Character development: what’s my motivation?

We would be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them.

-Rochefoucauld, Maxims

When taking on the role of a character, improvisational actors often ask each other, “What’s my motivation?” The answer serves as a guide for how an actor might believably portray a character, since motives dictate actions.

In a Dungeons & Dragons game, players portray characters, usually with intent to be as realistic as possible, given the setting. The responsibility of the Dungeon Master (DM) is even greater in this regard, as a DM may have to assume a dozen or more roles in a single game session, and poorly portraying these NPCs can detract from the players’ suspension of disbelief during the game. Fortunately, both DM and players can benefit from the actor’s tactic of defining character motivation first in order  to create consistent, believable characters. And a convenient method for doing so emerged at a most unlikely place: a management leadership training seminar this author once attended.

The seminar, produced by John Maxwell’s organization Maximum Impact, described an array of leadership tools and philosophies, among them an unusual deck of cards supplied at event registration. Instead of the various numbers and suits, these cards featured the names of 48 leadership values. In one of the break-out exercises, seminar attendees were asked to remove 24 cards from the deck that named values they felt were important. From those 24, they were asked to remove the 12 they thought were most important; from the 12, they needed to select six; from six, they had to choose three; from three, two; and from those two, they had to select the single leadership value most important to them.

Serve up your D&D with a side dish of red herring

While it might not look very tasty as depicted here, red herring can be the most delicious thing a Dungeon Masters can taste on game night.

An interesting idiom in the English language is “ the red herring,” an idiom defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary to describe something extraneous that distracts attention from the real issue. Webster attributes the origin of the phrase to the practice of drawing a red herring, i.e. a herring salted and smoked to a red color, across a trail to confuse hunting dogs. Wikipedia expands the definition of the term as a literary device, citing that methods of “emphasis and descriptive techniques” can be used to manipulate the reader’s impressions.

This post is about how a Dungeon Master (DM) can use this device  to present unexpected plot twists to players.

All posts re-categorized and re-tagged

Did the old category structure of this blog leave you feeling like this? Hopefully, today's reorganization will fix that.

One of the most commented posts at Role-Playing Pro asks what readers like, dislike and wish they could get from RPG Blogs.

One comment on that post seemed particularly appropriate for this Web log; it suggested that there be no duplicate content between tags and categories, a very common practice here. The practice began innocently enough; posts under the Crime Scene Sunday theme, for example, were about villains committing the crimes and about DMs applying those crimes to game settings, so it seemed logical to categorize the posts in both “Villains” and “DMing Techniques.” Unfortunately, cross-categorizing forces readers who search by category to view the same posts more than once, a concept that hadn’t occurred to this writer until reading the comment on Role-Playing Pro.

By extension, this blog committed the same crime with respect to post tags. This writer was under the erroneous impression that tags affect how Internet search engines located post content. WordPress Support indicates that they do not, so all placing tags like “D&D” on all posts does nothing but make it more difficult for readers to find what they are seeking.

To correct this problem, all 90 posts published to this blog have been re-categorized and re-tagged, with the noted exception that every post is categorized “RPG Hub” so that it may be considered for publication on the RPG Bloggers Network. Hopefully, the reorganization will make it easier for site visitors to find what they need, or identify what is missing and request that this blog provide it.

Crime Scene Sunday: Robbery

One regular feature of this Web log is Crime Scene Sunday, in which the author examines some form of criminal activity, considers how a villain may use that particular crime in a Dungeons & Dragons game, and provides one or more examples of that particular misdeed in a D&D campaign setting. As the name implies, such entries are posted on Sunday.

This week’s crime is robbery, which the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines as, “ larceny from the person or presence of another by violence or threat.” 

It is important to distinguish robbery from the related crime of burglary. By definition, a robber approaches a victim and forcibly takes something; a burglar, on the other hand, enters a building with the intent to commit a crime (such as theft), preferably when the victim is absent and without the victim’s knowledge.

The most common forms of robbery in a Dungeons & Dragons game are banditry and piracy, which are essentially land- or sea-based versions of the same thing: taking stuff from people at sword point.

Classic literature would have us believe that robbery pays well. The tale of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves describes mountains of stolen gold secreted in a cave, and nearly every tale of seaborne raiding, from sections of Beowulf to Treasure Island, contains references to great wealth. Historically, however, robbery wasn’t so lucrative. During the Dark Ages in Western Europe, the use of minted coin had declined so much that barter largely replaced the exchange of currency. And although minted currency returned later in the Middle Ages, it was rare for large sums of coin and treasure to be transported without a military escort.

Need an adventure hook? Try class-based conflicts

The princess has been kidnapped. The undead are rising in the graveyard. Strange lights and eerie sounds are coming from the nearby forest or swamp. Goblins and kobolds are raiding merchant traffic.

*yawn*

Although there is nothing inherently wrong about the adventure hooks presented above, apart from their being overused – and the fact that they are overused proves that they work very well in a Dungeons & Dragons game – many seasoned Dungeon Masters (DMs) and experienced players wouldn’t mind a bit more variety in their adventure leads.

One little-used option for conflict in a D&D game and, by extension, for adventures stemming from that conflict, is distrust between character classes. About the only class-based conflict commonly seen in published D&D adventures involves divine classes, in the form of cults and evil religions attempting to do unpleasant things to the world around them. But what about fighter’s academies, cadres of wizards, thieves’ guilds, knightly orders, or rangers and wardens committed to protecting wilderness areas from encroaching “civilization?”

The only official D&D product this writer is aware of that makes mention of this sort of conflict was the Thunder Rift adventure setting, published in 1992 for the classic D&D system. The product contained a detailed history of the rift, which included a brief chronicle of a war fought between an academy of fighters and a school of wizards for regional supremacy called Sword vs. Wand, which ultimately ended in stalemate with leaders missing or in hiding. While Sword vs. Wand was only a historical footnote in Thunder Rift, it illustrates how this sort of inter-class conflict can generate adventure.

Eight variations on the standard pit trap

Pit traps have been a staple element of dungeon adventuring since the very beginning of fantasy role-playing. This sort of trap is simple, inexpensive and effective, so it isn’t surprising to see villains employing them, or to see player character (PC) heroes falling into them.

For the players of those PCs, though, there is something lackluster about falling into a hole, even if putting a hole in the PCs’ way is one way the villain hopes to overcome the heroes.

Fortunately, there are seveal variations on the standard pit trap that can make the game more challenging for the heroes and more entertaining for the players. Eight such variations are listed below.

1. Enhance Pit Damage. Trendy villains will accessorize their pit traps, either with permanent features like spikes pointing upwards from the floor, or with other traps that need periodic maintenance, resetting or refilling, such as vertical walls that move inward (crushing those in the pit) or traps that spray acid or flaming oil.
2. Redirect the Party. A pit trap doesn’t have to be a simple hole; it can open new exploration routes (or force them, if the drop is long enough) for the party. For example, consider a two-level dungeon with brigands inahbiting the level above the untamed caverns below. The brigands might create a pit trap that drops intruders into the caverns, where intruders probably won’t survive. Classic examples of this variation appear in the first edition D&D module Ravenloft, in which a pit neatly drops heroes into jail cells. When using this option, try to ensure that the pit drops the heroes into a worse place than they were originally headed.