Reel In Your Players With Motivation and Incentive

This is a blog post about player motivation. But first, I want to talk about project management. When I was in college for computer science, I had to take a project management course. I don’t know why. I don’t remember much of it, but I do remember the unit on motivation. We talked about a bunch of different types: intrinsic and extrinsic, short-term and long-term. We talked about the fact that when you’re managing people, you oftentimes don’t have total control over who you get to manage or the conditions you’re in. Everyone on your team is different, with different needs and values, and they’ll respond differently to different motivating factors at different times.

When you’re writing/running a quest or adventure for a tabletop role playing game, you are, effectively, managing a team. Your job is to motivate players to cooperate and get through the adventure (because our main goal, after all, is to get people to play our stuff). Sometimes your team isn’t the 100% perfect, idealized team you want. Maybe you’re playing with a group of friends who all like different aspects of the game you’re playing. Some are in it for combat, while others are in it to flirt with their friends. Maybe you’re writing an organized play adventure that complete strangers will meet and play together at a con. You don’t know what they’re here for. But you also can’t just raise their salary (reward money or magic items) and forget about it because you have economy balance to think about.

So how do we reel players in, get them hooked on the quest we have to offer? Let’s add some tools to our tackle box.

Extrinsic Motivation

Let’s start with the easy one: extrinsic motivation. A motivator that is extrinsic is something that, surprise, comes from outside of you. Your dog sits for a treat. You do a job for a paycheck. The party enters the dungeon for treasure. Extrinsic motivation can also be about avoiding a consequence: you fight because you don’t want the world to end, you run because you don’t want to die, you refrain from attacking a town guard because you really don’t need the heat right now.

A lot adventure design is about adding incentives and consequences to engage players’ extrinsic motivation. Some more good examples include:

• Reward money or other treasure
• Experience / Promise of character growth – “You’ll level up when you complete this dungeon.”
• Character renown (whether that’s a tracked value or a story-based thing)
• A new ability – could be a new spell, a new magic item, or any other mechanism that allows a player to try a new skill
• Story/Exploration Progression – “Complete this quest and I’ll give you a permit to enter the abandoned cave.”
• Threatening an NPC – “Not completing this quest may result in negative consequences for someone the party cares about.”

Player Vs Character Motivation

I want to talk a little bit about player vs. character motivation for a sec. Up till now, the examples I’ve been using have covered both. But I think it’s worth taking into account which of your motivators are targeted at your players, and which are targeted at your characters. Sometimes characters and players are aligned in goals, and other times they’re not!

A character is probably motivated by their desire to live, for example, but their player might prioritize the story being told over that character’s life. A player who has a lot of experience with role playing might know when to engage with their own motivation vs their character’s, but new players not so much. This is why it’s important to offer a large number of incentives and hooks – so players can pick what matters to them and their character!

Intrinsic Motivation

Shocker: intrinsic motivation is something that comes from within. It typically comes from the desire to do something because you enjoy doing it, or because you’re curious enough to keep going. They say that someone who is intrinsically motivated will usually have a stronger drive to complete a task than someone who is extrinsically motivated. I say it depends.

The problem with targeting intrinsic motivation is that you can’t, by definition, do it. If you could directly offer an incentive, it would automatically be extrinsic. Instead, we have to provide opportunities for players and their characters to activate their own intrinsic motivation. Examples include:

• Learning opportunities (A mystery or hook that keeps players wanting to know more)
• Creative opportunities (A chance for players to describe something about their character, like a dream, a past memory, or a fancy new outfit)
• Cause-and-effect (Opportunities for characters to see what changes their actions have wrought – good or bad)
• Backstory engagement (Find a way to link the current adventure directly to what the characters care about – and show you care about what they’ve come up with in the process!)

Whose Responsibility Is It Anyway?

As a game master (or a designer who will not be at every table where this adventure is run), you have absolutely zero control over the table’s intrinsic motivation. Ultimately, the responsibility to find reasons to be intrinsically motivated lie with the players. But they can’t find what doesn’t exist – as designers, we need to do all we can to ensure they can engage with their intrinsic motivation.

This is where I think the line between adventure designer and game master is blurred, even when those roles belong to two separate people. Adventure designers should feel free to offer GM advice for keeping players engaged. This might look like clearly communicating the tone and themes of a game, so they can opt in or out of a campaign that matches their playstyle. It might look like advising GMs to ask players to describe certain things, or suggesting ways to hook players’ backstory elements into what you’ve written.

Goals and Achievement

Achievement-based motivation istechnically a type of intrinsic motivation, but it’s so powerful that it’s getting its own section. Also because I want to talk about it in the context of short-term and long-term motivation.

Short-term motivation is something we want immediately – we’re hungry, so we eat. We’re angry, so we want to yell. Long-term motivation is something we plan for – we save up to buy a house. A good game needs to have both. If we’re just chasing the next thing over and over again without a clear idea of what the long-term goal is, we lose focus. But if we’re working towards a long-term goal with no short-term goals to keep us occupied, we may lose steam.

When Short-term and Long-term goals work together, we get a feedback loop. As we slowly work toward our long-term goal, we get a sense of achievement – that progress is being made and we’re on the right track. The incentives we get for those small goals can enable us to go after the bigger goal.

The best advice I can give for understanding how this works is to go play Stardew Valley.

You have your long-term goals: restore the farm, complete the community center, etc. These are broken up into smaller goals, which are then broken up into even smaller goals: to complete the community center, you need to renovate many different facilities, including the fish tank. To renovate the fish tank, you need to catch and offer a bunch of fish, including these four specific fish you can find in the ocean. When you find all four of these fish, you get a reward (an item that lets you warp to the beach) and have completed one-sixth of the tasks you need to renovate the fish tank.

Know Your Audience

Whether you’re writing an adventure for publication or planning one for the people at your table, your greatest source of intel on what’s going to work lies in the audience you’re designing for. If you’re designing for a table, you’ve got it easier: just ask your players! Ask them to help you set expectations for what will happen in the game – ask them for backstory elements or use a different tool to elicit expectations from your group. While the game is in progress, use a tool like Stars and Wishes to get feedback about what your players are excited for.

If you’re writing this adventure for publication, you have it a little tougher (sorry!) because you have to instead make assumptions about your audience. My advice is to play with a lot of different people – friends, strangers, people new and old to the hobby. Observe what parts of the game they latch onto and what parts of the game they skip over. You can use psychology and existing models to profile your players – stuff like Self-Determination Theory or the Domains of Play model. That’s what they do in video games, and I link some resources in the conclusion.

If you’re writing for an existing game system, look at that game book. Lots of them share their take on user personas – the D&D 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Blue Rose 2e sourcebook are two examples.

Lastly – YOU are part of your own audience. Your tastes, likes, and dislikes matter, and as a designer you’ve been cultivating them all this time for good reason. But be careful – if you rely solely on your own tastes, you risk making something that feels super niche. And maybe that’s what you want – but that’s an entirely different conversation.

Conclusion

I’m not a psychologist. I’m not whipping out Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or Self-Determination Theory on you. I read one book ten years ago, and I wanted to share how it’s shaped my approach to player motivation. Lots of people have studied player motivation, although I admit most of the resources I really like are tailored to video games.

Applying the Five Domains of Play – Jason VandenBerghe

Engines of Play: How Player Motivation Changes Over Time – Jason VandenBerghe — This one I like in particular because he stresses the fact that the reason we START playing something is oftentimes not the same reason we KEEP playing something.

Map of Gamer Motivations – Quantic Foundry

Rethinking Carrots: A New Method For Measuring What Players Find Most Rewarding and Motivating About Your Game – Richard Ryan