What is at stake for the PCs?

[pemerton]

As some of you will know I've been playing a fair bit of Prince Valiant lately. In my most recent actual play thread I posted this quote from the rulebook: Normally death [of PCs] is not an important part of Prince Valiant.

What is important? Glory. Family. For some of the PCs in our game, piety. And also the integrity of their holdings. A couple of sessions ago one of the players used his Storyteller Certificate - a fairly precious "player fiat" resource - to make his newly-married wife fall in love with him, so that she would uphold the changes he had made to the Duchy out of personal loyalty to him, rather than revert to the cruel ways of the previous Duke, her father.

What drives the action in your RPGIng?

 

[pogre]

For many of my players their PC motivations crystallize through play. It would be easier on me if they had clear goals, but we are a pretty relaxed group.

My latest campaign began with the PCs inheriting a fief on the edge of the empire. Part of character creation was coming up with a reason their character was named in this unusual bequest. Inherent in the inheritance was a pathway to nobility and standing within the empire. Clearing the fief of monsters, trying to make it economically viable, and staving off competing warlords have been the immediate goals.

The group has largely bought into the concept. However, for some players it is still just finding the next combat, and I am OK with that.

 

[uzirath]

In my experience, even light-hearted dungeon crawls work best if the characters care about more than preserving their lives and gathering loot. Behind the curtain, it's also about hooking the interests of the players through their characters. Mysteries can often work well here. I know many players who would care less about the death of their character than the fact that they wouldn't be able to find out who had betrayed them. Currently, I'm running a very low-key Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh adventure with a mixed group of adults and children (ages 7+). They discussed burning the mansion to the ground when they first arrived because they thought this might take care of the hauntings in one fell swoop. But, as one of the kids said, "But then we won't find out what's really going on." Clever kid. Now they are deeply enmeshed in the unfolding story, brimming with questions about the details.

In a game where I'm a player, our first campaign arc was to rescue the fiancé of our holy warrior/princess from a distant prison. Since the princess was a PC, and the arranged marriage was part of her backstory, we were all pretty into it. After many distractions and an extended journey, we eventually discovered that the fiancé was, in fact, a demon-in-disguise. Now we're heading back to the home kingdom to find out whether the Queen was in on this or if her main advisor is corrupt. (We have some clues that suggest the latter, but we aren't sure yet.) Each character in the story has a slightly different motivation (some are just in it for the money), but it's safe to say that all of the players are fully hooked and eager to excise whatever infection has taken root at home.

 

[Umbran]

What drives the action in your RPGIng?

That varies wildly from game to game, campaign to campaign, character to character.

I'm currently running an Ashen Stars game. Each character has their own desires, but the group as a whole has a couple that drive them - 1) Get Paid*. 2) Try to keep thousands, millions, or billions of people from dying.

In this campaign... the players may shortly be in a position to satisfy each of their personal desires, in total, and never have to worry about money again. And, doing so would also stop a war! However, it would elevate to effective godhood a creature of... questionable ethical and moral stance, and to do it they might have to release a horde of self-replicating combat robots on the galaxy, and might rewrite the timestream.

All with very little personal bodily risk.

Meanwhile, I just started playing in a new D&D game. The characters... still haven't found themselves yet. I'm working with the basic motivations of, "don't be like the rest of your family, who are generally horrible," and, "satiate an insatiable curiosity."


*This is not merely about getting rich - some of the characters have cybernetic bodily systems that have, on normal human terms, truly atrocious upkeep costs. Packing away enough money to retire is not an easy task for them.

 

[Celebrim]

I find that there is a consistent sliding scale of what is at stake that is largely controlled by the number of participants in the game:

If you have very few players, say one or two, or at most three, then play is or can be dominated by the personal stakes of the participants. That means play catering specifically to the player's individual aesthetics of play, whatever they are, play driven by individual character arcs and individual character backstory. A small number of players allows play to cater to exploration of character, either individual players discovering who their character is and exploring what it is like to be someone other than themselves, or low melodrama where characters immerse themselves in thespian RP with the goal of creating emotional scenes.

But the more players you have, the less time you can spend on those scenes that really serve only one or a few player's aesthetic goals. If you have 6 or 8 or 12 players, you can't spend a lot of time on low melodrama with deep character exploration because not only would you never get anywhere in the story, but three quarters of the game would be players serving only as an audience to another player's game play. It might be hours before your turn came to participate, and this is really not an ideal situation.

So the more players you have, the more the game is about group stakes, and group stakes are almost always set by the DM and involve some larger plot afoot in the world. The more players you have, the more the game tends to be about combat, because tactical combat is one of the few situations where everyone can and must contribute to the success of the group, and where everyone has meaningful choices to make on a regular basis. Other sorts of challenges, it almost always makes sense for one player or one subset of the group to overcome by themselves, simply because they are better suited to do and the situation is not one were more numbers provide meaningful assistance. Likewise, the more players you have the less time you can spend on individual character stories, and the less immediate impact a particular character's backstory has on play, and the less proactive a particular player can be in deciding what the stakes of play are. Simply put, the more players you have, the more the stakes of play have to be a result of a consensus, and that consensus almost always tends to gravitate toward, "Let's follow the plot." provided the plot is even remotely interesting.

Of course, this can happen with smaller groups as well, either by choice because following the narrative and challenge are the player's preferred aesthetic of play or simply because the group lacks the experience or skills to play in any other way. But with larger groups, it feels very much like the choice of aesthetics is forced on you, both as a GM trying to manage such a large group and a player trying to play cooperatively with others.

Personally, as long as everyone has fun, I don't think it matters what aesthetics of play that a game caters to, but I do think that designers often fail to realize that some aesthetics of play can't really be central to play unless there is a small group involved. So there is a certain snobbery amongst designers who design games for and play test with 3 or fewer players, that their games are more advanced and simply better more mature games than traditional RPGs which evolved out of play by tables that catered to a large numbers of players.

And I've also regularly encountered games where it seemed like the process of play was intended to cater to aesthetics of play that focused on the actions of a single player and a single GM, and it was never at all clear how the game would be played if you had - as is usually the case - more than one player. That is, it was never clear from the text how the describe game could be shared by more than one player. I think the most obvious example of this was the original Vampire: The Masquerade rule book, where all the examples of play were about the internal struggles of a single player exploring the boundary between being human and being a monster, where as in practice basically no group played the game in that way because they played it as a social game with fairly large groups and the game as described couldn't be supported within a large group. In the case of more obscure games where the examples of play all involve solo play, I often wonder if anyone is actually playing the described game, or if the game exists solely in the experience of someone reading the rulebook.

 

[billd91]

I've enjoyed the way Paizo's APs have often built in hooks to keep PCs motivated with the main arc of the plotline and, for the most part, we've found them reasonably natural and easily adopted.

For example, in our Skull and Shackles game (Paizo's piracy campaign), we found ourselves in possession of a pirate ship and crew... that had once been someone else's. And he, at that time, was quite a bit more powerful than us and had his own pirate fleet at his command. So we spent quite a bit of time building good relationships with other pirate captains and strongholds just to try to deter him from taking retribution. It was a pretty good and natural motivator in our decision making and, of course, fit in well with the long term flow of the campaign and its intrigues.

 

[Umbran]

But the more players you have, the less time you can spend on those scenes that really serve only one or a few player's aesthetic goals. If you have 6 or 8 or 12 players, you can't spend a lot of time on low melodrama with deep character exploration because not only would you never get anywhere in the story, but three quarters of the game would be players serving only as an audience to another player's game play. It might be hours before your turn came to participate, and this is really not an ideal situation.

This is true... when all the action must be directly mediated by a single GM. You can totally have large groups of players with tons of melodrama driven by individual aesthetic goals if you decouple from the GM, and largely allow the players to go off and have their moments in small groups on their own.

This basically becomes the live-action model. Mechanical adjudication is decentralized to allow folks to walk away from central focus on the GM.

 

[Celebrim]

This is true... when all the action must be directly mediated by a single GM. You can totally have large groups of players with tons of melodrama driven by individual aesthetic goals if you decouple from the GM, and largely allow the players to go off and have their moments in small groups on their own.

This basically becomes the live-action model. Mechanical adjudication is decentralized to allow folks to walk away from central focus on the GM.

All true. Which is I think precisely why LARP became almost the defacto way to play VtM. It allowed you to have those small moments of personal drama that were supposed to be central to game as described, while at the same time allowing a larger group to cooperate in a social manner.

 

[Jd Smith1]

My group is motivated by four basic principles: spite, greed, petty-mindedness, and irrational affections for inconsequential NPCs.

 

[uzirath]

My group is motivated by four basic principles: spite, greed, petty-mindedness, and irrational affections for inconsequential NPCs.

I have found that last motivation, whether rational or not, to be a powerful stake in most campaigns. PCs get attached to NPCs and thus begin to care about protecting them or supporting their goals or opposing their antagonists, etc. Or the opposite—most of us have probably played in games where we were out for revenge against an NPC villain.