Player Motivation and Types Revisited, Again
The Gen Con 2008 seminar I’ll co-host with my friends DNAPhil, Zach and Vicki is going to be about sharing tips with GMs about prepping RPG game session . My parts of that seminar (What I’ve been doing most nights of this week and possibly the next one) will cover Using Tropes (yay!) and Player Types.
As I was re-reading the player types part of my review of Robin Laws’s Book, I reworked the list to feature some new types brought in the 4e Dungeon Master Guide.
As I was writing my seminar outline, it dawned on me that player types (as presented in Robin’s book and the 4e DMG) are different from player motivations (as presented in the 3.5 Dungeon Master Guide II). The first one is, IMHO, mostly a convenient label that simplifies discussions while player motivations is what a GM needs to understand to get the most out of the RPG experience he/she shares with the rest of the group.
So here is my updated list of player motivations (So yeah it’s partly reposted stuff, but bear with me for a min, I think it’s worth it):
Post publication edits: Rechecking the DMG II, I found that Player motivations are the incentives that make players excited and motivated to act in the game. Thus, I will move/remove things like the lurker and such around to better fit that definition.
- Player motivations in a RPG(Adapted from DMG II and paraphrased by me):
- Accumulating Cool powers: Enjoying the acquisition of loot/powers, planning a character many levels in advance.
- Kicking Butt: Enjoying combat for the sake of inflicting mayhem and destruction on foes.
- Brilliant Planning: Enjoying combat for the sake of winning, beating foes with brains and tactics.
- Puzzle Solvers: Resolving riddles, short puzzles or longer investigation type puzzles.
- Playing a favorite role: Seeking the same class/themes/roles campaign after campaign.
- Supercoolness: Being a badass and be able to show it often.
- Story: Seeking the range of emotions that comes from a game’s narrative and non-crunch achievements.
- Psychodrama: Seeking to explore and develop a character from an internal perspective.
- Irresponsibility: Being able to create trouble without having to deal with real-world consequence (ex: jumping off the rails and go wild!)
- Setting Exploration:Seeking new horizons in a setting and learning the lore of in-game objects, locales and events.
- Make Things Happen: Pushing Buttons, opening doors and start things regardless of the group’s wishes. Pushing the game’s and the gaming group’s limits.
- Cheetoism: The game is just an occasion to get together with friends and socialize
- Competition: Match wits against the GM and players to ‘win’ or gain advantage.
Question Number 1: Are some missing? Should we add more to that? Post suggestions and let’s have a mini debate on this. I’d like to have the most complete, yet concise list of motivators.
I now believe that understanding those and pegging which motivations are stronger in each of your players is more useful than assigning player types.
Still, player types are useful as a simpler, one word model to peg players. Here is the revised list:
- Player types (Adapted from Robin Laws’ of Goodmastering and the 4e Dungeon Master Guide):
- The Power Gamer: Get more powers and use them often and efficiently.
- The Butt-Kicker: Enjoys combat and pwning NPCs!
- The Tactician: Likes to beat complex situations through thought and planning.
- The Specialist: The one who always plays a <insert character type>. Ninjas and Dritzz clones are popular.
- The Method Actor: Likes total immersion in a character’s assumed persona, whatever the costs!
- The Storyteller: Enjoys exploring a story unfold around a character’s actions and choices.
- The Watcher/Lurker: Shows up to be with friends and share the social energies of the group without necessarily being motivated by the usual incentives.
- The Instigator: Likes to make things happen and trigger awkward situations
- The Outlier: Seeking the emotional kick of subverting a group’s dynamic by creating weird characters or actively seeking failure.
One thing that bears remebering is that player don’t usually fit one player type perfectly. I’d say each player features a major type and one or two minor ones (which mirrors thier top 3 motivation to play RPGs).
Question number 2: While I’m doing this, are there other player types that are misisng that don’t fit in these ?
Question 3: Most of your readers are hybrid GMs players. So I ask you, what are your main motivations as a player and how would you peg your main player types?
Have a great weekend.
Reiner Knizia: "Creation of a Successful Game"
Dr. Reiner Knizia, one of the best known and most successful boardgame designers, was one of the Guests of Honor at Origins this year. I showed up to one of his panels, entitled “Creation of a Successful Game”, a few minutes late due to late night D&D the evening before. When I arrived, he had already gone past his introduction and started into his powerpoint presentation. That’s OK, because I already knew who he was!
Here’s a transcription from my notes. As before, this is not verbatim, just my notes on his session. Taking notes proved more tricky than I expected since I had to do them on my PDA (my laptop deciding not to work that morning), the door to the event was quite loud, and there was a very loud demo shouting every few minutes downstairs.
All that out of the way, how do you create a successful game? [Read the rest of this article]
Doctor Horrible – Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, and.. Doogie Howser?
The mind behind Buffy and Firefly, the Actors behind Captain Tightpants and Doogie Howser, and god knows who else, have come together to bring the internet a free mini-series.
Well, free at first. Go to www.drhorrible.com on July 15th for Act 1, 17th for Act 2, and 19th for Act 3. They will remain free until the 20th, when the series will come down and be made available to download for “nominal fee” and eventually be release on dvd, with I quote “the finest and bravest extras in all the land”.
There’s more the the reasons behind this mini, so check out DrHorrible.com. Read Joss’ letter, and as he says, do what we do best. Spread the Word.
What's your disgustingly good local dish?
I’m smack dab in the middle of my Gen Con preparation week (which will likely bleed over into the next one). This means that whatever I post here is going to be very light in relevant content.
Since I can’t shut up and I hate silence, I put up little texts just to let you know I’m still there.
For a few weeks I’ve been pondering the sheer global aspect of the readership here.
As you may know, readers come from all over the world and that’s just so cool. Thinking that I could find someone to have a drink with in Tokyo, Nokia, Oslo, Paris, Jakarta, Sydney and pretty much all United States is mind blowing.
So to celebrate the globalness of the Minions believers in the Rule of Cool, I want to have an open and frank discussion about food!
More specifically our local, junky meals that we have a guilty love affair with but that are probably downright disgusting for other cultures.
I’ll start with our very own, Quebec Born Poutine!
From Wikipedia:
Poutine (Quebec French pronunciation puts?n ) is a dish consisting of French fries topped with fresh cheese curds, covered with brown BBQ chicken gravy and sometimes other additional ingredients. [1] The freshness of the curds is important as it makes them soft in the warm fries, without completely melting. It is a quintessential Canadian comfort food, especially but not exclusively among Québécois.
Yup, French Fries (the greasier the better), Cheese Curds (Soft, unripened cheddar-type cheese) and BBQ Chicken Gravy.
Disgusting? Probably. Good? Hell yeah! A Gazillion calories… Our nutritionist Nazis keep reminding us that it’s got as much fat content as a block of butter.
So what’s your local disgustingly good meal? I want to hear from as many countries/states/counties as possible!
Let's Talk About Fluff
I was reading through a discussion on Paizo’s message boards that grew out of a post linking to our coverage of the panel with Mike Mearls at Origins, and one discussion in particular caught my eye. Several people began to discuss the amount of content provided in the 4E core books vs. the amount provided in the 3.5 core books, which I think is a funny comparison to begin with because you’re looking at a revised edition in relation to a whole new edition; naturally, things are going to be more polished and meaty in the revision because it’s based on existing material. I’d say it would definitely be more relevant to compare the 4E core books to the original 3rd Edition ones, but then you could also get into a huge argument over how much of the content that was provided in 3rd Edition was actually usable/functional, which I think would lead to some more interesting comparison also.
The discussions quickly jumped on the obvious fact that there is less fluff presented in the 4th Edition core books, in comparison to previous editions, and many feel that the amount of fluff has been decreasing over time as the game progresses through various editions. The question this brings up to me, is this a bad thing? Your gut reaction is most likely, “YES! Without fluff the game is just like every other game!” However, when you really think about it, do the progressing editions of the game really change that much of the fluff that goes along with the game? [Read the rest of this article]
Mini-Post: Ascension of the Drow and 4e Fantastic Terrain
Gen Con Drow Insanity
This morning I had an email by Nicholas Logue, adventure writer extraordinaire from both Paizo and his own Sinister Adventures. Here it is:
Hi All!
If you are on this list, it means you have volunteered to GM and or assist with the Ascension of the Drow mega-event at Gencon this year! The event slot is Friday night from 7:00 pm to 1:00 am and this event will be a MASSIVE (and MASSIVELY FUN) affair involving 126 players as well as some special cameos by Paizo staff as NPCs. It shall be intense!
Thanks for volunteering. There will be a ton more details coming your way in the upcoming weeks. <snip>. Talk to you more soon!
So there you have it, The Chatty DM will be one of 16 DMs to run this insane event with the Logue.
Here’s what I found about it so far:
Deep within Golarion’s Dark Lands, the sprawling drow city of Deraktinus is consumed by shadowy conspiracies as its noble houses war for the city’s dominance. Take on the role of a noble drow in a deadly game against the other players. Decide the destiny of Deraktinus in this exclusive preview event for Pathfinder’s Second Darkness AP. If your noble house takes control, your evil exploits will be immortalized forever in Pathfinder #16.
I don’t know if any readers registered for it, all 126 places are taken. This is going to be awesome!
Gah! Does that mean that it will happen at the same time as the Ennies? I still don’t know if they got my submission…
Oy, I’m starting to feel I bit off more than I could chew at Gen Con.
Ahhh Who cares! It’s going to be my only time there and I’ll go down in flames! I prefer GMing to Playing anyway. Plus I’ll get to meet Nick Logue, Wolfgang Baur, (maybe) Mike Mearls and others!
Uh oh! DMG author might be on to me (Via Graham through Gtalk).
Other news flash, I think James Wyatt might have read my review of the DMG. In it I said:
One thing that bugs me in that part of the book is in fantastic terrains. Some terrains calls for a DC check when entered. Instead of suggesting static DCs, the book tells you to set a DC according to the Tier the PCs are.
What that means is that not only are character Epic… the Cave Slime they step in becomes Epic as well and the DC goes from 20 at level 1 to 33 at level 30.
Here’s an excerpt from his Under the Hood of the DMG article posted yesterday.
Does that mean that high-level characters encounter Epic Cave Slime that’s objectively slipperier than the Heroic Cave Slime they encountered in their early careers? Maybe. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the DM has permission to use terrain that’s relevant to the characters, regardless of their level — and has a table supported by solid math to make sure it’s relevant.
Well that answers the question I had and I tend to agree now. Not to sound grumpy or anything, mentioning things like that in the DMG would have helped some of the transitioning pains of crusty old 3.5 DMs set in their ways. However, I appreciate he took the time to post this on Wizard’s site.
I’m starting to realize that there are chances that I met these people at Gen Con and I’ll have to stand by my written word! Thank god I have been polite as Greywulf pointed out.
This has been a very geeky week for me.
Which brings me to the question: What’s next for this blog and my growing relationships with the industry?
That’s a good question. Only I’ll try to tackle it after I’m done prepping for Gen Con.
Have a great day all.
Origins Wrap-up and Swag Report
Well, another Origins has come and gone. As with the past two years, I focused on press coverage and hanging out with friends moreso than playing games. However, I did still manage to hit the big games I wanted to play.
Gaming
North Star Games was one of the first booths I hit at the show, and picked up my copy of Say Anything (gratis, in exchange for the secrets of the Select-O-Matic 5000 technology.) I’m very glad to see this game out, and in addition to playing at the booth with some friends, I also played a few games back in my hotel room late at night. I’ve had a blast with it, and I hope it does as well for them as Wits & Wagers did. The only potential issue is that “Your Mom” tends to be the best answer for most questions. [Read the rest of this article]
