Writing | Roleplaying Games

The One Hard Rule for Creating Good RPG Characters

The what, why, and how of character motivations

Image by Sam Hollon

There’s a lot of advice on the internet for how to create compelling characters in Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs. Give your character a memorable feature or core gimmick. Give them a guiding aesthetic. Give them a backstory with dramatic potential. A lot of this advice is good. But most of it isn’t necessary for creating a character that’s fun for you to play or compelling for the rest of the table.

But there is one piece of advice that is nearly always helpful — even vital — for good roleplay: give your character motivations. Specifically, ask:

• What does my character want?
• And why do they want it?

Why Motivations Matter

If you ask any professional storyteller “what makes a compelling character,” they will probably say the character’s “want,” “need,” “desire,” “motivation” or some other near synonym. And you’ll get a similar response regardless of whether the writer writes for the page, stage, screen, comics, or any other storytelling medium.

In roleplaying, character motivations perform two specific functions.

First, motivations make your job as a player easier. Knowing what your character wants and why gives you access to their unique perspective through which you can interpret fictional situations and make decisions. A character with a strong perspective will have a clear way of responding to and acting upon events that takes the guesswork out of the improvisation. For example, if your character believes all forms of hierarchy are unjust, a range of possible reactions to meeting His Most Glorious Duke jumps out. Moreover, you and your fellow players are likely to care more about the fiction if your characters do. The dungeons and the dragons, being unreal, only matter insofar as we agree to care about them, after all. (For a more detailed discussion of how the power of perspective works in improv, worldbuilding, and storytelling in general, see my previous article.)

Second, motivations make the GM’s job easier, too. Much of that job involves introducing situations that the players will find engaging to deal with and then letting the players run with those situations until a new, complicating situation is called for. Motivated characters make this task easier. If a player says, “My character cares about X,” that’s a strong signal that a situation involving X will engage that player. (And how the player might respond also becomes clearer, guiding GM planning.) Moreover, motivated characters require less prompting. The GM only has to ask, “What do you do now?” when the players have not proactively launched into their next (mis)adventure. If your hatred of His Most Glorious Duke leads you to orchestrate an operation to take him down, all the GM needs to do for the time being is see where you and the other players take the story. Characters lacking clear motivations are more likely to respond to situations reactively. They are less likely to take the game into their own hands.

In a GM roundtable with Aabria Iyengar and Matthew Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan summarized the importance of nailing down character motivation to get players to care:

There’s nothing you can do if the players don’t care. At the end of the day, I don’t care how good of a GM you are. The players are the driving energy of the game.

Crafting Strong Motivations

It’s all good and well — and actually kind of obvious — to point out that character motivations matter. What’s harder is crafting strong motivations for your own characters.

Some game systems solve this task for you. In many Old School Renaissance (OSR) games, for instance, you’re assumed to be scoundrel-adventurers motivated by the fear of personal harm and the reward of treasure, and the game incentivizes you mechanically for pursuing this goal (via XP for killing monsters or acquiring gold). In Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games, your character’s playbook usually supplies you with a strong characterization, already half-finished, appropriate for the genre, and linked to other characters through fill-in-the-blank “bonds.”

In both cases, motivations are still central. There’s a reason OSR and PbtA games so often support proactive, player-driven playstyles. The game systems provide strong, readymade, default motivations, with some room to deviate for those who wish to — of course, you can play an OSR game about non-scoundrels, but only if the players supply other reasons for the characters to act in the fiction.

Then there are games where players are supposed to come up with their characters’ motivations on their own. Without a guiding structure, this is surprisingly hard to do well, unless you’re an experienced writer or improviser. It’s easy to create characters who seem to have strong motivations but don’t. (See the GM roundtable linked above for a discussion of this danger and some solutions.)

Luckily, numerous games in or informed by the storygame genre provide frameworks that help when writing character motivations (as do endless creative writing guides). Robin D. Laws’s DramaSystem and Luke Crane’s The Burning Wheel are good examples. What follows is a brief, minimalist structure synthesizing some of the ideas from such systems. I call it the drives technique. It’s a version of what I’ve started giving out to my players to help them come up with compelling characters for story-driven games. Feel free to do the same.

The Drives Technique

Drives are the core of your character. They’re why you do what you do.

Create three drives for your character, or choose them from a list provided by the GM. If you write your own, run them by the GM. It’s important to think carefully about each one, as strong drives will make your character easier and more compelling to play. If your character changes and grows, revisit your three drives and revise them.

Each drive is a short, two-sentence statement that includes:

• a belief your character holds about the world
• and how your character acts in response.

These two components together form a setup-payoff structure. And this structure provides a minimal basis for a specific, actionable perspective: what you care about, how you care, and a way of seeing things that reveals why.

Some examples:

• “Anyone can be redeemed. I will always forgive those who repent.”
• “All lies hurt people in the end. I must never tell them.”
• “The written word is a weapon to shackle the free and natural mind. I eschew reading and writing and destroy all texts I can.”
• “Fear is only a lack of conviction. I will never show it.”
• “I can only love what I understand. I will study especially that which I find ugly to discover the beauty in it.”
• “I don’t deserve the money I made doing my corporation’s bidding. Now, I must spend it to repair the damage I did.”
• “Lives matter only through the stories we remember them by. I protect my reputation above all.”
• “The law protects those who write it. I protect those who don’t get to.
• “I’ve never had love or support, and I’ve never needed it. I will show everyone I can beat them without their help.”
• “Our oppressors won’t respect us until they fear us. I must become whatever it takes to make them afraid.”

A compelling drive is:

• a core motivation for your character (a primary, not a peripheral, drive that often shapes your decisions),
• specific to your character (is not shared by everyone and may name specific relations, communities, or factions),
• written from your character’s perspective (it’s how your character sees things from their perspective, and is not always accurate),
• clear-cut and often extreme or absolute (not overly qualified),
• sometimes hard or inadvisable to follow (not always in your true self-interest),
• sometimes in conflict with your other drives (creating drama and nuancing the absolute individual drives),
• and appropriate for the genre and expectations of the game (e.g., drives that create conflict between you and other player characters will work in some games but not others).

A drive is not:

• an aesthetic or vibe. “I’m cool and unphased.” is not a drive. But this is: “Fear is only a lack of conviction. I will never show it.”
• a backstory or factual descriptor. “I’m an orphan.” is not a drive. But this is: “I’ve never had love or support, and I’ve never needed it. I will show everyone I can beat them without their help.”
• disinterest, apathy, or an absence of motivation. “I don’t care about money anymore.” is not a drive. But this is: “I don’t deserve the money I made doing my corporation’s bidding. Now, I must spend it to repair the damage I did.”
• others’ responses to you but rather your own response to the world. “People fear me” is not a drive. But this is: “Our oppressors won’t respect us until they fear us. I must become whatever it takes to make them afraid.”

By all means, give your character compelling aesthetics and backstory if you’d like. These might even play into motivations. Backstories, for instance, matter because they show us where you’re headed — or want to head — based on where you’ve been. Just make sure to give your character genuine drives as well.

That’s a Wrap

That’s it. Write three drives. Consider coordinating your drives with those of other player characters for extra cohesion or drama. Stick to the format, or break it if you have a strong reason to do so. And enjoy roleplaying with compelling, proactive, motivated characters.