Engaging Your Players: A Lesson from Crime Fiction
Means, Motive, and Opportunity.
The M-M-O triad are the foundation of mystery stories and crime fiction in general, and have been for centuries. To be fair, most stories rely on the fallability and limitations of the triad as a means of solving those mysteries, especially on the first and third of the trio. Motives, after all, can always be inferred.
I was reading issue #455 of Roleplaying Tips, in particular “Let It Ride” by RJK, and “Mess With Your Players’ Heads” by John Lewis from Roleplaying Pro, when the confluance of the two articles made me realise something: The Means-Motive-Opportunity trio can be used as a template, a blueprint, a guide to the best method of engaging your players.
Since this was an entirely new perspective on the subject (something that is always valuable), I coudn’t wait to share the insight with our readers. (Besides, I didn’t want anyone else to beat me to it!)
Means
To satisfy this leg of the M-M-O tripod, you have to give the characters the tools to shape their own destiny as they see fit. That doesn’t necessarily mean the biggest, baddest magic weapon; more important are Information and Resources. The latter might mean gold, it might mean experience and expertise, it might mean magic, it might mean political influance, it might mean professional contacts. It most probably means some combination of all of them. These should not be handed to the characters on a plate, they have to be earned; but there should always be some means by which the characters can take what they have and ‘work’ them to achieve the next rung up the ladder.
Up the ladder to what end? To give your players the Means by which to fully engage in the campaign, you also have to give your players the tools to shape that campaign. That means that the players should set the agenda in terms of ultimate goals, chosen from the menu placed before them by the campaign setting that the GM has created for them.
At the start of every day’s play, the GM should ask himself what will take place in the course of play that day to enhance the players’ and characters’ tool-chests. What does he expect them to achieve to advance their cause? And, at the end of the day’s play, he should reflect on the same questions in retrospect; what did they actually do to further “the story of the campaign”? What is the shape of the chapter just written, and how does it inform the shape of the next chapter to come?
Motive
In order to be successful, the campaign also has to give both players and characters a Motive to engage fully in it. Unlike the crime-busting context, this can be the hardest to achieve. To provide Motivation for your characters, they can’t be mere cookie-cutter collections of statistics, they have to be Simulated People, internally consistant and with developed personalities and ambitions. To the characters, the Campaign should represent a Journey; equal parts self-discovery, personal growth, achievement, adventure, awe, and wonder.
Equally, the world has to be as plausible as the GM can make it, not just to the characters, but to the players; they need to be Stimulated People. He has to bring the world to life – its tastes, sights, sounds, and smells. It, too, needs an internally-consistant logic. Even if neither players nor characters know what it is, they can still detect its presence – and feel its absence. It’s fortuitous that a solid conceptual foundation saves the GM work, or it would be almost impossible to achieve; but, by making choices quicker and easier, as well as more consistant and logical, the GM can more easily focus on the essentials when the time comes to make decisions. On-the-fly responses within play can be made more quickly, because the logic of circumstances defines what the right answers should be.
In addition, the GM needs to give the players the motivation they need to engage in the campaign. That means rewarding their efforts appropriately, arousing and then satisfying their curiosity, giving them the sense that they are making progress – a checklist can be useful for that – and giving the players the sort of adventures that they want to have. A lot of advice to GMs focusses, one way or another, on properly providing motivation to players.
At the start of each campaign, the GM should establish what each character’s objectives are, should map out a rough plan of how that will be achieved in-game, and should use that information to plan the major scenarios. If a player doesn’t yet know what he wants his character to achieve, the GM should periodically check in with that player, gently prodding him until the player can come up with an objective. These don’t have to be the primary plotline of the campaign, but they should, at the very least, be prominant side-quests and sub-plots. As much as possible, the GM should integrate them into the main plotline, ideally as stepping-stones to completing that final plot. And, at the start of each session, the GM should ensure that there is some progress for at least one of the characters toward his objectives. Someone in the party should always be able to look back on the day’s play and say to themselves that they are a step closer to achieving their goals.
Sometimes, these goals are relatively trivial, or to be achieved fairly early in the campaign; as soon as that happens, the player needs to define a new goal for his character. For example, in my Shards Of Divinity campaign, one of the players has, as his primary objective, joining the Assassin’s Guild. Well, that will happen as soon as the group reaches the city, in a scenario that I’m already planning; he already qualifies in terms of game mechanics to take the Assassin prestige class and is taking Shadow Levels until the time comes. What will he want to do once he’s succeeded? The player has stated that he deliberately chose a relatively easily-achieved goal purely to give him time to get to know the game world, an entirely sensible approach, so we’ll see what he comes up when the characters start playing on the bigger stage. For the record, the other PCs objectives in the campaign are, for the cleric: to assist his deity in achieving her goals of committing suicide while ensuring that his own power is not affected; and, for the mage, to become undisputed lord and master of all existance (NB: It is an Evil Campaign).
Particular notice should be paid to aparrantly-contradictory character goals; no matter how much it shakes the conceptual foundations of the campaign, the GM has to reconcile these. For example, the cleric’s initial goal in Shards Of Divinity was (at first) simply to do his Goddess’ will, and support her in her work; that is clearly contradictory to the goal of the mage. Only by completely redefining the nature and attitude of the Gods, and in fact the very nature of Divinity itself, can the two be reconciled. So that’s what I did; character Goals can and should be a source of inspiration to the GM.
It will usually be the case that each goal will be broken down into a succession of lesser ambitions. But, trivial or sweeping, the PCs should all achieve their objectives in the course of the campaign (or die trying), and should be perpetually aware of making progress in that quest.
Opportunity
Opportunity bridges the gap between Means and Motivation. The latter concerns what the characters want to achieve; the former gives them the tools to achieve those things; and Opportunity is the chance to use the tools they have acquired to fulfill their goals. They might succeed; they might fail, but they need to be presented with a fair chance by the GM.
That, most emphatically, does not mean that it should be easy. The GM should, in truth, throw obstacles at each of the characters left, right, and centre.
Judging these obstacles is a fine art, dificult to master, and absolutely essential to success as a GM. As a general rule, they should never be so completely impossible that the player loses heart, but that general rule has a lot of exceptions, which the GM can use to pace and maintain some control over the overall campaign. The more difficult and distant the GM wants to place the objective that they relate to, the more insurmountable the obstacles should be; and the campaign then becomes all about finding the path to victory over, under, or through those obstacle, a route that is only discovered when the overall plotline of the campaign is ready for that next step.
The very best GMs find a way to hide the path to the achievement of the ‘next goal’ of the party within the achievement of the current goal, so that there is an overall sense of group achievement, with each party member contributing.
Means, Motive, and Opportunity: give all three to your players, and to their characters, and they will find you guilty – of running an unforgettable campaign!
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July 24th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Thanks a lot, as simple as it is this is probably one of the most useful articles on getting the players motivated (without flogging) that I have ever read.
Right now in my current campaign neither of the 2 players seems to have any long-term goals, so I just ask what they want to do this time, plan some challenges for them to overcome on their way there, and give them a few special items needed to achieve that goal in addition to standard loot. I should perhaps consider making it personal in the next few sessions… Both of em got living family members…
July 24th, 2009 at 10:12 am
You’re welcome, Robert. A new perspective on an old topic is incalculably valuable, I think; it carries a fresh way to consider the subject, and fresh avenues to persue in seeking to achieve the objectives. Tasks that seemed impossible, or overwhelming, or simply too difficult to grasp can become easy, or at least manageable.
Perhaps the family members of the PCs might end up on seperate sides of some dispute, and the PCs have to find a solution that is at least acceptable to both sides? And if both sides are simply looking at some sort of short-term gain and are unaware of a bigger picture – some mastermind who is attempting to play both sides against each other for his own gain – they will find a greater goal that they can both get their teeth into?
July 24th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
That would be priceless, especially since they are brothers (one of them has a wife and kid though, so I don’t count that as the others’ family). The campaign is fairly new so they haven’t made any powerful enemies yet, or at least enemies that would be willing to track down the families of a traveling monk and bard from a secluded island fishing village. They are getting close though, unknown to them they were already involved in an incident that attracted the attention of most of the major players in the world, including the BBEG.
I was thinking of having the BBEG give them a “Motive” to take him down by killing some family members and kidnapping some others. Of course since they are just a minor thorn in his side right now they wont be dragged to his fortress of doom, but will be rather easy to rescue within the PC’s “Means”. Some friendly help from one of the BBEG’s slightly less evil enemies, for a heavy price of course, to balance out the forces a bit should provide plenty of “Opportunity”.
July 25th, 2009 at 1:00 am
That’s the beauty of having the family members taking sides on a bigger issue – it makes them part of the game world, reacting to events within it. The BBEG doesn’t care about the family members, doesn’t even know are care who they are – but would pay strict attention when the PCs start meddling in whatever scheme he has going because their family members are getting caught in the gears, especially because of the attention-getting incident you refer to. This also has the advantage that you can save the kidnapping/blackmail angle for later, when you need to further up the ante.
Perhaps the BBEG is trying to gain some political advantage – control over a trade route, or elevating some puppet (or himself) in authority. To achieve this, he orchestrates a conflict between the taxation office (chancellor of the exchequer or whatever he is in this world’s society) and the Fisherman’s Guild, or Merchant’s guild, or whatever. By reducing the profitability of the industries apon which his political opponants depend, he weakens them, and by engineering a confrontation, he gets to play “diplomat” and settle the dispute, elevating himself in the eyes of the supreme political power. Of course, to make such a move popular enough to win support, he needs to spend the capital that he would acquire through taxation in such a way that he wins allies – perhaps a move towards more universal education, in the form of subsidising bards. The monk’s family, fishermen, would then oppose the tax, while the bard’s guild, who would suppport the bard’s family, would be in favour. As in any trade-union dispute, it would be easy for things to get out of hand at a local level in various places, both in the cities and out in the sticks. I would play this by first making the PCs aware of the political dispute as “news” in whatever town they are passing through (a minor subplot on their way to do whatever they would be doing anyway). Some time later, letters from the families would reach the PCs complaining of “unfair tactics” by the other side and asking each PC to come home and protect the family; in fact, the “unfair tactics” are being perpetrated by flunkies of the villain, whose real objective is simply to stir up trouble. The PCs are eventually persuaded as rumours of things getting out of hand elsewhere reach them (witch-hunts, trumped-up trials, cases of arson, etc – all exaggerated, of course). They discover the flunkies, expose the scheme, and realise that there’s someone out there pulling the strings – but the derailing of one minor regional dispute doesn’t stop the overall plan from succeeding. Following the hue and cry, the bad guy plays peacemaker in the capital, waters down the inflammatory proposals that he engineered in the first place, and moves on to his next plan, probably something more directly involved in gathering intelligence about these upstart trouble-makers (the PCs) – perhaps despatching a band of brigands or other flunkies to put them out of his business. Step by step, the PCs and the enemy work their way closer to direct confrontation, without even seeing it coming…