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<blockquote data-quote="BookTenTiger" data-source="post: 8338989" data-attributes="member: 6685541">I do think it's interesting how some settings have the character motivation baked into them..for example, the game Dogs in the Vineyard has all the characters as, essentially, Mormon cowboy exorcists traveling from town to town clearing out demons and punishing transgressions. Why your character chose this life, and the journey they took to get there, are the ways the characters are differentiated.I borrowed that once for a 5e game I called Plague Dogs. It was a fantasy world torn apart by diseases (we played this about 6 months before COVID hit) which were explicitly caused by transgressions with demons. The characters were all Hounds of St. Hestian, sent out to plague towns to find the transgressors, kill the demons, and enact justice. All the characters had the same path, but their individual motivations varied. One was paying off a debt, another was secretly working for a demon who wanted to clear the competition, etc.It reminds me of something Monte Cook once wrote about the assumed adventuring day. If I recall it correctly, he said that the 3rd Edition settings taught players that the adventuring day looked like this: learn about a dungeon in town, travel to dungeon, overcome challenged and get treasure, return to town to spend treasure and upgrade equipment, repeat.I wonder if when building a setting it's less important to worry about supplying character motivations than it is to communicate what an &quot;adventuring day&quot; looks like?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="BookTenTiger, post: 8338989, member: 6685541"] I do think it's interesting how some settings have the character motivation baked into them..for example, the game Dogs in the Vineyard has all the characters as, essentially, Mormon cowboy exorcists traveling from town to town clearing out demons and punishing transgressions. Why your character chose this life, and the journey they took to get there, are the ways the characters are differentiated. I borrowed that once for a 5e game I called Plague Dogs. It was a fantasy world torn apart by diseases (we played this about 6 months before COVID hit) which were explicitly caused by transgressions with demons. The characters were all Hounds of St. Hestian, sent out to plague towns to find the transgressors, kill the demons, and enact justice. All the characters had the same path, but their individual motivations varied. One was paying off a debt, another was secretly working for a demon who wanted to clear the competition, etc. It reminds me of something Monte Cook once wrote about the assumed adventuring day. If I recall it correctly, he said that the 3rd Edition settings taught players that the adventuring day looked like this: learn about a dungeon in town, travel to dungeon, overcome challenged and get treasure, return to town to spend treasure and upgrade equipment, repeat. I wonder if when building a setting it's less important to worry about supplying character motivations than it is to communicate what an "adventuring day" looks like? [/QUOTE]

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