Image courtesy Constantin Deaconescu

Character Motivation can be the hardest thing to unlock for any character, and yet the most useful.

Knowing a character’s motivation can provide a cohesiveness of personality and decision-making context that simplifies the complex task of getting under an NPC or PCs skin down to one or two basic issues and their ramifications.

Knowing why a character is doing something is half the battle when it comes to roleplaying that character spectacularly well.

When I’m creating a character, one of the approaches to getting a handle on that character that I always try early in the process is to ask four simple questions – with deceptively complex results.

It doesn’t always work, but a lot of the time it simplifies the process of making every other decision to the point where snap judgments are not only possible, but relatively frequent.

This frees up my mind for other aspects of the game, whether I am roleplaying a PC or GMing the game. Today, I’m going to share that secret with the world.

The Four Questions

The four questions are:

1. What are the character’s Principles?
2. What Cause or causes is the character fighting for?
3. To what courses of action has he locked him- or herself into?
4. What does the character’s Principles tell me about his or her approach to Responsibility?

Notice that there’s virtually nothing about what the character can or can’t do. These questions define what the character will, won’t, and is trying to do, and those constraints determine the choices that he makes in all other areas of his life – and those, plus opportunities, define the answers to those other questions, and remain valid even as what he “can” or “can’t” do evolves as a result.

Principles

The fundamental starting point are the principles that the character believes in, the philosophy that is central to his being. The simplest characters can be reduced to a single principle. Second-order characters have two principles, one primary and a second that yields only to the first. Third-Order characters have a third principle which yields only to the first or second, and so on. As Asimov’s three Laws Of Robotics and the stories that he was able to write about them prove, three is enough to give a sufficiently rounded personality that we relate to the result as a person; real people usually have more.

The depth of the character is therefore the first decision – 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th order?

Once you know how many you are aiming for, the next decision is to populate those empty slots. Most principles can be reduced to a single word or short phrase. Even “Absolute Pragmatism,” which rejects all philosophical principles in favor of practicality and opportunism, is a philosophical principle!

My personal principles illustrate all this perfectly (I have the advantage over most people of actually having thought about this stuff). In order, they are (1) A fair go; (2) Protection Of Society; (3) Honesty; (4) Individual Liberty; (5) A Positive Attitude; and (6) Empathy. These aren’t set in stone; the order can, and has changed from time to time, but by and large, that’s my natural default. I’ve even failed in just about all of them to some degree at some point.

• “The Fair Go” is a uniquely Australian concept, encompassing everything from “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” (and vice-versa) to sportsmanship to innocent until proven guilty to equal pay to equal opportunity to anti-discrimination to marriage equality to the Golden Rule of “Do unto others”. This is my number one because if a society fails to provide it, I would compromise the protection of that society in pursuit of fairness. I don’t begrudge business the right to make a profit, but don’t support the exploitation of workers, or the gouging of customers, in order to do so. This list of implications and applications just scratches the surface!
• All societies are under constant threat both from without and from internal dissent and destruction. I’ve been threatened by criminals; I’ve been threatened by illegal drugs and the things that people have to do to satisfy their addictions; I’ve been threatened by unthinking or uncaring drivers. I have no doubt that without a strong military, my country would face invasion from, or simple domination by, many others seeking to exploit our natural resources. I have no doubt that Terrorism is real, both foreign and domestic. Protection of society from such threats is my number two because I am willing to compromise everything further down the list to at least some extent in order to achieve that protection – right up to the point where that protection starts to impact on the fair go for all.
• Honesty is my number three. Own up when you make a mistake, and try to fix it. Sugar-coat your criticism as necessary, but be critical when its’ warranted. Would I lie to protect my society? It would haunt me, but yes – just as Winston Churchill had to do when he chose to protect the secret that the British had cracked the Enigma code of Nazi Germany by not evacuating Coventry when the WWII British Government learned the city was to be bombed. Ideally, I would prefer to protect society without deception – but if it came down to it, I would reluctantly support the dishonesty. And if someone were to lie to me, and get caught out, Fairness and the principle of Protection Of Society are the only acceptable justifications – which means that I need to trust those making such claims and making decisions on these matters or I can’t support them. Honesty also means no false modesty, acknowledging people when they help you, and so on.
• Individual Liberty is something I’m big on. I’ve been a maverick for most of my life, even down to playing RPGs when they were a fringe activity, but I draw the line when that liberty threatens society, or is dishonest, or threatens a fundamental fairness within a society. Totalitarian and Racist regimes are therefore something I oppose. Religious Extremism is another. Trying to convert me to your faith is still another – because one person’s personal liberty doesn’t give them the right to invade that of another, except where justified by a higher principle on my list, not theirs. And note that you can’t have individual liberty if your privacy or civil rights are being abused with insufficient oversight. While individual cases might justify invasions of privacy in order to protect society, that doesn’t justify a blanket surveillance of citizens.
• I have a generally positive attitude; I’m reluctant to think the worst of others, or of a situation. As I put it to someone the other day, if you look down all the time you don’t see the high points, only the low. Like everyone else, I have highs and lows; but I don’t stay low for very long – I look for, and usually find, silver linings that at least make whatever life throws at me tolerable. This has enabled me to find something to enjoy about every position of employment that I have ever held, which in turn has enabled me to do my level best to do whatever I’m being paid to do. Only when the fairness of such a situation has been undermined – like the time I was expected to work more than 100 hours a week of unpaid overtime every week just to keep my underpaid 40-hour-a-week job – does this ethic begin to fail.
• I have a fairly high capacity for Empathy, I can put myself in other people’s shoes fairly easily most of the time, at least enough to get a glimpse of what they are going through. That means supporting those not as well off as I as best I can – even if that is sometimes only by not taking advantage of the generosity of charities and taxpayers by abusing the support on offer, leaving those resources for those who need it more. When I can, I support charitable causes – probably too many of them, spreading that support thin, but there are so many that are worthwhile!

There are a couple of others that should probably be in there somewhere, like Respect for others, and a Romantic perception of love and marriage, but that’s more than enough for the purposes of this example. It’s been said that humans are rationalizing creatures, not rational creatures. It might well be that this nested cascade of principles is simply my way of rationalizing the things that I like, so I don’t insist that anyone else model themselves on me! Other people are welcome to their own set of principles. Nor do I think for a moment that I have the perfect recipe, or any sort of exclusive wisdom or insight.

This isn’t about me; I offer the above not as lecture or to proselytize, but to illustrate how much of a personality can be defined through the principles that the character lives by.

So, once you have decided how much complexity you require in the character (at least to start with – you can always add more), list the principles that you want him to believe in, one after another. If this entire process is half the work of coming up with a character, then the principles are half of the work of the process, so take your time and get them right!

Cause and Causes

Whenever principles are viewed in light of a society or world that doesn’t share them, the result is a Cause. The greater the gap between the present reality and the ideal expressed by the principle, the higher the priority the individual gives to the Cause. Similarly, the higher up the list of principles, the greater the priority given to the cause.

Now, you could get all technical and list a dozen or more Causes, popular or otherwise, then determine which (if any) principles of the character the cause represents a violation of, and then index by severity of perceived disparity, either generating a numeric rating of how strongly the character feels about that Cause, or mapping them onto a table with Principle Rank along one axis and perceived disparity on the other – but it’s probably simpler to just look at the first couple of principles and select the most egregious violations of those principles.

Once you know what the character’s Cause or Causes are, you can apply the character’s Principles to determine how far they will go in pursuit of that agenda, and how much room there is for compromise.

Course

Of course, others may be to be willing to further, and quite often people find themselves supporting a Cause or allied to an organization more willing to embrace “radical solutions” to a problem. Take the environmental movement, for example; within that space you have groups who view the cause as an opportunity for profit; you have eco-terrorists; you have radicals who advocate animal rights over human rights; you have criminals who would release infected animals into the streets rather than see them giving their lives in pursuit of a cure for AIDS or Ebola or whatever.

Any organization will have its share of radicals, and because these are the most passionate members, they frequently ascend to leadership positions, driving the organization toward more extremist positions and policies. Those who are more moderate can often find themselves trapped by such circumstances.

Any character will have courses of action to which they are committed, unable to back out of, even though they do not personally support those courses of action. This can be anything from raising an unexpected child to being a member of a radical sect within a faith.

So the next question to be answered is what, if any, courses of action is the character committed to, even though they may violate his principles?

The example of raising an unexpected child is an excellent one for illustrating the point. To the best of my knowledge, I am not a parent, but if I were to discover otherwise, what would I compromise in order to care for that child? Tell you what, we’ll come back to that in a minute, because that raises the whole issue of the fourth question: how the character responds to responsibility.

Responsibility

The key to unlocking an understanding of the sense of Responsibility of the character is to locate Personal Liberty, or anything else that is all about the individual being generated, or his immediate family relative to everyone else, as opposed to others.

A Fair Go For All? Global, by definition. Protection Of Society? Ditto. Honesty? That’s not just Honesty about yourself, it’s honesty towards others. So my sense of Responsibility is first compromised by the fourth-order principle, “Personal Liberty”. That’s a long way down the list, so I have a strong sense of Responsibility.

If “Political Power” was high on the list, or “Personal Wealth,” or “Social Position,” that diminishes the sense of Responsibility by compromising the things that the individual will take responsibility for. If the obtainment of any of these is the first principle by which the character lives, that means that everything else is compromised to that purpose. If one of them, or something like them, is in second place, then there is something more important to the character than achieving the goal, a line that the character will not cross, and something that could compromise that goal through a sense of Responsibility. Each step further down the list acts to functionally increase the character’s sense of Personal Responsibility.

So, as I was asking a moment ago, what would I compromise to care for a son or daughter? Well, getting “a fair go” for him or her – ensuring that the child had as much opportunity as I could provide – comes under Principle Number 1, and that’s a long way ahead of Personal Liberty, the principle that defines my Responsibility Level. So I would compromise everything short of that point without hesitation. Protection of Society? Not if it puts my child at risk – unless my failure to so protect society diminishes his or her future opportunities or safety, in which case, “show me where to sign”. Honesty? Yes, I would bite my tongue for the sake of a hypothetical son or daughter’s welfare. Personal Liberty? Set aside in a heartbeat, except to the extent that it does not harm the welfare of the child. In fact, I would have to be seriously convinced that “doing the right thing” was going to detrimental to the child before I would not insist on taking responsibility for it.

This also means that I would oppose unjust laws, even if they are aimed at the protection of society – and accept the responsibility of doing so.

Note that there is a difference between feeling responsible for a general situation and taking responsibility for your own choices and actions. The first stems from a generalized identification with those who are, or have, violated a principle; the second is far more personal.

This becomes important when considering the Causes to which the character is committed, and how they will behave when those Causes go beyond the character’s comfort zone. The responsible thing to do might be to put The Cause ahead of the welfare of those fighting for it, leading the character to become an informant; or they might have so low a sense of Responsibility that they will go along with the group, swayed by the charisma and passion of the radical elements, a process of radicalizing the character.

1st Application: Morality

These four questions, then, define the personality extremely quickly and succinctly. All that remains is to demonstrate how to apply this “personality shorthand”.

The first such application is to define the character’s Morals, or – in the case of D&D / Pathfinder – the character’s alignment. This is quite simple – just look for morality-defining terms in the principles. The higher up the list these are, the more significant the contribution to the Moral Classification, but the stronger the term, the more strongly that term’s effects shape the overall morality of the character.

In my case, terms leap out like “Fair”, “Protect Society”, “Honest”, and “Personal Liberty”. “Fair” is, by definition, even-handed, pointing to a strongly Neutral position. “Protect Society” is definitely both Lawful and Good, and so is “Honest”. “Honest” is also a somewhat stronger term than “Protect”, compensating for its lower position in the ranking, but it’s more “Lawful” than “Good” – so let’s say that it contributes as much Lawful to my alignment as “Protect Society”, but only about half as much Good.

“Personal Liberty” is strongly either Evil, Chaotic, or Both (depending on your definitions of “Evil”, something I’m not going to go into right now). Because it promotes the individual over society, I would argue that it is more Evil than Chaotic. It’s a much stronger term than “Protect”, but it’s a couple of intensity levels down the order of priority, so let’s say that it cancels out the “Good” from “Protect” and about half of the “Lawful”.

If you map these out on an alignment chart, you get the alignment chart shown above, which shows that my personal alignment is Lawful Neutral with Good tendencies – in fact, pretty much riding the border between Neutral and Good.

The character’s alignment thus becomes a synopsis of the influences that dictate the personality, a summary of a more complex and robust characterization.

2nd Application: Applied Morality

Not only that, you can easily see on such a chart where the predominant factors are that can produce an alignment or moral shift. The “ground” that is so defined is what the character considers moral behavior. At the same time, at least some moral development stems from misbehavior in a particular direction and a resulting sense of guilt – so at least some of the development lies in a reaction to movement in the other direction. People make “mistakes,” but they learn from them, so this becomes a tool for the creation of the character’s background, as well as a guideline to the making of future decisions.

3rd Application: Development

The answers to the four questions also form a guideline to the way in which the character will “improve” himself, what he will learn to do, and how he will use what he has learned, dictating the opportunities that come his way and the type of people to whom he has been exposed. It becomes one of the defining factors in what the character can do at the point in which he enters play.

4th Application: Bias and Prejudice

People naturally have a prejudice against those whose principles oppose theirs. I am strongly opposed to elitists of any sort, for example. I have no sympathy for people who cheat the system (any system) and get caught – though I make allowance for human error. Corruption of any sort earns my wrath – and that extends to people who rort game systems. The combination of environment and principles define a character’s biases and prejudices.

That, in combination with the character’s social environment and opportunity for expression, defines their politics. Will a Feudal Landowner mistreat his serfs? He will exploit them, that’s a given, the cornerstone of their respective social stations – but mistreatment beyond that level is determined by the extent to which his priorities oppose theirs, and that comes down to the principles that he values.

You can only deny a population their human rights while retaining those rights for yourself if you first define that population as less than fully human, as somehow being unworthy of being treated equally.

5th Application: Past Decisions

When people are confronted with the need to make a decision, there are two factors that define their choice. The first is the range of options before them, as they perceive them; the second is their priorities and which of these options best achieves that priority, as best as they can determine.

But the ramifications of past choices can last a lifetime, can define what opportunities will be presented to the character in the future, as made clear by the “Chosen Courses” question. Applying the same logic to the other questions that have arisen in the character’s past will define them, and potentially define the outcomes of those decisions.

For example, at one point I was a Systems Analyst in all but title and pay-scale. A change of management in my department resulted in the decision to make my specialist expertise redundant; I was offered what I considered a demeaning contract that effectively denied that the previous five years had not happened, returning to trainee status – and pay-scale. I had the choice of accepting, or looking for work within that specialist sphere elsewhere. I chose the latter and stood on principle, and don’t regret it, even though it didn’t work out well at the time.

6th Application: Current Status

Put all this together and you end up with the character’s current status – and, by then applying the principles again, can determine just what the character thinks about that status, and what he’s prepared to do about it. This defines his emotional state at the start of play.

7th Application: The Future

Everyone plans for the future, even though we don’t know what it will hold. Well, anyone who doesn’t have “live for today” or something analogous in their priority list! Planning for the future essentially means arranging circumstances so that when an opportunity arises, the character is in a position to take advantage of it, but may extend to actively trying to bring about just such an opportunity. It follows that the character’s plans for the future arise from his current priorities, and those are defined by the character’s current status and his priorities.

If I were in the Wild West, and wanted to eventually become the town Marshall, I would start by learning as much of the skills required as possible in my spare time, and working to establish a reputation in town for the qualities that a Marshall should have, while keeping out of trouble. When an opportunity came up for the position of Deputy, I would volunteer for it, and use it as an opportunity to learn still more – and when. eventually, a new Marshall was needed, I would be one of a few select candidates.

8th Application: Further Development

I’ve more or less pre-empted this item with the discussion above, but that’s all right – the two go together as a natural partnership. The course life takes is always determined by what has come before, and how it has equipped you to handle the future. In D&D / Pathfinder, the character should continually be assessing which Prestige Classes he qualifies for, which best achieves his priorities – and whether or not he can change that list of choices for the better by taking a Feat, Improving a stat, or acquiring a skill.

9th Application: Snap Decisions In Play

And the final application, the final benefit of employing this simple tool is this: you can get inside the head of the character very quickly and easily, which enables you to make snap decisions in character.

It’s really easy: you consider the decision to be made in light of the first priority. Is that priority relevant? Yes – decision is easily made on that basis. No? Then consider the second. And then the third, and so on.

You can reflect the greater depth of characterization embedded within this system simply by looking for subsequent items on the list of principles that may also strongly affect the decision. It takes only a second or so to be able to say “yes, this matters,” or “no, this is irrelevant”. By the time you’ve considered them all, your subconscious will have finished mulling over the relationship between the question and the critical factors as the character sees them and reached a consensus – another second or so, and the decision is ready to be implemented.

Well, almost. There’s one factor that none of the questions might address, and that’s how decisive the character is. Knowing how much they will dither is the final piece of the puzzle.