Motivations of characters

[Rel]

One cautionary word about this: A little goes a long way and there IS such a thing as "too much of a good thing".

My gaming group are GREAT roleplayers. So great that we had recently found that we tended to paint ourselves into a corner with character background and motivations. At the start of every campaign we wound up all having characters with a minimum of three typed pages of background detailing where they came from and what made them tick. That seemed great at first.

But when we'd start playing it became a complete pain in the butt to try and come up with adventure ideas that would grab the whole group and hook them because they had such entrenched adgendas. There might be an opportunity to rid some woods of Goblin bandits and one of the PC's would pipe up with, "That's all very well but my family was killed by ORCS and I've sworn that I will not rest until I've avenged them. I really need to find some Orcs to kill." Another would interject, "Actually I was once nearly mauled by wolves and if a Goblin Ranger had not intervened then I would have surely been killed. So I'm going to give these Goblins the benefit of the doubt and I refuse to hunt them down." Meanwhile somebody else would say, "But these Goblin bandits have kidnapped the Princess and I am IN LOVE with the Princess. We MUST hunt them down and rescue her!"

You get the idea.

So when it came time to start a new campaign last week, I had them all make their characters in the two hours before we actually started playing. I told them that I really wanted no more than a few sentences of background and motivations. I jokingly quipped that, "Anybody who will write a paragraph of character background gets some bonus XP. Anybody who writes more than half a page takes an XP penalty."

And I think it has worked. The players all seem to be looking to derive their character motivations from the story unfolding WITHIN the campaign rather than having so much written before we even start. This has caused much less dithering about whether they all even want to participate in the adventure proposed and, though not in lockstep, they seem to be moving in more or less the same direction. It's kind of refreshing actually.

 

[Crothian]

AS a DM I need to know what the motiviations of the character is. AS players they are free to reveal what they want as they role play things out with other PCs and NPCs.

 

[Elf Witch]

One cautionary word about this: A little goes a long way and there IS such a thing as "too much of a good thing".

My gaming group are GREAT roleplayers. So great that we had recently found that we tended to paint ourselves into a corner with character background and motivations. At the start of every campaign we wound up all having characters with a minimum of three typed pages of background detailing where they came from and what made them tick. That seemed great at first.

But when we'd start playing it became a complete pain in the butt to try and come up with adventure ideas that would grab the whole group and hook them because they had such entrenched adgendas. There might be an opportunity to rid some woods of Goblin bandits and one of the PC's would pipe up with, "That's all very well but my family was killed by ORCS and I've sworn that I will not rest until I've avenged them. I really need to find some Orcs to kill." Another would interject, "Actually I was once nearly mauled by wolves and if a Goblin Ranger had not intervened then I would have surely been killed. So I'm going to give these Goblins the benefit of the doubt and I refuse to hunt them down." Meanwhile somebody else would say, "But these Goblin bandits have kidnapped the Princess and I am IN LOVE with the Princess. We MUST hunt them down and rescue her!"

You get the idea.

So when it came time to start a new campaign last week, I had them all make their characters in the two hours before we actually started playing. I told them that I really wanted no more than a few sentences of background and motivations. I jokingly quipped that, "Anybody who will write a paragraph of character background gets some bonus XP. Anybody who writes more than half a page takes an XP penalty."

And I think it has worked. The players all seem to be looking to derive their character motivations from the story unfolding WITHIN the campaign rather than having so much written before we even start. This has caused much less dithering about whether they all even want to participate in the adventure proposed and, though not in lockstep, they seem to be moving in more or less the same direction. It's kind of refreshing actually.

You have a very good point. The best character I ever played the one that so far I have enjoyed the most. Really had no background or motivations. You see I was getting tired of creating backgrounds for characters just to have the game fizzle out after a dozen sessions. So I really didn't know much about the character.

One of the defineing points for her came early on when the DM threw a real moral dilema at the party. What to do with tow orphan Kobold babies. It was during that session that it became clear that this character was not about killing everything and believed that everyone deserved a chance to become good.

This game lasted for three years and I let what happen in game shape the character. It was very rewarding to play.

Now I am not saying that making a background is a bad thing. But I think it bad to lock yourself into things like I am out defending my family's honor without discussing it with the DM first. What happened above is from a lack of communication between the players and the DM. And even you have an agenda for you character it does not mean it has to be filled right away.

 

[fusangite]

How do other players share their character motivations?

Yeah -- by playing. In my personal experience of real life, even when you're doing essentially the same things every day over a period of years, your motivations and, more importantly, how you perceive yourself to be motivated, are constantly in flux. One constantly revises the story on tells oneself about one's motives in order to explain past and ongoing behaviour.

Now, I suppose that in some theories of psychology, there is an ever-present underlying movtive but, even then, people are understood to be only partly aware of it. I don't think writing up a character motivation at the start of a campaign makes a character more real; it makes the character less real, in my opinion.

how do you sprinkle that with motivations?

Your character is doing what he is doing because it seems like a good idea at the time; if your character wants to construct an elaborate set of justifications linking these individual decisions into some kind of overall structure, that's fine. But the less consciously you do so, the more real the character will actually be.

it would be really interesting to figure out what motivates major NPCs but you rarely do. Why is the sage helping you for free?

Gee... here we differ. As a GM or as a player, I'm always thinking about what's making the NPC behave in the way he is.

 

[MonsterMash]

I do find that motivations are useful for NPCs as a DM, characters can have both overt and covert motivations, but too much more than hunting for fame, fortune and adventure (e.g. killing monsters and taking their stuff) can get in the way. It seems fine for a Cleric or Paladinto want to proselytise for their god or a Wizard to want to seek out esoteric knowledge and other motivations can be good for RP purposes, but not if it creates pointless interparty conflict.