Six versatile motivations for engaged characters
Of course, the best solution is to work with your DM before the campaign starts to get a character motivation specific to the campaign's plot.
When that's not a possibility, make a character with a versatile motive — one who has a reason to get involved in any adventuring situation. Here are some basic adventurer motivations for you to put your own twist on:
Altruism
This one's listed first because it's the one of the most classic heroic motivations. Altruistic heroes stand as guardians over regular people threatened by sinister forces. They realize there's a lot of evil and suffering out there in the world, and their talents and abilities mean they're among the few people who can do something about it.Putting a twist on it
Mr. Allan Schoolfield is a school principal, but he's also a paladin. He had worked in his clan's educational system for a century or so when a visiting human dignitary had some trouble with his children. Mr. Schoolfield talked with the young humans about their feelings, defusing a situation that could have led to catastrophic diplomatic breakdown.Emboldened by his success, Mr. Schoolfield took a sabbatical to see who else he could help with his empathetic approach to adventuring. He believes that most creatures aren't evil, they're just going through some confusing changes and need someone to listen to them or a little structure like they'd find in Moradin's Six Habits of Honor.
But when reason and self-help psychiatry fail, sometimes creatures just need a little Discipline. Which is the name of Mr. Schoolfield's hammer.
- Paladin
- Cleric
- Fighter
- Folk Hero
- Urchin
- Acolyte
Devotion
If there's any motivation that can claim as much prominence in Western literature as altruism, it's devotion. Modern Western literature is buttressed by champion knights like St. George, King Arthur and the Red Cross Knight. These knights were devoted to their god, their kingdoms, their ideals and individuals they'd sworn to protect.This kind of chivalric devotion is baked right into the paladin class — your paladin's not complete without defining your gods and the oath you've sworn.
Epics found elsewhere in the world and in history show heroes motivated by devotion, as well. Ulysses braved every peril of Greek mythology to get home to his wife. In Japanese literature, you find the unparalleled devotion of samurai to their military leaders and to bushido, their warrior's code.
An adventurer's devotion to gods or ideals often take shape as devotion to people or places in the material plane. Adventurers may be knights sworn to serve a noble, or they may be nobles themselves, sworn to protect their house or their subjects. They may even have sworn an oath to protect or serve another player's character.
Devotion is an especially useful motivation because it bonds characters to the world.
Great classes for the "devotion" motivation:
- Paladin
- Cleric
- Monk
- Druid
- Warlock
- Acolyte
- Folk Hero
- Noble
- Faction Agent
Treasure
The original D&D motivation! In the game's early days, parties were often lured into labyrinthine death traps because they'd heard there was a diamond the size of a raccoon's brain down there.Some characters, especially those of certain non-human races, are motivated by a pure desire for treasure — they may be dwarves looking to adorn their halls, or they may be dragonborn that share their ancestors' hoarding tendencies. They may be kenku who just obsess over shiny objects.
But watch out, because treasure is more often a means to an end, and so you'll be combining this motivation with one of the others I've listed. Maybe your player has a debt to pay off. Maybe, like The Count of Monte Cristo or Lone Wolf and Cub's Ogami Itto, your character needs a fortune to exact revenge.
Maybe your character isn't looking for money, but for magical treasure. Magic users may be looking for artifacts to increase their power and mastery. Characters who are motivated by devotion may be looking for magical weapons to help them fulfill their duties.
Treasure-seeking can even combine with devotion or altruism to make a very versatile motive. Because the heroes of The Blues Brothers and Nacho Libre are trying to save the orphanage, they're still the good guys even if they get up to some pretty questionable antics, like stealing eagle eggs or leading the police on a car chase through a mall during business hours.
Putting a twist on it
Bark of the Lonely Flag Tree ("Bark" for short) is a tabaxi monk traveling far from his homeland in search of a cure to save his people from a recent plague. They've exhausted their magic and medicines, and in desperation they've sent their warriors to far-off lands to gather potions, healing magics and samples of plants, blood and venom to bring back to their sages.Bark jumps at the chance to join an adventuring party, as their quest will certainly take him to remote, hard-to-access areas and put him in contact with powerful sages and hermits.
Great classes for the "treasure" motivation:
- Rogue
- Bard
- Sorcerer
- Wizard
- Charlatan
- Criminal
- Entertainer
- Guild Artisan
- Noble
- Urchin
Power or mastery
The one thing adventurers are guaranteed to get is power. Even if they don't end up saving the world, even if they don't get any loot, if they survive encounters, they're going to get stronger. So if your character is just out to get stronger, it doesn't matter which dungeon you're delving or which dragon you're slaying.Hunger for power is often associated with villains, shonen manga and anime are bursting at the seams with characters obsessed with being the strongest. Some people just have a competitive drive that makes them want to be the very best, like no one ever was.
If anime's not your thing, think about sports dramas — a scrappy underdog wants to be the best even though everyone tells them they can't do it. They work hard, harder than anybody else. And in the end, they prove all their naysayers wrong by pushing way past their limitations and proving their will to win is stronger than anybody else's.
Adventurers looking to fill some sort of mantle or become worthy of something are also flexible heroes. Maybe your character will have to become a kingdom's ruler or champion, so they have to test their mettle. Maybe their culture requires them to complete a coming-of-age quest.
Great classes for the "power or mastery" motivation:
- Monk
- Wizard
- Barbarian
- Bard
- Warlock
- Hermit
- Sage
- Cloistered Scholar
- Courtier
- Guild Artisan
- Far Traveller
Vengeance
While you have to work with your DM to get your revenge story in the campaign itself, if you're just preparing to take revenge, you can have all sorts of crazy adventures.I mentioned Lone Wolf and Cub under the "treasure" motivation. For those of you who haven't Googled it yet, Lone Wolf and Cub is about Ogami Itto, a samurai whose entire household, save his infant son, was murdered by a power-hungry rival clan. Since the ones who murdered his family are representatives of the shogun, Itto needs a vast sum of money to bribe officials and put his plan for revenge into motion. A good chunk of the manga series is about Itto's adventures as he assassinates high-profile targets and master swordsmen to earn that money.
One twist too far?
While Lone Wolf and Cub is a great example of how versatile revenge can be as an adventurer's motive, Ogami Itto himself would be a terrible D&D character. He doesn't talk much and he's ridiculously overpowered, but the thing that would make him an especially bad D&D character is the twist that makes his character unique — the fact that he carries his toddler son, Daigoro, with him on his quest for vengeance. The son often helps Ogami assassinate targets by putting people off-guard. In one chapter, Itto separates a target from his formidable matchlock pistols by putting Daigoro in a raging river and then killing the guy after he tries to rescue Daigoro. Daigoro is 100 percent on board, even exhibiting many of his father's strengths as a samurai despite being 3 years old. It's a pretty interesting premise — that a wolf cub is still a wolf — and the story's creators, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, get a lot of mileage out of the father-son relationship and the shock value of a 3-year-old assassin. Of course, in the manga, Daigoro never comes to any real harm, but in D&D, it's pretty hard to keep a familiar or an animal companion alive for long, and there aren't many things that spoil the fun quite as quickly as kid murder. |
| Lone Wolf and Cub: Not a parenting guide |
You don't even have to have a specific target of revenge to have a vengeance-motivated character. Batman, for example, is motivated to fight crime because his parents were killed by a mugger, but he's usually not trying to get revenge on that specific mugger. Rather, he fights against all crime and the corruption that fosters it. He's dedicated to eradicating crime because he has a deep understanding of what it's like to be a victim.
Great classes for the "vengeance" motivation:
- Ranger
- Fighter
- Paladin
- Barbarian
- Warlock
- Sailor
- Noble
- Outlander
- Far Traveller
- Courtier
- Soldier
- Urban Bounty Hunter
- Criminal
- Charlatan
- Folk Hero
Redemption
Characters seeking redemption can be great for roleplaying. Earlier in life, they gained some serious skills while doing bad things, but as they're forced to work with a noble adventuring party, they aspire to something better. They're almost tailor-made for the band-of-misfits approach to adventure parties.Some characters motivated by a desire for redemption were never really bad people, they just have a strong, sometimes misplaced sense of responsibility. Spider-Man, for example, could have stopped a robber who later, by coincidence, shot and killed his Uncle Ben. Now even though he's saved the world on multiple occasions and can go toe-to-toe with some pretty heavy-hitting villains, his guilt over not stopping his uncle's killer compels him to stop every petty crime he sees.
Putting a twist on it
Abbijean Langoria was once a scientist who performed experiments on live animals. But then a circle of druids hunted her down and destroyed her laboratory. As poetic justice, the druids sentenced her to become a druid herself, learning the ways of nature and seeing through the eyes of the animals she once harmed. They fitted her with cursed bracers that give her druidic powers, telepathically give her a general sense of what a druid would do in her situation, administer electrical shocks if she does something too un-druidic and alerts the circle if she tries to remove the bracers or needs to be taken back into custody.Abbijean starts out as a Neutral Evil character, but through her interactions with an adventuring party and her druidic experiences learns empathy and starts to change.
Great classes for the "redemption" motivation:
- Rogue
- Warlock
- Barbarian
- Ranger
- Sailor
- Noble
- Courtier
- Soldier
- Urban Bounty Hunter
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