"Have you thought about the reason your character became an adventurer?"

Sexual gratification through wanton whoring and savage violence.

Power can be for it's own sake - you can get a lot of good feelings as a leader, even if your actual situation isn't so good.
You might ascribe that as the goal of "followers", but just knowing that what you do and say has a big impact can feel pretty good - call it vanity, ego or whatever, but there's a reason "power for its own sake" has remained a staple motivation for thousands of years

Is there a reason why players hit the default button so readily when it comes to motivations?
Aside from them just being lazy?

>everyone goes for gold
I go for silver

Too lazy to type it all out again, but it's pretty much right there.

Only bad/new players do that.

>not going for iron, cold iron

Its the only occupation that has a high fatality rate, chances at massive riches, if you don't die you almost always end up incredibly powerful and influential, and you always come home, assuming you're not dead in a ditch, with crazy overpowered magical items. He could honestly care about the prestige.
He's suicidal as all hell and if life doesn't get exciting quick he will just off himself to end the boredom. Now his retirement plan, assuming it all goes to plan, is that he now comes out the other end a rich and powerful demigod, with magical world breaking relics he can go on a world tour of destruction, enslavement, raping, pillaging, and general mayhem just to keep himself entertained and make life interesting for the rest of the world. If he's immortal at the end he will just occasionally move between benevolent god to Murderhobo Supreme on his Golden Throne Above as fits his mood, again, to ensure things stay fresh for everyone involved, especially him.
Its basically agreed amongst the group, and myself, they WILL have to kill him at some point but considering his whole focus up to this point was amalgamation of power through basically any means that doesn't rob him of any types of pleasure he's a damned juggernaut thats the only one to survive 3 total tpk's and 2 technical tpk's, minus him of course.

If a character has other motivations than gold/power, he'd be busy completing his goals instead of participating in jolly adventuring with 4 other guys who have "very important motivations" but instead of following them they prefer to loot random ruins and slaughter kobolds.

tl;dr because it makes the most sense

If "adventurer" is a profession in your games, that's probably half the problem right there. Try crafting a scenario where the players are non-adventurers forced into a situation where they have to go on an adventure. As much as I hate to quote video games as good examples, in this case they kinda are. See the new Tomb Raider, Fallout series, even GTA (modern settings), ect. Just find a way to apply something like that to multiple characters instead of one and you're golden.

>ect
Fuck off

Chump
Chumpette
Yours
Up
Pimpmobile
Bite
My
Shiny
Daffodil
[redacted as per the requirements of the Muh FeeFee's act of 2014]

Lel u mad

It's a common theme for all my characters that they have a single goal when it comes to adventuring.

They want to make hats out of the most terrifying of beasts.

Along the way, money, fame, fortune all comes along (Some settings omitted) but they don't do it for that. They do it because they want the best hat around. Not one to waste parts, the rest of the creature is used for... something. Food, more armor, alchemical reagents, what have you. No matter what though, the most impressive ones always have SOME part of them turned into a hat.

Not him, but it should be etc., the abbreviation of etcetera, from the Latin et cetera, "and other [such] things" - t. Grammar Nazi

Motivations aren't hard. My first character came home from the war to his parents' general store and realized he just wasn't feeling it, so he went mercenary.

Had another character whose culture promoted adventure and grand deeds in combat.

And another who wanted to be an anime character, so she went on magical girl adventures.

A man after my own heart.

That's actually really good to know. Thanks user.

You honestly expect your players' characters to be more self-aware than the players themselves? Your players probably believe in acquiring money for its own sake. It's a pretty common mindset.

Or motives that can be solved with gold and bbeg hide. Sick family/loved one. Rivalry. Nihilism. Research?

His friends Ricardo and Stephan found the diary he wrote at the temple at home and it turned into a bestseller when they published it, no doubt due to his odd philosophies and way of looking at things.

They sent him off to be a cleric with a pre-existing adventuring team in hopes that his writings on the road will sell just as well. He just went with it.

Red Death, is that you?
youtu.be/Gj6r0Vi4-Bk

Motherfuckin gold and glory

He didn't want to become an adventurer, he just sort of stuck around with the group because it was sort of fun.

Yeah. Initially it's gold. That's not why he continues adventuring. Retirement is death.

He just signed up with the militia to get away from the wife and his naggy harpy of a mother-in-law a bit, he never expected to actually be in a fight.

In a setting done by someone else my character was slain in a conflict with a fellow apprentice wizard. Thanks to a secret pact with a friend, my character was raised as an 'undying "

I'm no more powerful than a normal human but I'm visibly different and must hide this fact or be lynched. So I left to find a place in the world of the living for someone who just pretends to be breathing.

Life? What life are you talkin' about I ain't got no life! I just got a living and the only way I get to do that is through these loot drops.

Wealth -> Social Status -> Power.
Also, better bargaining position when getting a husband.

I lived in a society where males generally get stabbed, and don't have much opportunity to make giant piles of cash. I want money, and the possibility of a lover who will not knife me as soon as she gets bored.

I guess if I want kids someday I will have someone polymorphed into a drow. Maybe a halfling, busty drow lady who likes baking seems really cozy.

>the guy is standing on her robes

Assuming your talking about DND. The average adventurer makes more in a single loot pull at level 1 than most shitty villagers make in their life time. It is absolutely a reason for a character to become an adventurer.

Drow are commonly what most people would call jerks.
He is probably about to die though, irritating a priestess of lolth is a painful way to die.

I seem to remember some drow spell that causes your hand to tear off and become a spider that starts to eat you. Knowing female drow, I'm sure they have a spell like that for penises.

Just hero's journey all the things!

Motivations are not important as long as the player roleplays his character well and gets along with the party and interacts with the world without wanting to kill/rape everything.

His wife and daughter nees medicine.

At least that's what he tells people, they actually died years ago while he was out trying to earn money for medicine. Nowadays all of the money he sends home is to support his townspeople who watched after his family while he was gone.

>Have you thought of a setting yet?
>Generic medieval europe fantasy

95% of any community is shit.

Congrats on being part of the 5% of this one that's not. 9/10 would gladly accept as a player.

You lookin' for a fight because dem's fightin' words.

Ah, the master of them all.

I would say it's more like Sturgeon's law, with a shit/nonshit 'schrodinger-esque' gradient in between that represents 91-95% percentiles. Now you can lock that shitty idea in your tabletop folder, and it will simultaneously be fucking awful and really cool at the same time.

Only after it is used in a game (observed) will we know its true state.

Sure, any idea can end up being shitty in practice, but if given the choice between the player who looks like they put some effort into it or the player who's just in it for the gold... well, it's not hard to develop ideas of which is probably going to be more interesting.

It almost blows my mind how many people in this thread proudly proclaim their characters are just in it for money or thrills.

Because defaulting to "a bunch of assholes raiding tombs for gold and glory" makes the game less serious. It makes it easier to have an open table, which makes it easier to introduce people to RPGs.

They shouldn't have to read 15 pages of worldbuilding and submit a 2 page backstory to play a game.

Or it could be that you prefer to not have a dominating motivation for you character initially, instead wishing to see what kind of story the GM is going to tell, and then thinking up a reason as to why your character is interrested.

>If I don't slay the dragons and claim all their gold my sister won't let me fuck her.

>I just really hate goblins. More than is socially acceptable to admit.
>It's not even a personal vendetta like they killed my father or something. They are, as a race, objectively bad people and holding my race back.
>Don't act like your reason is any better.

>Are you by any chance a paladin?

>"So, GM, who is the rest of the party"
>well, there's Synn. The Thief. She likes knives and has amnesia.
>and the Barbarian. He goes by "Meat." He was kicked out of his town for being too stupid and rowdy.
>And T'elen#thander, the drow wizard. He's out for revenge against all Drowkind because male drow, but he also is smugly superior to everyone who isn't drow as well.
>And the cleric of Pelor, whose player hasn't given me a name yet.
>also pretty sure that "revenge on drow" thing from punctuation-man is going to be a plot tumor because he's gonna try to politic every noble we meet into being an "unwitting pawn" in his revenge crusade. So we might not actually ever find out what happened to your mentor on account of other interactions we're forced into with nobles, then their guards and shit.
>still, great character. Love the thought you put into this. Great plot hooks.

This is me. I've forever GMed so long that good characters like yours fill me only with pity, because I know what will come of it.

There is literally nothing wrong with this.

If you phrased gold as wealth or riches, you'd be cool. If you phrased power as magical mastery or physical perfection, you'd be cool with that too.

I am also so tired of characters that come in and slap down their five page backstory, that quite clearly states several very specific goals that give them absolutely no reason to want to work with the rest of the party, and even give them good reason to hate other party members - not that it matters, because half of them have done the same thing.

While that is a motivation that I, as a hedonistic sort, can empathize with it really comes off as pretty edgetastic when his relief from boredom is to become evil supreme and rape and pillage.

It is an interesting end goal, and if he lives a good way to set up a BBEG, but Im not a fan personally. I probably wouldve phrased it as he goes out afterwards looking for someone who can match his prowess, whether it be in battle, sheets, or tavern. Winning or losing doesnt matter, the experience is what actually matters.

In my group, we have:

>A conman warlock who signed a deal with his mentor as an act of desperation, and now seeks sufficient power and knowledge to out-trick his trickster spirit mentor in a way that gets him out of the deal.
>A nobleman paladin who's utterly convinced he's a genuine prophet/messiah and seeks to radically transform the dominant religion
>Half-orc Malcom X, seeking to end oppression AT ANY COST.
>A wild magic sorcerer who accidentally burned his entire tribe to death because of his magical awakening, and now seeks the money to erect a massive monument in their honour.

Well, you wern't wrong. Except it was the barbarian who fucked the game over by constantly doing murderhobo shit even though we were supposed to be hunting criminals and constantly whining that he was "bored" when we tried to pursue anyone else's personal plot arcs.

Would've been nice to just keep going without him, but he had too many connections to other people in the game, most notably the GM.

Still probably gonna attempt to use the character in a future game once I find a better group for it.

Which will be never T-T

Greed and pride are valid motivations to go adventuring. They mostly lead down to the dark side, but they're still viable.

Each of the group is in some way set to become or replace a god/dess of the setting. For a lot of the group that's not an obvious outcome or the initial reason why they're adventuring, but it's the assumed ongoing goal.

He wants to find out who he is and make himself.

>Caught between the lines of right and wrong
>Caught between the things that I don’t know
>Up and down the mountain climbing, climbing
>Drowning in a ocean to find my soul

One of these is not like the others.

...

"Get the power" is only a transient goal when you can't use the power to literally reshape reality as you see fit.

>Joker without lipstick
He looks weird as fuck
>Joker being THAT against other villain because of ideology
What a fag. Villain is a villain, Jokie.

But then the actually interesting question is "what shape do they want reality to have?"

absolutely disgusting

My group runs the spectrum of good/bad motivations. I've found that how motivations are roleplayed is more important than the quality of the motivation itself.
I got the paladin with the novella-length backstory that basically boils down to standard "protect the weak, uphold my god's rules"
I got a bard who is unabashedly in it just for the fame. The player actually makes this work through decent role-playing
Warrior who's got great motivation for freeing his clan from oppression, but the player is incapable of roleplaying and ends up doing LOLRANDUM shit
And a rogue who's goal is to be in a position where he never has to do anything he doesn't want to do. Would be a good motivation except the teenager playing him is telegraphing his "my parents are such mean tyrants" angst

My characters are murderhobos trough circumstance rather choice. Since I frankly cannot imagine why any sane person would willingly put themselves in constant life-threatening danger unless they were basically desperate.

End goal is not having to be an adventurer anymore by scrapping enough gold pieces together to afford a decent home and either an early retirement or a real job.
But of course by the nature of campaigns things often spiral out of control way before that point.

In another comic, a prisoner asks Joker if he's interested in joining the Aryan Brotherhood, to which he says "I'm evil and all, but you guys are just mean".

Meanwhile in Death in the Family, he becomes the Iran Ambassador.

In the last campaign I was in, one of the players had the goal of becoming a sort of infamous wealthy swashbuckler. Anything that would build his reputation, swordsmanship, or wealth was seized upon. Over time he started chasing legends around simply because they existed. He was one of my favorite players to have because his goals were numerous and transparent so motivation was never lacking.

The players in my current campaign are the proverbial band of misfits that don't play nicely with society. They don't like their circumstances or each other very much (in character), but they can't really deny their mutual goals, so a lot of their roleplaying is coming to terms with one another.

Gold/Curiosity/Knocked the fuck out and woke up on a different plane of existence.
He just wanted to learn a bit of magic and run his shop in peace, but now that he's here he may as well learn more magic.

>gold
Easy to come by as an adventurer
>women
A construct is cheaper unless your wanting a serious relationship in which case, why are you adventuring?
>Superman style hero doing whats right/believes in
IMO feels the blandest, would rather have any of the other tropes in my party than this one.
>revenge for murdered family/friend/something stolen.etc
I hear this one non stop. Honestly bores me how often I her it. Sure it gives the GM a villain and stuff to work with but they can do that with any other reason to become and adventurer.
>Flee from Underdark
Generic drow background, personally never have used it. Most of my Drow are wizards who didn't flee because their good (Their neutral) they left for their dreams.
>power
I get this one and its one of my favorites but I feel it needs to be expanded upon rather than just "I WANNA BE STRONGER!"
>Knowledge
Same as power, like combining the two.

The trope I almost always use for my Wizard (Since its the same Char, just different Editions) is that the Wizard is adventuring to improve their knowledge of how the world, magic and science work while taking relics/artifacts/tomes to learn how to use them and what makes them tick. Generally his opinion ends up being (Or for post level 5 already is his opinion) that the world is ran by super powered Wizards and that he wants to learn their tricks so he can ascend and become a god of Knowledge, spending all eternity learning every bit of information he can. Gold is a means to this end, as is power. A love interest would interfere with his pursuit of knowledge and once he is immortal he can chase tail as long as he wants. Hes the kind of person to dissect a Kobold/Goblin/Orc/Dragon and write down his findings after they were slain in a dungeon.

hydra-media.cursecdn.com/dota2.gamepedia.com/8/81/Rubick_move_21.mp3

Grief and alcohol

>Those are not reasonable responses to becoming an adventurer.

>"Have you thought about the reason your character became an adventurer?"

He wants to stop monsters and thereby save people from their evil. Pic unrelated.

>gold
>power
>grief
>alcohol

By your powers combined, I am Murder Hobo.

>the poster-child of absurd anarchic villainly suddenly getting a hard dick for ideology

To be fair it is the Red Skull.

Fucking nobody likes him

...

Wants to figure out why she seems to be cursed. Original plan was to become strong enough to lead the charge to generic evilland. Then in the first session I rolled no higher than a 5, and my first roll was a 1. Retroactively changed her backstory so as to be horribly, inhumanly unlucky and she wants to find a solution. GM ruled any time she fails it's because of her luck. It's kinda funny hearing how she gets bitten every time.

I disagree; the motivation can easily be to amass enough money/power that they can reach whatever goal occurs to them. They do not have a goal in mind, only an intention to make the goal reachable if they had one.

Effectively, the mindset that answers "What do you plan to do with your lottery winnings?" with "Whatever I want." Ask them what they want and they'll just start listing off whatever comes to mind, because they hadn't even wanted it yet when you asked.

To see as many beautiful and exotic bodies and faces as possible to create a catalog for his illusion staffed strip club when he retires.

Well Jubilee's Hitler, so what did you expect?

Am I missing a joke here?

What asshole weeb makes the shitty drawings of these stupid anime-looking bimbos, because when I see him I'm gonna call him a big faggot for making this garbage

That's adorable and awful simultaneously.

My character went a-sojourning to prove themselves to their noble bloodline.

They kept adventuring for the sake of dressing up tomboy lolis in fancy clothes.

When the alternative is dying a peasant, does one really need a reason to become a murderhobo?

You're a newfag and you're trying too hard.
It's cringeworthy. Lurk more.

>not becoming an adventurer to ressurect your dead-ass god
>not also becoming an adventurer to get that sick fucking fame and notoriety
>being satisfied with just power and gold

Or maybe I was just born with a heart full of adventuring.

What about wizards and shit? Why are learned men murderhoboing around instead of doing literally anything else?

Mercenary. He's literally in it for the money and to kill things.

Because fuck logic.

Actually applying knowlesge? Finding exotic magicks? Thesis for wizard college?