User Blog:
Your Character and You: Goal Setting

When I was in high school, I helped to run a decent sized Vampire The Masquerade LARP. As a part of that, I ran occasional after school workshops on roleplaying and getting the most out of your roleplaying experience.

If you're done laughing at me, we can move on.

Every time I had new players show up, I always started over again with my goal-setting workshop, as it was the number one most effective method to produce active, self-motivated players. Now, because LARPs are their own special animals, it was important for my new players to know how to entertain themselves and discover the best reasons to interact with other characters. Still, I feel like these techniques can help you bring your own excitement to any roleplaying environment.

You have to know every time you bring your character to the table, (or the LARP, the chat room or what have you,) what it is you want your character to want. These are three in character motivations and a fourth out of character motivation or goal that spur you on and help you decide what your character should be doing, who he should be reaching out to, and why those actions matter.

First, you need a long-term in-character goal. This is something that, deep down inside, your character wants or thinks they want to do to be complete. This should be unobtainable or very nearly unobtainable because in the scope of a normal chronicle, if your character achieves this thing, their story is effectively over. Think big here, does your character want to become the King of All Vampires? Does she want to usurp God? Does she want to see the pits of Hell emptied of all evil and purified? (Depending on the scope of your game, you might scale this back a bit. Becoming President of the US or head of the FBI might be more to scale just so long as that's a thing that would be just outside of the character's grasp through the campaign.)

Second, you're looking for a mid-term goal. In this case, you're talking about something difficult or time consuming but not impossible. The idea is to give your character something to complete over the course of a few games while the main story is going on. The reason? Beyond helping you to decide how your character reacts to the sorts of problems the game master throws at you, it's also handy for those times when your character isn't the center of the action. (Just, you know, don't let this get out of hand and use as it as a means to steal the scene when it's only fair to share, right?) Here, you’re looking at goals like discrediting the DA who charged you in court, or finding the parts to complete the repairs on your mother's holy sword, (unless that's your long-term goal.)