathize with his experiences, but we aren't actually experiencing them. As Players, we are actively experiencing what our characters are going through in a much more direct manner than reading about Conan.

Like, I start people in my campaigns with "you're broke and in the job line" it's an easy way to organize the party and give them all at least one shared goal. They may have other different goals, but at a bare minimum they need some cash to put food in their mouths.

This is not really a repeatable situation. Eventually characters may tire of these events.

Pursuit of wealth is a drive, but it's not one of those self-for-filling drives like finding love. I frame my campaigns based on:

Acquisition of wealth falls on the bottom two tiers of the Hierarchy. These are shallow needs. Which is why the constant pursuit of them leaves people hollow (see: real life). When a person has sufficient wealth (which is a subjective number) they start realizing that they have "higher needs". Which is why the acquisition of wealth becomes a trite objective fairly quickly, especially if you actually achieve it. Once you have it, you realize that you need something more.

Once you've made that realization, pursuit of the bottom two tiers becomes more hollow than it was before. The acquisition of wealth becomes secondary to the things you really need. Wealth becomes a means instead of a goal. A means can't be a goal anymore. The goal is now Love/Belonging or perhaps if you achieved that when you had your wealth the goal is now Esteem. Few people ever make it to true self-actualization, but once your goals have moved beyond wealth, pursuit of wealth as a motivating factor drops off dramatically.

I played in a years long 2e AD&D campaign (it went from 1st to 8th level) where the DM wanted to keep us poor, for a similar reason to my OP - he thought it was implausible that wealthy characters would be motivated to go on adventures. The mechanisms he used were: not hand out large treasures in the first place, allow us to buy magic potions, and (I think) at one point he had my PC fined by the authorities. I didn't mind because I knew why he was doing it. But I think if a DM pulled the kind of thing you describe in a typical 3e game, without any warning or explanation, and didn't seem to have taken the PCs lack of magic items into account when constructing challenges then, like you, I wouldn't be happy.

See above. The reason this happens is because DMs are humans in a money-driven world. It is difficult for us real-life humans to conceptualize "need" beyond the "need for more wealth" because so few of us have actually made it bast the 2nd tier. DMs freak out over "what will my players do if wealth isn't driving them!?" because the DM themselves is unable to develop something that for-fills those higher needs because as a real person, they don't know​.

Most video games have what we gamers call "gold sinks" and they are perfectly applicable to D&D. Don't take your players wealth. Give them things to spend it on. Magic weapons, homes, land, kingdoms. Sure, some of them might buy a home and their character might retire and there is nothing wrong with that. The player did not retire (ideally) and they'll make a new character who can start from the bottom of the ladder.

But ideally, characters should be moving up the Hierarchy as they progress through the game. Characters who don't become stale and tiresome to DM for.

EX: One guy I played with has a woody for Lovecraftian stuff. That's all any of his characters are interested in. Ever. It's easy to make quests that get his attention, but it gets boring because his character never grows (except when he grows tentacles).

 

[Doug McCrae]

Interesting points [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION]. I will happily admit that there is something stale about Conan and other characters that have eternal adventures but never seem to change, such as Sherlock Holmes and most superheroes. Could you say a bit more about how you bring out the higher tiers of the hierarchy of needs in play?