What is D&D supposed to be about? It behooves every D&D DM to ask himself this all important question and give a thorough answer so as to provide a clear cut understanding of the premise of the game to the players. Now your typical good DM will say the most natural and simplest thing that rolls off the tongue of most good DM’s, its about story. Truer words have never been spoken, however this simple answer does not really lead one to a definitive statement of the premise behind D&D or ensures story is the outcome. Sure its about story, but how do you get that story to the table? How do worthwhile stories make an appearance in our games? How do you ensure the players participation and involvement in the story is ensured?

The answer is motivation. The motivation of players participation and the motivation of their alter egos, the characters are ultimately what drive the natural invention of story at the table. Before we get into this articles primary purpose, to discuss how stories sprout in our games and what methods DM’s can use to ensure that they do, lets discuss what does not.

Fake Storytelling

I have for many years been an advocate for the OSR (Old School Revival) and there is a primary and very good reason for that. I find modern DM’s really suck at bringing story to the game, they suck at creating motivations to care about stories in which our characters participate and they fail to give life to the worlds in which the stories are told. In essence they regulate the entire thing to cliche’s. While I can say that part of the blame goes to RPG culture, really it has been specifically the way gaming systems are designed that has caused the evolution of RPG culture to become so terribly derailed and unfocused.

This has happened because the practice of “storytelling” has evolved to become the domain of mechanics. Elements that were once the exclusively the work of our imaginations and constructs on which the premise of fantasy adventure was built have been washed away in exchange for tactical battle systems and rules oriented replacements.

Modern games no longer care who is at the helm of a player character as it is the character sheet and the mechanism that drive the systems that define the success and failure of a character and not the player driving him. Your choices in modern systems are reduced to die rolls rather then your imagination, your cleverness and your teamwork with your fellow players and note when I say “your” I mean the player, not his imaginary alter ego made up of attributes, skills, feats, special powers etc..

So what are we talking about here. Well to put it plainly with examples, we no longer define what our characters do, we activate mechanical actions to find out if we succeed or fail at our intention.

For example we don’t bargain for price of a sword with a merchant, we make a diplomacy check to see if our character manages to get a deal or not. We don’t decide if an NPC is lying to us, we roll an insight check to see if our character knows whether or not someone is lying to them. We don’t define how we search a room, where we look, how thorough we are, we make a search check to determine if our character finds something or not.

By the sheer act of mechanizing these many role-playing opportunities, we cease to tell a story about our characters and reduce the experience to a series of mechanized checks to see how our characters are doing.

In an environment like this it can be difficult, ney impossible for players to find their characters soul and purpose because the truth of role-playing is that it’s magic is hidden in the detailed and mundane activities of characterization. That interaction with a merchant is the opportunity to explore who our characters are and how they deal with people of the world in which they live. Believing whether or not someone is lying is a component of mystery to be debated among the players, is it truth or a lie, we must decide, not the dice. Whether or not we find treasure in a room should not be delegated to the randomness of a die roll, but rather our attention to the details of a room that must now be defined by the DM creating the atmosphere and imagery so desperately needed for the art of storytelling.

The point here is that in a fundamental way as you remove mechanics from the game, the central focus then instead becomes the story and the motivations of the characters and as such from that grows the responsibility and independence of the players to discover the concept of story. This is what the OSR and really old school games got right. They where simpler mechanics, vague mechanics and often existing in the absence of mechanics. These omissions aren’t an accident, they are a very intentional and purposeful decision to ensure the focus of the games is where it belongs, on the story, not the rules of the game. Oddly enough, the primary driver for DM’s everywhere, modern and past alike.

The morale of the story is that good storytelling and great stories are born in the absence of mechanics. I believe no truer statement can be made about role-playing

Creating Motivation Through Abstinence

It is here then that I make a case for slim, watered down systems that focus on the players and their intent instead of mechanics as is the case in versions of D&D like Basic/Expert, the full BECMI or various clones like Old School Essentials, Castles and Crusades etc..

These systems create a basic construction kit for story by alleviating the complexity of rules and defaulting to the premise of collaborative storytelling, imagination and core concepts. In the absence of rules, players have no choice but to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks, however that still does not provide players with the fundamental premise of the game. What are the things that actually motivate players to find and advance the story.

The Goals of the Game

You have to see D&D and role-playing as a construct in which their must be a primary driver with some secondary drivers that motivate the players, so that they can in turn invent fantasy oriented motivations for their characters. In a sense the players must know what the game is about, to know what sorts of characters to create. In the absence of this construct you end up with what I call “null motivation” characters.

A null motivation character is a result of a player creating a character without an understanding of the premise of the game.

For example. In Vampire The Masquerade, players are asked to create vampire characters in a world of darkness. Now a player who understands the premise of the game, that it is a game about political power in a gothic underground world of vampires, will understand that since this is the over arching concept of what the game is about, that in turn his character must fit into that world. He must answer questions like, how will this character pursue that power, what level of morality will he apply to his actions, will he pursue that power through intrigue, wealth, force or something else? If a player creates a character in pursuit of that premise, understanding that this is the meta goal of the game, he is likely to create a character that is ready for such a place narratively. This character will be attuned to the world around him, motivated to act in it in pursuit of the core premise.

However it is entirely possible to create a null motivation character if you fail to understand this fundamental premise of the game. If you create a character that is not going to engage in the loosely defined but fundamental meta objective of the game, he will likely enter it unprepared to participate in the gothic world of horror and be delegated to irrelevance as he does not pursue or engage in the world/setting built for that very purpose. A player like this might create a lone wolf, an outsider, who finds no logic in getting involved in the plots of vampires seeking higher positions/advancement, he will have no one he views as a competitor or a threat to his own power as he likely will have none. His world becomes one in which he exists as an empty placeholder with no real reason to actually be a member of the troupe.

The outcome however, when characters are built for the core premise is undeniably the story that will emerge from that interaction. When players are motivated to act, when they have their goals defined through a core premise in this way, they will both create and use their characters in that pursuit, ensuring that a story will most certainly emerge without any need for a GM to nudge anyone into action.

I used Vampire The Masquerade as an example here because unlike D&D, the premise of the game is very strictly defined as are the rules of this political game very explicitly defined in the kindred traditions. Your goal in this gothic world is to seek power and control, but you must abide by the rules of vampire society while doing it that very much force your hand into the world of intrigue and plots to achieve your goals.

Modern D&D’s premise, its core concept is not well defined at all, in fact, its really the absence of this fundamental definition that creates the most amount of problems as the players are asked to create “generic adventurers” in a game about “adventure” without any real definition of purpose. So vague is that premise that there really is not much on which to hang your hat. There is no core fundamentals on which to base a players motivations as such players create characters in the absence of any real direction about what the game is about other then the easy to say but hard to accomplish concept of “story”. Yes story, but what story? What is going to motivate the players into action?

Traditionally the answer is “whatever story the DM creates”, but this still lacks the true motivation because the story cannot be revealed to you in advance. You know it will be a fantasy adventure of some sort, but without a fundamental premise this becomes a rather vague catch all phrase and its very likely some players will create characters that simply don’t fit resulting in null motivation characters.

This is a very common problem for DM’s in modern D&D. A quick run through any D&D community forums you will discover just how common the DM complaint that his players “Waste Time”, are “unmotivated”, or are not “following along in the adventure” are. Its an epidemic in modern D&D culture so vast, I’ve personally gotten to the point where I don’t really like running or playing modern editions of D&D.

Old School Premise

Old School D&D, aka, 1st edition B/X, BECMI and 1st edition AD&D all actually had a core premise, just like most RPG’s of the time and really even today, just like Vampire The Masquerade.

The old school premise was fundamentally built on a simple mechanic that has been regulated to being an out dated concept, but was and continues to be in my opinion one of the most important and fundamental mechanics D&D needs to ensure it functions as a game that will ultimately create a story.

The mechanic I’m talking about is the Treasure is XP mechanic (1gp recovered = 1 XP earned). In classic D&D, the core (main) way that characters gained XP was through recovering treasure. This defined a core premise of the game. At the center of the D&D, all players knew that in the end, they where treasure hunters and this was the premise on which the motivation of the player rested. Their job as players, was to lead their alter egos to wealth. This wealth could take many shapes, just like in Vampire The Masquerade, the road to political power could vary dramatically. The important thing was that a premise for the game was established.

The Unfolding Story

From an absence of direction, to a clear cut goal, the very definition of what D&D is about is made crystal clear in the classic 1st edition D&D. However there will be skeptics and its important to remember that rules like this don’t exist in a vacuum. Just like in Vampire The Masquerade there are things that govern how you go about doing it, for example the Kindred Traditions is one such barrier to success. So it is too in classic D&D, there are other, widely misunderstood pieces of logic built into classic D&D that are important to understand and must be used for the premise to work.

First is that the game was deadly, this reputation is well deserved, but part of the core premise was that when you created a D&D character, he was a mundane nobody that was setting out on an adventure, now with a clear cut goal to write their story. They were vulnerable, they could easily perish and that was a barrier to success you had to overcome.

This is connected to the concept of “who is your character”, which gives directions to the players. Who are you? You are a nobody, the game is about finding out if you, the player, can turn this nobody, vulnerable weakling into somebody. That is the story, that is what you are writing when you are playing classic Dungeons and Dragons.

The fact that the game is deadly is to remind you further and really define to the player that the goal here is not to go out and seek your death by trying to fight monsters but to find wealth while avoiding danger. You must figure out how you are going to do that. Will you venture forth into the wilderness and seek your fortune in some ancient ruins of a long forgotten city or will you stay in the safety of town to scheme a way to rob the local nobles? Will you join the ranks of the local militia in hopes of making a name for yourself or start a local adventuring guild to get other adventures to do the dirty work for you as you claim a percentage. How you achieved your goals, was entirely up to you, the game is the story of how you do that.

This was further enforced by the fact that all other methods of earning XP, namely fighting monsters was the absolute worse way to do it. To prove that point consider that a 21 HD monster, the single most powerful in the world of D&D that would require a party of max level characters earned you a measily 2,500 XP, while a 1 HD monster that you would be an even match for at 1st level earned you 10 XP. The chances of you successfully fighting your way into success without dying was virtually ZERO.

Which puts the cliche that D&D is a game about fighting monsters and taking their stuff in a much different light. It is a cliche that is regulated to the OSR, that this is how “D&D used to be”, but the truth of the matter is that this is what D&D is today, in 5e, this is the core and fundamental motivation for players today, to fight monsters and take their stuff. In classic D&D this was the absolute worst thing that you could do and the entire system from low HP of characters, a complete absence of encounter balancing, to tiny XP rewards for fighting monsters and everything in between. The system did everything in its power to discourage fighting monsters. Which is true, as a player of the old school games I can assure you that we always avoided fights like it was the worst possible thing that could happen.

So how does the story evolve from this atmosphere. The answer should be obvious. The players have a clear directive, they know the premise of the game. When they sit down to create their characters, they do so with purpose. They understand their meta motivation and when the game starts, their purpose is also crystal clear. We are here to become rich, famous and powerful, now we need a plan. That plan, that adventure, those pursuits drive the story and players will seek out whatever opportunities you put in front of them with eager anticipation. You will never have unmotivated players again.

The Conclusion

It may not be as romantic, but having a clear cut goal for your players, something on which they can put their elbows is vital to the game. Players who create characters without a full understanding of exactly what the goal of the game is, will always struggle to create meaningful characters with meaningful motivations on their own, or worse, they will have misaligned motivations that will pull them in different directions.

The best thing you can do is to establish a core premise for your game, now you don’t necessarily have to adopt the classic Gold = XP premise of old school D&D, though I would argue this is an excellent logic to have in the game as a starting point. However in the absence of a premise, you will find that null motivation characters and mismatch is inevitable.

In my next article I will focus on creating other motivations (other premises) for D&D, Gold = XP is just one in a sea of possibilities and may indeed be better left to the past, though I encourage you to try it.

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