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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 7424269">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.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:<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg/300px-MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />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.  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).</blockquote>

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