# Shoot for the Goal



## Quickleaf (Jun 20, 2013)

Great article! Love how you've used some rules of story writing and applied them to gaming 

I think there are 2 forces fighting this sort of character-driven play. You identified one: the power fantasy of flawless heroes. The other is more complex... 

It's the whole adventuring party model. You have 5 (or so) characters with dramatically different motives and backgrounds. If you don't want characters just "going along for the ride" sometimes, it will take an extremely skilled groups of players to balance the competing goals of their party OR a ruleset designed to account for inter-party disputes (eg. something along to Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits).

I just don't think it's feasible for a DM to include all character goals all the time. 

So for a group of pro-players or with the right system, I think this could work really really well. Otherwise, it could lead to inter-party confusion/paralysis/conflict.


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Jun 20, 2013)

"Having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true." - Spock


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## Janx (Jun 20, 2013)

Quickleaf said:


> It's the whole adventuring party model. You have 5 (or so) characters with dramatically different motives and backgrounds. If you don't want characters just "going along for the ride" sometimes, it will take an extremely skilled groups of players to balance the competing goals of their party OR a ruleset designed to account for inter-party disputes (eg. something along to Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits).




I think D&D parties have been struggling with that problem for 40 years, BECAUSE players don't know each others goals to effectively cooperate with each other.

I think there will still be players who suck at cooperating, but putting goals into the character sheet is a start toward helping players accomodate each other.

I also like how you demonstrate taking a broad goal and breaking it down into a model for telling the story of the PC's rise to presumed success.  Nobody wants a Rigid Railroad or a Boring Sandbox.  The story should be based on what the player does.  But to get to there, it helps if the PC has a goal that he pursues, and the GM has some guidelines on the barriers to set in his way.  The 3 major stages (the stuff between Origin and Legacy) are a good way to illustrate that.  If the GM envisioned reaching the Legacy stage by Level 10, then barring gross failures on the PC's part, it because obvious when to shift gears for throwing debt collectors at the 3rd level PC all the time, to finally letting them score the big haul that they get to keep so the PC moves to Stage 2 (Solvency).


Note, I use the phrase "let them".  I don't think any GM should be under the illusion that PCs get what they choose to do and succeed at.  A GM can throw reasonable setback after setback to hold and counter the success of a PC if he chooses, and may not even be aware that he is doing so.  The PCs get rich because the GM chose to have the treasure horde actually be real and not a lie, and to not have NPCs steal it out from under them, and to not have a zillion expenses suddenly show up to eat their windfall.

Part of good storytelling (and probably GMing) is knowing when to change the state of the world to accomodate the growth of the characters.


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## I'm A Banana (Jun 20, 2013)

Quickleaf said:
			
		

> It's the whole adventuring party model. You have 5 (or so) characters with dramatically different motives and backgrounds. If you don't want characters just "going along for the ride" sometimes, it will take an extremely skilled groups of players to balance the competing goals of their party OR a ruleset designed to account for inter-party disputes (eg. something along to Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits).
> 
> I just don't think it's feasible for a DM to include all character goals all the time.




Well, the easy way to solve this is to have the whole party take a goal instead of or in addition to an individual goal. This happens in ensemble ragtag-adventurers-save-the-world-style works all the time.  

Though part of why I broke it down to three big events per PC is to help DMs space out the events or cycle around to various PC's. It does help if you have players (even if not characters) who are "team players," but there's also ways to help encourage that, too (relationships!). 

Another way to work on it is to cram several characters' stages together. If you've got a 4 person party, and they want Wealth, Vengeance, Knowledge, and Peace,  you can create a pretty compelling antagonist if you have the orc that once slaughtered one character's parents causing violence in a nearby town while sitting in a pile of plunder, including rare scrolls from a city of scholars she sacked. Suddenly, that one adventure to go stop her becomes _really_ compelling! (as an aside, this is often how villains get constructed in creative works: as antithesis to the heroes).



			
				Janx said:
			
		

> Note, I use the phrase "let them". I don't think any GM should be under the illusion that PCs get what they choose to do and succeed at. A GM can throw reasonable setback after setback to hold and counter the success of a PC if he chooses, and may not even be aware that he is doing so.




This can depend on the level of loss aversion in the players. Personally, I like the idea that I may fail to accomplish my characters' goal if I'm not smart or lucky enough to survive or complete the adventure in which I have a chance to achieve it. But I'm kind of into more dramatic and emotional gameplay, which means I like the stakes to be high and real. 

But a more loss-averse game would likely embrace the idea of a "fail forward" toward your PC's goals, and I think that can be a lot of fun, too.


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## Janx (Jun 20, 2013)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> This can depend on the level of loss aversion in the players. Personally, I like the idea that I may fail to accomplish my characters' goal if I'm not smart or lucky enough to survive or complete the adventure in which I have a chance to achieve it. But I'm kind of into more dramatic and emotional gameplay, which means I like the stakes to be high and real.




This part of the conversation (my fault) is more of a tangent to when you start planning stages of story progression and character advancement toward their goal.

Let's stick to the example of a PC who's goal is Wealth.  And for the sake of argument, let's say the GM has set the time lime to get him to the Legacy stage by level 10.  Partly, because as the other part of your response, there's other player's goals being pursued as well.

Let's also assume that the GM certainly will let the PCs fail if the player screws up, to cover those who think we're deliberately talking about railroading the player through this rags to riches storyline.  if the PC dies, or does stupid things, or has bad luck, then he will not get the happy ending.  let's call that part of the discussion settled, as it bogs the conversation down.

What I'm therefore talking about is that the GM can assume that if there's 5 stages (origin, in debt, solvent, wealthy, legacy) for this PC to experience, that he can therefore bring in continous problems in the in-debt stage to keep the player down, until such time as he sees fit to ALLOW the player's latest mission to be unsullied.  When the PC breaks into the vault, is the money there?  All the best intel in the world can still be defeated by an NPC adversary who got there first.  And that kind of "bad luck" can only happen because the GM decided to invent an NPC who would thwart the PC's latest haul in order to keep him down.

To my eye, your PC is nothing, without some assistance from the GM. That's not because he's gracious or malicious.  it simply is a factor of the game that the GM is making up what happens next, which can invalidate or neutralize the best efforts of the PC.

So here's what I like about your 5 stages to reach Legacy for a Goal.  Good storytelling inherently has obstacles for the PC to overcome.  By defining the 5 stages (and my suggestion that the GM view it as an approximate time table on the level progression) is that it reminds the GM when to stop jacking with the PC and let their next success move them to the next stage.  

This is the kernel of adapting storytelling techniques to GMing a D&D campaign, as CR was a metric for the GM to know how tough his encounter was relative to the PCs.

Again, I don't think KM is confusing having a plan for what the successful path of a PC pursuing his chosen goal looks like with deliberately letting them succeed regardless.  But somebody else will, because that's where this part of the discussion tends to lead when we talk about story telling.


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## Janx (Jun 20, 2013)

Getting back to the goal side of the conversation (by the way, I like the topic and article):

In my own group, we have a basic social contract rule to always bite the plot hook.  This speeds along game play so the GM can write one hook and the party will identify it as soon as we can and agree to go rescue the princess.  This simplifies how much material the GM must write.  There is a requirement that the plot hook be something that would make sense and appeal to the party and NOT be a total screw job.

That last is important because the GM could introduce the shady Mr. Johnson with a job that totally smells like a setup, and we're forced to go do the mission because of the social contract rule, even though we are all saavy enough to see that our PC would really avoid the mission.  Three Days to Kill was one of those crappy-arsed adventures that played on our social contract and screwed us, so we added the corollary for the GM side of things.

Here's how this ties into Goals as invented by KM:  In our group, the GM is required to do a plot hook that appeals to the party.  If we have mandatory Goals, then the GM has a better idea of how to shape that plot hook.  Which in turn means we effectively have a happy matchup of plot hook to player interests.  Our social contract doesn't feel arbitrary or constraining when the GM makes adventures that are tailored for our goals.

One thing I do that's related, is between sessions, I get my players to specify very immediate short term goals.  basically, what are you trying to do next.  Then I write my material for the next session based on that.  So if the PCs say they plan on breaking into the bank to steal the records from the safe deposit box of the old man, then I go write up material to support that (including the interesting complications to the heist), as well as all the information they'd get if they scout the place first.

So it's valuable to have a Macro-scale Goal as well as a Micro-scale goal identified for each PC.


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## Quickleaf (Jun 20, 2013)

It does remind me a bit of "Keys" from The Shadow of Yesterday, which are player-selected goals broken down into smaller XP granting tasks (it's the player-defined/chosen XP mechanic).


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## I'm A Banana (Jun 20, 2013)

One thing I didn't really explore here is using this as an XP source, but it strikes me that a lot of tables use XP more as a measure of timekeeping than a measure of reward or advancement. Still, if you're failing forward in your narrative and it's all just a matter of the interesting things that happen between origin and legacy, the two are not incompatible! 

I like putting the steps in place at big level events, though. Helps them to be quite memorable.


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## Janx (Jun 21, 2013)

Could you explain more by what you mean in the phrase "failing forward"?

I don't think it has a good connotation.  I think some folks would assume it means the GM is ignoring the player's failures to allow them to move forward.


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## I'm A Banana (Jun 21, 2013)

"Falling forward" is the notion that failing a check or a challenge doesn't change the arc of the game as much as it informs the things that happen along the way. You can think of it like watching a TV show: you know the Doctor (or whoever) is going to be fine at the end of the episode, the question is more what happens between Point A and Point B. 

The classic example is climbing a cliff: you don't fall and die if you fail, you just encounter some hazard or difficulty or problem on the way up. 

You can apply this to goals if you presume that success is going to happen (to get a nice character arc), but that PC's might determine the path or nature of that success. It's not a matter of IF the character achieves vengeance, it's just a matter of, perhaps, if they lose themselves in the process, or if they wreak a lot of destruction on the way. 

Personally, this feels a bit weak sauce to me most of the time, but I'm big into dramatic swings in action. It makes a better story if you use it generally, because narratives have a somewhat inexorable arc.


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## Hussar (Jun 23, 2013)

Very, very interesting.


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## EditorBFG (Jun 24, 2013)

Have you read Lorefinder? It applies this exact principle to Pathfinder with a very well-developed system called Drives, among its other optional rules.


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