Analyzing three motivations for dungeon-delving

1. You want wealth and power, fame and glory!

It's hard to "be a fan of the player characters" when their only distinguishing motivation is "get rich." This is a feature if you want the PCs to be empty vessels who could die without the players being seriously disappointed.

The bigger problem is: what do you actually do with the treasure? It's not much of a power fantasy if there's nothing to spend your heaping piles of gold on.

In the olden days when D&D was an MMO (massively multiplayer offline), this wasn't a problem, because the point was just to be more powerful than all the other players. Money was endlessly useful because you always wanted to be at a higher level with a bigger army than everyone else.

Nowadays people try to make domain-level play work in dedicated-table play, but without the competitive element of fighting other players (not to mention setting up your own dungeon to tax low-level players who want to explore it), it tends to fall flat.

You could force the PCs to spend their money on XP (through carousing-for-XP or paid-training-for-XP), but you end up putting a lot of weight on the character sheet: the power fantasy becomes all about gaining new abilities instead of gaining power in the world.

You could focus on one-shots and mini-campaigns and have treasure be like a "score" at the end of the adventure. Maybe how much treasure you get tells you how luxurious a life your PC lives in retirement. I've experimented with this idea here and there but I've yet to give it a proper try.

2. You want to help the local NPCs, and it just so happens that helping them involves dungeon-delving!

You can get away with more complex PCs here. If there are multiple NPCs asking for help, choosing who to help can be an expression of your PC's motivations. Maybe some of the PCs just want fame and glory, as in Option 1, but others want knowledge or justice. Treasure is just an optional reward that you can use to help more NPCs.

The "problem," if there is one, is that you have to present a setting where all significant problems can be solved by a handful of strangers with swords.

Let me give an example… I was designing an adventure where the PCs would fight a wizard who’s part of an oppressive regime, but then I kept thinking, “actually, if you’re trying to present a realistic world here, wouldn’t fighting this one wizard who’s part of this regime do absolutely nothing and maybe actually make things worse for the people who live here?”

The PCs in Option 1 aren't very admirable, but at least there's no pretense that their actions are important to anyone or anything beyond themselves.

3. You're desperate to pay off a colossal debt!

In theory PCs could have a variety of motivations like Option 2, but in practice the only motivation that will find expression is "get treasure." The PCs will come across more like the empty vessels of Option 1, only more sympathetic — they're not greedy adventurers, they're being forced to adventure.

At the same time, there's a built-in sink for the treasure. Maybe the PCs will be awash in cash if the campaign continues after they finish paying their debt, but you could always impose recurring debt payments like Traveller's mortgage payment system.

I think I tend to like this one better if, in the fiction, the PCs have gotten something in return for taking on all that debt. Again, using Traveller as an example, in that game you're in debt so you could afford a space ship! Red Ink Adventures also has a fun table of things your party went into debt to buy.

Reflection: or, Why am I writing about this?

I have been wrestling with these problems for so long because I really want dungeon-delving gameplay to work for me. I've been playing a lot of Animal Well recently, and it's just a big puzzle dungeon with no story whatsoever, and I love it.

But the "problem" with RPGs is that you can't have pure gameplay and no story, you have to wrap it in a layer of fiction that justifies what's going on and keeps everyone's imaginations on the same page.

At the same time there's another part of me that is pulled toward designing RPG-like games where PCs have more complicated and conflicting motivations. I have been craving something more dramatic and more real, less grounded in fantasy.

But if I love pure gameplay with no story, I should probably just design a video game, right? And if I'm craving something dramatic, I should probably design story games and matrix games, right?

But it's hard for me to admit that maybe I just don't like dungeon-crawly RPGs as much as I thought I would when I started diving deeper into this hobby. There's an element of the sunk cost fallacy, I guess.

There's another argument to be made that I just need to lower my standards. For example, so what if in real life a handful of strangers with swords can't solve everyone's problems? Isn't that just part of the genre? Why can't I just accept that?

Maybe I just need to stop thinking of dungeon-crawly RPGs as my big contribution to art and culture and start thinking of them as a fun little thing I do on the side. I know I hold myself to standards that are too high. It's a blessing and a curse.