TPK

I want to wrap up my month on motivation by talking about the ethics of motivation. After all, creating and using these tools to motivate the players is essentially manipulating them to do what you want, which could be railroading by another name. As someone who has staunchly defended respecting players’ autonomy, how can I get behind this? I’ve touched on it briefly here and there, but now it’s time to really dig into how to use these motivations ethically.  Read more

I’m starting to wrap up my month on motivation here, but wanted to spend some time on what’s probably the most common and most overlooked motivation for characters to get involved with adventures, and that’s simply by virtue of being heroes. Even in a non-heroic game, being a good person will provide worlds of motivation to interact with the characters and events in the setting. I always recommend it to new players, because it provides a simple reason for them to get involved.  Read more

So I’ve talked about reward and punishment as motivators, as well as requests and orders, but there are lots of other things which can motivate people to crawl down dark holes full of monsters or hang from a cargo plane while shooting at nazis. Here’s eight of them, for your perusal.  Read more