JV’s Motivations Designer – Jeansen Vaars' Fiction House

After tweaking, testing and playing through character motivations, I found a method that worked out really well, without taking huge amounts of effort. I suggest using this method for important characters and only very important NPCs.

This is basically my simplification of Character Motivation Guidelines (inspired by LemFliggity) – Check that post out for a more detailed version of this one.

Motivations Table

Character	Goal 1	Goal 2	Driving Need	Conflict	Motivation
Character Name	Action-Subject	Action-Subject	Driving Needs	Conflict between Goal 1 and Goal 2	Main driver based on Conflict

Driving Needs

d6	Driving Need	Explanation
1	Physiological	Health or psychological issues, basic needs of own
2	Safety	Physical, emotional, financial and safety
3	Affiliation	Love, biological family, chosen family, memberships and belonging
4	Esteem	Ego or acknowledgment of self from others
5	Self-Actualization	Education, skill development, better version of self
6	Transcendence	Mystical, spiritual, identity discovery

Abraham Maslow’s needs principles

Reference

Goal 1-2 → We need an abstract Subject-Action random table for this. An oracle will do, or any equivalent random table that can tell us something about character motivations and goals.
Driving Need → Roll on Maslow’s Driving Needs table
Conflict → Combine the two goals and find something that is incompatible with each other. Interpret the results. Target clash of goals, consider that goals can either be internal (from self) or external (from someone else).
Motivation → Combine the conflict you found with the driving need. Interpret the results. With this, target what makes your character move forward, why does he think he is right and what makes him want to answer or solve the conflict.

Example

Character	Goal 1	Goal 2	Driving Need	Conflict	Motivation
Baelev	Travel Technology	Delay Trials	Transcendence	He was accused of using an illegal travel-technology in Space, but needs to delay the Trials since he needs to use such technology again for his current mission!	Baelev wants to make the Interstellar Organization understand that he has justifiable arguments of using such technology, but he does no longer feel like part of them. Too much is at stake from the very self thoughts!

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character motivations random rpg solo table

Motivations Table

Driving Needs

Reference

Example

JeansenVaars

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