T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Actually I often find that the best motivator for players is “Power”. Most RPG players go into such games wanting a power fantasy. Money is a subset of this because money can be used to buy more powerful magic items which ties back into the first motivator.
FYI typo in the second panel: than/then
Honestly, Aragorn is behaving in a way that is pretty dissonant with how a fantasy king is supposed to behave, but extremely realistic for an actual medieval king.
I will let you live and keep running your kingdom in exchange for annual tribute. Let’s exchange hostages to seal the deal. That’s the medieval way.
Mostly correct, except that a medieval king would pay more lip service to honor and justice while looting and pillaging.
Money makes for a reliable default motivation to assume for the adventure writer, especially for a game historically based on dungeon delving plotlines.
Back in the 3.5 days I was in a Living Greyhawk game (pre-written adventures in a world-wild living campaign of sorts) that particularly famously failed to entice many PCs that way. The setup was that during a passage on a ship, some water elves snuck on board looking for heroes to help against an invader in their underwater realm. Strangers climb onto the ship at night and offer you potions (of water breathing, allegedly) and ask you to jump into the water out of the goodness of your heart. If you refuse, they leave, and you miss out on the adventure entirely.
When a dwarf who wasn’t keen on getting his new full plate rusty asked how much they were offering in payment, they were written to take this as an insult and a refusal. Thankfully, the GM bent the block text* a little to not auto-eject a player on the grounds of reasonable doubt.
*Not sure if it’s still a thing. Int these adventures ‘block text’ was supposed to be inviolable story sections for the GM to read out verbatim (they were free to adjust other things as befit the group). It was meant to preempt players hastily declaring investigation actions before the final sentence mentions the angry monster glaring at them, but it was also frequently misunderstood or abused by the writers to negate player preparations or enforce surprise rounds. Campaign had issues, was still fun with good groups, and I should stop ranting.
My point is: Always offer multiple motivations, and money is an easy extra one.
A good example is Baldur’s Gate 2. Every time the conversation turns to the pursuit of the BBEG, you are given three reasons to chase him you can pick from:
To rescue your friend
To stop the evil scheme
To get revenge on what he did to you and your friends
And that choice matters, it helps invest the player (as does the BBEG’s brilliant voice actor). Yes, money isn’t actually on offer here, so maybe bad example for my point after all.
In short: Players want money. They often want other things too. But in this vicious cycle of PCs learning to want what’s on offer and GMs learning to offer what’s wanted, money is just a really safe second bet for the GM to place, and as a second bet, it’s not terrible.
One thing I would add is that players want money *to the extent they can do something with it.* As soon as there is nothing left to buy, interest wanes. I actually had this problem with the original Baldur’s Gate. Once I figured out what equipment I wanted for each party member (and had beaten the game at least once, for the record) replays stopped having any meaning to me. There wasn’t anything left to do. I’ve played some games where I run into this problem on the first playthrough, though usually it’s a longevity thing.
That is true. I remember how baffled I was when in the original KOTOR, you would keep finding money in random crates and barrels (and container loot was not random in that game!) long after you lost access to any shops in the endgame. Plus you were ostensibly playing a Jedi or Sith, neither of which would care much about petty cash, so I couldn’t even convince myself to roleplay being happy I found more money.
You missed one possible motivation. I once went to a talk where David Gaider was speaking about storytelling. He talked about player motivation and BG2. He mentioned that originally the only motivation was to save Imoen, until it was pointed out that players might not care about her, especially new players that only first met her half an hour ago. So that’s why they wrote the dream sequences where Bhaal, pretending to be Irenicus, promised to help unlock your full godly potential.
He talked about other stuff too, but it was a really long time ago now so I don’t remember much.