How to Motivate Your PCs

Here's how the question is usually phrased, as far as I've seen it.

"Hi everyone. So, I'm running a piracy-themed game of 7th Sea and four people signed up. I started them on the docks in a port ready to sign onto a ship's crew, and instead they all decided they wanted to attend the Baron's masked ball! I said that I hadn't planned any scenes set in a 'masked ball' and they all got upset and one walked out. How can I motivate their characters to get on that pirate ship?"

If your PCs don't want to go on an adventure, chances are the players aren't keen on it either. There's been a mistake somewhere. Maybe you've insisted on a setting or genre even when your players weren't keen, or your players immediately latched onto something in the setting you didn't care for, or maybe they're feeling deliberately contrarian and just want to cause problems. If it's the latter, then you'll need to have a frank conversation with them about it. If it's either of the former, then you'll need to have a different frank conversation where you figure out exactly what each player wants from the game.

PC motivation is a two-way street, but seeing as (typically) PCs are designed by their players, they have to make the first move. GMs, make sure you clearly explain the themes of a campaign to your group before you start. Players, make sure you create characters that will engage with those themes!

And to pad out this article a bit, I'll just throw some examples around and see what sticks.


You're a dashing loner who doesn't trust anyone.

• There's something the party can help you do that you can't achieve on your own.
• You don't like being a loner, but you can only trust friends who fight by your side.
• You hate the party and everyone in it, but you are somehow obliged to assist them.
• (Challenge) Start as a typical sad loner, but warm up to everyone over time!

You're a good/evil person who's travelling with an evil/good party with different morality.

• You respect the party for their skills, but only accompany them for practical reasons.
• These poor souls will someday be redeemed, and you shall redeem them!
• The party is bad, but the villain is worse. You'll deal with the greater threat first.
• Eventually, you abandon your original morals and adopt the party's morality.
• (Challenge) You're undercover and eventually betray the party for your ideals.

You're of noble blood, but are travelling with some common folk.

• Isn't it thrilling to live like 'regular folk?' You could get used to this!
• These commoners disgust you, but you're paying for the best and they're it.
• One day, you'll reclaim your titles. These peasants will be [destroyed/rewarded] afterwards.
• This band of adventurers needs a diplomat, and you need a meat-shield.
• (Challenge) Travelling with commoners helps you hide your true identity.

You're a commoner, but have ended up tangled in a web of noble intrigue.

• You're helplessly out of your depth, but if you don't make allies your realm is doomed!
• This employer turns up their nose at your normal methods, but at least their money's good.
• If you help this so-called 'prince' regain their throne, you might just be richly rewarded.
• Eventually you'll crack skulls again. For now, the blue-bloods pay your food & board.
• (Challenge) One day, you will bring down the 'noble' houses of this realm. For now, you learn.

My Wounds System (Donut Steel)

I figure if there's anywhere I'm allowed to just post my houserules, it's on a blog I made for myself where I post about my writing and game design. So here we go.

The system's designed for Dungeons and Dragons, or rather for a generic OSR-style hack that's partially LOFTP and partially reverse-engineered from 5th Edition, which is where I started actually playing RPGs instead of just reading about them. Only thing worth noting is that I use 3d6 instead of 1d20, since 3d6 lands on a bell-curve and means I can make critical successes & failures more memorable. They're fun, okay? Remember fun?

As for the wounds themselves, it's a total mishmash that's like 90% in-the-moment rulings. As such, I'm publishing this more as inspiration than as anything else!

tl;dr:

Zero HP or below is Death's Door. Wipe negatives and reset to zero. If a PC takes damage when they're on zero, instead of losing hp they receive a permanent consequence. Enough of these permanent consequences and they're just dead.

The Mechanics

If your hit-points are reduced to zero, you're now on Death's Door. If you'd normally be in negatives, you're just at zero (exceptions below). You are not unconscious, though if you're feeling cowardly you're allowed to lie on the ground and pretend to be dead.

There's now two ways to proceed, pick one or mix and match. Or use a third, I guess.

Stat Damage. (Thanks Chris McDowall and Into The Odd, sorry for stealing from your system.)
If you're on Death's Door then every point of damage you take is removed from one of your stats. Typically, you'd remove it from Constitution or your system's equivalent. If you're taking non-physical damage or under psychic attack, maybe apply the damage to Intelligence or Charisma.

Whenever you take stat damage in this way, reduce the stat and then roll a d20. If the result is equal to or less than the stat you took damage in, then nothing happens. If the result is greater than the stat you took damage in, then you are incapacitated. Typically you're rendered unconscious, but depending on circumstances you could rule this as something like 'hallucinating vividly' or 'asleep.'

Wounds Table. (Cavegirl has a really good table, and Dark Heresy has plenty of them.)
If you're on Death's Door, then every subsequent attack that hits you causes a nasty injury, most of which will be permanent until fixed with serious medicine and probably some magic or something. See how much damage the attack does (e.g. 6) and then find a result in your Wounds Table with a matching number and a matching damage type. Roll randomly for hit location if you need it.

I could do up a table here, but there's a ton of good ones (one of which I linked above). The important part of using a Wounds table is the permanence of it. Once you're at zero HP, then your lifelines are gone and even a scratching blow dealing 1 damage can result in your character losing an eye, whereas larger hits of 8 or 10 damage will often just straight up kill you dead.

More Caveats

The reason for the 'Death's Door' mechanic is pretty simple- it gives the players a vague second chance. If they're on 1 hp and take 10 damage, it's not instant death- they're put to zero and then their next mistake has permanent consequences. That said, I would always apply a 'massive damage' exemption for situations where a character would be put to like, -20 hp in a normal game. If a PC jumps off a cliff and takes capped fall damage, there is no way that they should pull a 'b-but the mechanics say Death's Door' on you. I'll just tell you to rule this case-by-case. A hard number like -20 might be okay for a low-level dungeon crawl, but a high-level campaign might have the party exchanging damage numbers like that in a single hit.

You don't have to offer a way out from your 'permanent' wounds or 'permanent' stat damage. Actually make it honest-to-god permanent if you want to! Just don't break your own fiction to do it. If NPCs are regenerating missing limbs with first-level spells, then it's rude to arbitrarily prevent PCs doing the same thing.

Violence, Depictions of Violence, and Gaming: In Practice

Just like anything in gaming (and fiction), you don’t want to make your violence too real and thus have it be too complex, potentially off-putting, or both. Finding the line between ‘immersive’ and ‘unenjoyable’ is virtually impossible as well, because it’s such a subjective judgement. Look at the sheer volume of ‘realism’ mods found for sandbox RPG video games such as The Elder Scrolls or fan-made encumbrance rules in tabletop dungeon-crawlers. Finding a ‘perfect’ level of abstraction for gaming violence just simply isn’t going to happen on a large scale; thus the responsibility falls on individual groups and GMs to tailor their experience or choose/write systems that appeal to them specifically.

Speaking as another subjective GM, here’s some stuff I’d do.

Implement a wounds system.

I’ve seen a lot of games with ‘wounds’ and a lot of ways to use them. My personal preference is for wounds as punishment for poor play, rather than the fairly common ‘wounds as result of critical damage’ approach. Ever since reading the system Chris McDowall used in Into the Odd I’ve had that in all my OSR games, since ‘damage suffered after you’re out of HP is temporarily deducted from your stats’ is brutally punishing, but it also requires PCs to make the choice to stay in a dangerous location after they run low on HP.

Another option for this system is to have your ‘wounds table’ only come into effect after characters reach zero hit-points. (Cavegirl sniped this one from under me, seeing as I was already using a similar system and starting to rough it out into writing as well. Definitely worth a read.) Put simply, make it possible to receive injuries that aren’t soaked by hit-point abstraction, and maybe even let them have permanent (or semi-permanent) effects on your PCs. Potentially apply the same thing to NPC enemies as well, if you’re willing to do the bookkeeping.

Implement a morale system.

Lots of OSR stuff already assumes morale systems and reaction rolls and so this goes without saying. If you’re playing something more like D&D 4e/5e, you might need to houserule one in. A morale system gives mechanical representation to the nigh-universal drive that sentient beings have to not be brutally murdered. You’ll probably want to keep it fairly light and flexible to account for unprecedented circumstances, and it’s your choice if you want morale calculated per-person or for a whole group. I guess you could apply morale to the PCs as well, but I’d personally be against doing that.

When thinking about morale, factor in: relative numbers, relative gear, motivation to fight, who’s ‘winning,’ personal tenacity, appearance of the party, ‘intimidation’ checks, who’s dying, etc. A particularly nasty wound dealt or taken could have an effect on morale, as could the death of a key team-member (e.g. an officer). Whether you use a mechanic or just eyeball it, keep one question in mind. If I were the NPC, would I be willing to risk a painful and violent death in order to continue this combat?

Don’t expect opportunistic bandits or cowardly goblins to fight to the death when they could run instead. Even if NPCs choose to fight on, have them acknowledge the threat in some way! One option is having one bandit from a pack of 12 choose to run. Another is bloodied enemies choosing to surrender. A third is changing tactics, from ‘rush and engage the barbarian in melee’ to ‘keep as far away from the raging half-orc as possible.’

Narrate your attacks.

For some this’ll go without saying, for others it’ll feel like a time-wasting flow-breaker. (I guess it is, if you expect to be running multiple to-the-death combats per session.) Let your sword swings result in more than ‘six damage!’ If your hit-points are highly abstract (in a ‘fighting spirit’ sense) then you can have attacks fail to connect but still reduce HP. If your system gives characters a lot of hit-points and expect them to be depleted by a lot of attacks… maybe don’t do this. There’s only so many times you can hear ‘the sword grazes their [body part]’ before it loses any meaning.

As for narration, I did a handful of examples a month ago. They’re not great, but hopefully they’re a good starting point. The goal of this is to drive home that every single ‘attack’ action represents a real and serious attempt to cause injury to something or someone!

Don’t run multiple to-the-death combats per session.

It’s hard to make combat and death feel authentic and relatable to the players if your PCs are hacking down sentient beings by the dozen every few dungeon rooms. It’s hard to make your super cool and intense narration (see above) work if you have to come up with new verbs and adjectives every few in-game minutes! It’s really hard for your players to buy that a small town of 200 peasants and no fighters manages to flourish in a forest if the party’s attacked by 3d6 bugbears and 2d12+4 goblins fresh off the random-encounter-table every time they step off the main road to visit!

“Any situation that would reduce a character's head to the consistency of chunky salsa dip is fatal, regardless of other rules.”

There’s a lot of ways of saying this. I’ve heard Massive Damage, I’ve heard Coup De Grace, I’ve heard System Shock, I’ve heard Mortal Wounds. Essentially, don’t let mechanical abstractions (such as hit-points) overrule what’s actually happening to your characters! If you’re a regular human holding a live grenade when it detonates, it’s pretty safe to assume a max-damage critical hit to the hand in question rather than rolling damage. If a PC is hit by an explosive projectile but the hit location is a limb, assume the explosion spreads beyond that limb even if the rules don’t explicitly state it. If a PC is falling from orbit at terminal velocity, maybe it’s not authentic to break out the “make a dexterity save to roll when you land and take half damage” clause from the corebook… or if you’re playing with superhuman PCs, maybe that’s just a regular tuesday. I don’t know what campaign you’re playing.

Apply this principle to things other than just damage. Don’t add a ‘dodge’ bonus to armour class on a character that’s unconscious, for example. Don’t have enemies roll to hit at -4 because of ‘partial cover’ if the enemy is behind the PC or tall enough to just shoot directly over it! Don’t let an untrained animal companion make a medicine check to heal a party member, even if there ain’t no rule saying that direwolves can’t use scalpels!

Violence, Depictions of Violence, and Gaming

For the purpose of this article I'm talking about violence in the sense of causing (deliberate) physical harm to someone’s body.

Exposing a character to danger is the fastest way to increase the tension in a narrative. Danger can take many forms, from ‘being unable to financially sustain your business’ or ‘your romantic partner leaving you’ to things like ‘being killed’ or ‘suffering serious injury.’ The latter have the draw of being both life-threatening and universal. Not every audience member might be at risk of losing their business, but everyone is at risk of experiencing a physical injury (even if only a little).

Applying this to gaming, many games use physical violence as their ‘danger’ hook; i.e. a fail state in your game will result in a character experiencing physical violence. Physical violence is often preferable to other life-threatening dangers like starvation or disease because of its immediacy. The hero being skewered by spikes can be avoided by a last-second dodge, whereas the hero starving to death will (almost always) take weeks.

So violence-as-danger is fast and can be used frequently. It's high-stakes in that there are potentially large consequences for failure. It's relatable in that the audience will know why the characters want to avoid the danger.

Conflict is another universal element of narrative. A common type of conflict is a ‘love triangle’ where two characters compete for the affection of a third. Other conflicts can be ideological or political (such as a story about an election), commercial (such as two inventors trying to market their creations), or physical (such as two sportspeople trying to win a tournament).

This is a lot of words to say why combat is popular in gaming, isn't it? Put simply, combat is a fast & volatile form of conflict where the characters are in danger of experiencing major physical trauma. The success states and failure states are immediate and universally recognizable.

There's plenty of writing on non-combat gaming, and right now I don't feel like talking about that. Instead, I brought this up to discuss a different problem.

People don't like observing realistic graphic violence.

So we have a paradox here! On one hand, violent combat is an easy & effective form of narrative conflict (and can be represented clearly in mechanics). On the other hand, realistic depictions of violence tend to be unpleasant or unnerving at best, and straight-up horrifying, disgusting or triggering at worst.

Popular media in the Horror genre often features graphic and brutal violence intended to provoke those reactions of horror and disgust in the viewers. In my experience, most horror media actually overplays its physical violence and makes it appear more viscerally disgusting than real-life violence would be… which can paradoxically make it less viscerally disgusting since it’s obviously fake.

In the sphere of tabletop RPG horror, games like Dark Heresy have memetically gruesome critical-hit tables (linked site is NSFW) in order to heighten tension in its gunfights. “Your heroes are facing nightmarish terrors from beyond the stars” can be illustrated quite well when the descriptions (and mechanics) showcase how horrible your inevitable deaths will be.

As horror-inspired ‘weird fantasy role-playing’, many Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventures use graphic imagery for similar purposes as DH does. The viscerally detailed cannibal kitchen the players may explore in Better Than Any Man (free and linked) explicitly chooses to portray violence in a way intended to disturb and disgust RPG players that have probably raided dozens of cannibal-cultist lairs in their adventuring career.

So how come players would be disgusted by BTAM if they’ve raided dozens of cannibal-cultist lairs already? It’s probably because despite all the violence and murder seen in a typical combat-heavy role-playing-game, it’s never really dwelled upon. I’d like to lay at least some of the blame on hit-points abstracting away actual injuries, but honestly it’s not a mechanical problem.

Realistic violence just isn't fun.

It’s sudden, painful, unpredictable and irrevocable. You can experience it at any time as a result of blind chance, accident or deliberate malice. Realistic violence means realistic suffering. It’s hard to feel like a hero when the ‘evil’ drow is clearly and unambiguously feeling quite a lot of pain and regret. It means bookkeeping to determine the extent of specific injuries. It means that even an unambiguously heroic action like ‘prevent the doomsday cultists from burning the orphanage’ is going to be a harrowing experience full of the smell of burning hair and meat.

On the other hand, a game like Paranoia might have fun narrating gushing arterial sprays, or your party's barbarian might run around collecting ears, but those aren't more realistic. They're just less sanitary. Sure, real people collect ears and real arteries gush, but you're not being realistic if your depiction of violence extends to the gruesome displays and not to the real psychological effects of causing suffering.

No wonder that writers shy away from publishing it, and that GMs avoid narrating it. I really wouldn't make violence in my games realistic unless I was deliberately trying to depress people.

Why bring it up, then?

The more abstract and disconnected from reality your combat is, the more abstract and disconnected from reality the participants are. In combats represented as rounds, attack actions and hit-points, it's easy for players to lose sight of what they're fighting, what they're fighting for, and why their characters should care. You need at least a taste of real weight and consequence to stay present.

The same thing applies to a lot of other things, such as encumbrance mechanics and food. Tracking a 'realistic' depiction of calorie intake and waterskin volume might not be 'fun' for most players, but simply brushing those elements off as 'you put it in your bag' or 'you find water' both robs some authenticity from your world, and risks confusing your players when you decide that no, you can't just 'put in your backpack' a pile of gold bars, and you can't just 'find water' if you're making an un-supplied impromptu walk across a desert!

Read on if you want to read some amateur nonsense about how I deal with this 'problem.'