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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8138339" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Your whole post was good, I just wanted to single this part out for expansion. Flaws are absolutely a great source of interesting roleplay, but it doesn't all have to be "flaws" per se. This is part of why I like Dungeon World's Bond and Alignment rules (though I'm sure both can be improved further).Bonds are between characters and something (people, places, concepts, organizations, deities, whatever) that the character cares about. There's a starting list, and you can gain new ones through play or by resolving one you have (which can mean "completely explored, no longer relevant," or any other meaningful change of state). They have only two functions by default; resolving a bond gives you +1 XP, and you roll +Bond (rather than +DEX or whatever) when you try to Aid or Interfere with others' rolls. The goal, however, is for them to be shaping roleplay, giving you a clear idea of the things that matter to your character in an actionable way. E.g. the Thief class has a default bond, "I stole something from <name,>" which automatically implies a certain relationship between the characters--and how that status could change. (E.g. if you return the item, or the person dies, or they save you and you feel you owe them, or you cease caring about worldly possessions, or...) Generally when helping my players come up with new bonds to replace old ones, I try to direct them toward "I will <action>" statements, or "<name> needs <help>" statements, or the like--stuff that really shapes and drives roleplay. Default bonds are just there to stimulate ideas; you can always write your own instead.Alignment, meanwhile, is always some kind of action description. E.g. the Thief's three provided alignment moves (you can use others if you don't like the ones on offer) are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Chaotic: Leap into danger without a plan.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Neutral: Avoid detection or infiltrate a location.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Evil: Shift danger or blame from yourself to someone else.</li> </ul>Each session where you fulfill your alignment move, you get +1 XP. (This may not sound like much, but you only need 7+current level to level up, so +1 XP is never less than 1/16th of a level!) It helps drive home what the character values, the kinds of things they actively seek out to do. I really quite like this take on alignment and find that it is far less prone to bickering--you work out essentially a one-sentence "ethos" for each character and then the player gets rewarded for behaving that way.Expanding on both of these ideas is a great way to help create new stakes, new investment that will keep players on the edge of their seats even though their participation in play is not in question.As with high lethality, and indeed with any game premise, you want to make sure your players are on board, sure.That said, I find it really isn't too hard to get players to value things, people, places, or organizations (whether positively or negatively) through play. Having affable allies who actually do work to help you, and who have positive goals of their own, often endears the party. Providing pets, mounts, or other such things often works well too. And it's really not hard to make enemies the players love to hate! "Smug arsehole," "slimy businessman," and "corrupt nobility" are all easy archetypes for players to latch onto and enjoy fighting against. Giving them the opportunity to literally invest money, resources, and/or time into a place can also work--even if it doesn't inspire intrinsic motives of care, it at least has the extrinsic motive of "this is mine, I made it, you can't break it or take it from me."You can argue that perma-death has "built-in" weight, needing no effort to earn players' care, since players want to keep playing. It's a given. Despite that, I find it...I guess too blunt. In being built-in, it has no human touch, no regard for each player's individual likes and dislikes. For all the derisive comparisons to video gaming in this thread and elsewhere, "you ran out of lives, you don't get to play anymore" is in some sense the driving factor of video game difficulty for a huge swathe of games. It's the key experience of arcade, platforming, and shooter games, at the very least. It requires literally zero DM effort to have "keep your character alive" as a motive--even a computer can do that. The motives I find far more interesting and productive cannot work without an active and healthy DM-player relationship.</blockquote>

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