Your character undoubtedly has some hopes, some dreams, some aspirations. Maybe they’d like to kill that rampaging dragon. Maybe they’d like to live in a castle. Maybe they want to unlock ultimate cosmic power, or simply slay the orcs that ravaged their town.
But any of those things gives your character a goal – a concrete thing that they want to change about the world they live in.
Goals are fabulously useful things. They drive the action and the plotline. In a book or a movie, the goals the characters have funnel them toward, keep them moving, and prevent the action from getting dull. Every scene is about what a character wants, and the steps they need to take to get it, what obstacles they must overcome.
Ah, progress!
But in D&D, specific character goals have largely been an area left wide open to interpretation. Pick your race and your class, sure, but your goals can be whatever gets you into the dungeon – as far as the rules are concerned, the end point isn’t half as important as the fact that you need to fight myconids and drow (or whatever) to get there.
This ambiguity also makes it hard for a DM to deliver satisfyingly on this goal. If your character wants to slay the dragon, but seeking the item to slay the dragon is what keeps them delving into dungeons, the DM is encouraged not to ever let you actually slay that dragon – what would you do after that? And if your character wants fabulous wealth, and the DM is worried about Monty Haul, it’s not something you ever have a realistic chance of achieving, because the DM doesn’t want to give you the one thing your character actually wants. It can be a recipe for frustration: nothing you ever do is getting you what you actually want out of the world, you can’t accomplish any of your goals. Sure, you can murder all the triaphegs in a 60-yeard radius of the village, but securing a castle is beyond your capabilities?
So let us improve on what has come before.
Goals As A Character Option
The central idea here is that, in addition to race, class, skills, proficiencies, feats, etc., when you make your character, you pick a goal.
Like with race and class, the DM may provide you with a list of goals particular to the campaign. Such a list might look like this:
Each player picks a goal for their character that represents what they seek. So, our character above who wants to take out the orcs that leveled her village would probably pick Vengeance as her character’s goal. A character who wanted to learn high-level magic might choose Mastery as his character’s goal, reflecting a complete dominance in the field. Our dragon-slayer might pick Peace: she just wants to live her life without having her friends and family burninated.
A DM could customize this list to the flavor of the campaign, and a player could also volunteer new goals. Note that the goals are big and significant – “kill one particular orc” isn’t a goal, but Vengeance is. This is intentional: a goal should be nebulous and big enough that there are multiple ways and paths to interpret it. It is not a discrete event, it is a concept.
Origins
So, you’ve got a (fairly abstract) goal for your character. So what? I could say my character wants peace and truth and love, but that doesn’t necessarily help the DM figure out how to organically make my character want to wail on some adherers out in the forest, or how to reward my character for doing so.
The first wrinkle in the plan is this: your goal helps describe your character’s background.
Call this the “origin.” If your character’s goal describes where they want to end up, then their origin needs to be where they are now…and the farther away they are from their goal, the more heroic that rise to meet it will be.
So, the goals help define where your character is when the campaign starts.
So, for example, your character who wants to become wealthy should start out poor – quite poor. Dirt poor. A humble moisture farmer or a beggar on the streets or deep in debt to the dire corby mafia. You have no money. Meanwhile, our spellcaster begins as a clumsy oaf who can barely string together two syllables of moderate potency, let alone intone words of power.
This creates an interesting dynamic instantly: you lack X, and you want to get X, because lacking X is causing you a lot of problems.
D&D characters have a tendency not to have these interesting arcs because they tend to begin as largely flawless characters with remarkable skill that then simply become more powerful and rich as the game goes on. It’s sometimes hard to make them want something, because they don’t lack anything – they’re heroes who have it better than everyone else and always have. Having your ultimate goal inform your character’s origins gives your character something to struggle against, some reason to pursue that lofty goal. If your character was defined by strife – say, raised with a refugee family – it becomes all the more clear why they crave peace, why this is a goal you cling to even when the war rages around you.
You can also use this origin point as backstory – perhaps hidden backstory – for your character. Even if your character was once a humble moisture farmer, that might have been years ago. Now they’re a grimdark mercenary with a necklace of maezel ears to show their might. But they pursue wealth still, still motivated by that place they came from, which was poor and simple, even if the PC’s never really see it.
This has a lot of potential to link a PC directly to the campaign world too. Questions naturally arise as you consider a character who came from the opposite of your goal. Who are the poor? Where do the wars occur? What elite organizations exist? How can that help you choose a race or a class?
Legacies
If origins are an origin point in the formation of a character goal, then legacies are the end point, the flip side. Origins are back-story, and legacies are denouement, the mark you leave in the world after you accomplish your goal.
Legacies affect the world after your passing, after your character retires or dies or fades into legend. In fact, they help define how your character fades into legend.
Legacies are there to ensure that your deeds affect the world after they’re completed. No sense in going on all these adventures to pursue your goal if, the moment you stop killing gambodo, your goal is counter-acted, right? This also keeps you going after you accomplish a part of your goal. If what you want is wealth, why don’t you stop once you’re happily comfortable? Because you can change the world so that no one you know ever has to suffer from poverty again. Your goal is more than yours, it bleeds out into the world you inhabit, and makes it a better place.
That’s what heroes do, after all, even after they’ve departed.
How To DM With Goals
With codified goals like this, it becomes quite easy to hook the PC’s, to keep them interested, and to ensure that they have an effect on the world. The goals of your characters are effectively rewards, as important to the characters as treasure and magic items. Like any other reward, it should be parsed out in parts over the course of the campaign, and to facilitate this, you can think of the goal as having five main parts: The Origin, the Legacy, and three steps in the middle.
Your job, over the course of however long that character is in your campaign, is to bring them through those three middle steps. Think of three things that a hero in your world might be able to accomplish to bring them from that origin to that legacy, or three steps in that process. These three steps (four, including the legacy) are going to be rewards for that character, given when they complete some mission or some portion of the story.
Because the distance covered from origin to legacy is so large, it shouldn’t be hard to arrive at three distinct points in it. If the character is interested in getting rich, but starts off deep in debt, you might plan that Step 1 means cancelling the debt, Step 2 means never needing to take out a loan like it again (effective financial solvency!), and Step 3 means finally becoming wealthy. If the character is interested in vengeance, Step 1 means overcoming the injustice, Step 2 means getting the target of your vengeance to flee, and Step 3 means finally getting an opportunity to reap that vengeance. You’ve got some time to think of later steps, but breaking it down in general terms can help you get an idea of the PC’s character arc: how they go from their initial position, to their end-point.
Because these points are “rewards” for your PC’s, you can easily structure an adventure around achieving that reward – it’s a great carrot to hold out there. Not only can you make those three points significant, you can also work smaller rewards into any given adventure: perhaps the wealth-seeking character explores the forgotten tomb because of rumors of fabulous riches. Maybe those rumors are overblown. The benefit of making these goals broad is that you can lure a character toward the adventure material you’ve actually prepared by putting something that may relate to the goal behind it.
The three points should change how the PC lives in the world dramatically and noticeably. A man avoiding debt collectors won’t live the same kind of lifestyle as a guy who just landed a great haul of gold, after all. This change in behavior can breed stories and hooks out of themselves, too: what might risk that character’s newly acquired gold? Who might come looking for that character while they’re on an adventure?
Now You
So, that’s the basic idea of codified goals. The design is intended to make the DM’s job of hooking the PC’s and producing adventures a little easier, while simultaneously helping players to feel more empowered to change the world themselves, and to take on challenges eagerly. What do you think? What might be some of the goals, origins, legacies, and steps for characters that you’ve had or DMed? Let me know down in the comments!
But any of those things gives your character a goal – a concrete thing that they want to change about the world they live in.
Goals are fabulously useful things. They drive the action and the plotline. In a book or a movie, the goals the characters have funnel them toward, keep them moving, and prevent the action from getting dull. Every scene is about what a character wants, and the steps they need to take to get it, what obstacles they must overcome.
Ah, progress!
But in D&D, specific character goals have largely been an area left wide open to interpretation. Pick your race and your class, sure, but your goals can be whatever gets you into the dungeon – as far as the rules are concerned, the end point isn’t half as important as the fact that you need to fight myconids and drow (or whatever) to get there.
This ambiguity also makes it hard for a DM to deliver satisfyingly on this goal. If your character wants to slay the dragon, but seeking the item to slay the dragon is what keeps them delving into dungeons, the DM is encouraged not to ever let you actually slay that dragon – what would you do after that? And if your character wants fabulous wealth, and the DM is worried about Monty Haul, it’s not something you ever have a realistic chance of achieving, because the DM doesn’t want to give you the one thing your character actually wants. It can be a recipe for frustration: nothing you ever do is getting you what you actually want out of the world, you can’t accomplish any of your goals. Sure, you can murder all the triaphegs in a 60-yeard radius of the village, but securing a castle is beyond your capabilities?
So let us improve on what has come before.
Goals As A Character Option
The central idea here is that, in addition to race, class, skills, proficiencies, feats, etc., when you make your character, you pick a goal.
Like with race and class, the DM may provide you with a list of goals particular to the campaign. Such a list might look like this:
- Wealth
- Authority
- Vengeance
- Peace
- Truth
- Mastery
Each player picks a goal for their character that represents what they seek. So, our character above who wants to take out the orcs that leveled her village would probably pick Vengeance as her character’s goal. A character who wanted to learn high-level magic might choose Mastery as his character’s goal, reflecting a complete dominance in the field. Our dragon-slayer might pick Peace: she just wants to live her life without having her friends and family burninated.
A DM could customize this list to the flavor of the campaign, and a player could also volunteer new goals. Note that the goals are big and significant – “kill one particular orc” isn’t a goal, but Vengeance is. This is intentional: a goal should be nebulous and big enough that there are multiple ways and paths to interpret it. It is not a discrete event, it is a concept.
Origins
So, you’ve got a (fairly abstract) goal for your character. So what? I could say my character wants peace and truth and love, but that doesn’t necessarily help the DM figure out how to organically make my character want to wail on some adherers out in the forest, or how to reward my character for doing so.
The first wrinkle in the plan is this: your goal helps describe your character’s background.
Call this the “origin.” If your character’s goal describes where they want to end up, then their origin needs to be where they are now…and the farther away they are from their goal, the more heroic that rise to meet it will be.
So, the goals help define where your character is when the campaign starts.
- Wealth (Poverty)
- Authority (Subservience)
- Vengeance (Injustice)
- Peace (Strife)
- Truth (Deceit)
- Mastery (Incompetence)
So, for example, your character who wants to become wealthy should start out poor – quite poor. Dirt poor. A humble moisture farmer or a beggar on the streets or deep in debt to the dire corby mafia. You have no money. Meanwhile, our spellcaster begins as a clumsy oaf who can barely string together two syllables of moderate potency, let alone intone words of power.
This creates an interesting dynamic instantly: you lack X, and you want to get X, because lacking X is causing you a lot of problems.
D&D characters have a tendency not to have these interesting arcs because they tend to begin as largely flawless characters with remarkable skill that then simply become more powerful and rich as the game goes on. It’s sometimes hard to make them want something, because they don’t lack anything – they’re heroes who have it better than everyone else and always have. Having your ultimate goal inform your character’s origins gives your character something to struggle against, some reason to pursue that lofty goal. If your character was defined by strife – say, raised with a refugee family – it becomes all the more clear why they crave peace, why this is a goal you cling to even when the war rages around you.
You can also use this origin point as backstory – perhaps hidden backstory – for your character. Even if your character was once a humble moisture farmer, that might have been years ago. Now they’re a grimdark mercenary with a necklace of maezel ears to show their might. But they pursue wealth still, still motivated by that place they came from, which was poor and simple, even if the PC’s never really see it.
This has a lot of potential to link a PC directly to the campaign world too. Questions naturally arise as you consider a character who came from the opposite of your goal. Who are the poor? Where do the wars occur? What elite organizations exist? How can that help you choose a race or a class?
Legacies
If origins are an origin point in the formation of a character goal, then legacies are the end point, the flip side. Origins are back-story, and legacies are denouement, the mark you leave in the world after you accomplish your goal.
Legacies affect the world after your passing, after your character retires or dies or fades into legend. In fact, they help define how your character fades into legend.
- Wealth (Poverty); you leave behind great wealth yourself, to your heirs or to the public.
- Authority (Subservience); you leave behind people who still treat your words and actions as important traditions, long after you’ve gone.
- Vengeance (Injustice); you leave the people near your target fearful of committing that injustice again.
- Peace (Strife); you leave a populace free of wars and violence for a long time to come.
- Truth (Deceit); you leave a fact known to all, accepted as reality.
- Mastery (Incompetence); you leave behind a reputation as the greatest, and others aspire to be half the master you were.
Legacies are there to ensure that your deeds affect the world after they’re completed. No sense in going on all these adventures to pursue your goal if, the moment you stop killing gambodo, your goal is counter-acted, right? This also keeps you going after you accomplish a part of your goal. If what you want is wealth, why don’t you stop once you’re happily comfortable? Because you can change the world so that no one you know ever has to suffer from poverty again. Your goal is more than yours, it bleeds out into the world you inhabit, and makes it a better place.
That’s what heroes do, after all, even after they’ve departed.
How To DM With Goals
With codified goals like this, it becomes quite easy to hook the PC’s, to keep them interested, and to ensure that they have an effect on the world. The goals of your characters are effectively rewards, as important to the characters as treasure and magic items. Like any other reward, it should be parsed out in parts over the course of the campaign, and to facilitate this, you can think of the goal as having five main parts: The Origin, the Legacy, and three steps in the middle.
Your job, over the course of however long that character is in your campaign, is to bring them through those three middle steps. Think of three things that a hero in your world might be able to accomplish to bring them from that origin to that legacy, or three steps in that process. These three steps (four, including the legacy) are going to be rewards for that character, given when they complete some mission or some portion of the story.
Because the distance covered from origin to legacy is so large, it shouldn’t be hard to arrive at three distinct points in it. If the character is interested in getting rich, but starts off deep in debt, you might plan that Step 1 means cancelling the debt, Step 2 means never needing to take out a loan like it again (effective financial solvency!), and Step 3 means finally becoming wealthy. If the character is interested in vengeance, Step 1 means overcoming the injustice, Step 2 means getting the target of your vengeance to flee, and Step 3 means finally getting an opportunity to reap that vengeance. You’ve got some time to think of later steps, but breaking it down in general terms can help you get an idea of the PC’s character arc: how they go from their initial position, to their end-point.
Because these points are “rewards” for your PC’s, you can easily structure an adventure around achieving that reward – it’s a great carrot to hold out there. Not only can you make those three points significant, you can also work smaller rewards into any given adventure: perhaps the wealth-seeking character explores the forgotten tomb because of rumors of fabulous riches. Maybe those rumors are overblown. The benefit of making these goals broad is that you can lure a character toward the adventure material you’ve actually prepared by putting something that may relate to the goal behind it.
The three points should change how the PC lives in the world dramatically and noticeably. A man avoiding debt collectors won’t live the same kind of lifestyle as a guy who just landed a great haul of gold, after all. This change in behavior can breed stories and hooks out of themselves, too: what might risk that character’s newly acquired gold? Who might come looking for that character while they’re on an adventure?
Now You
So, that’s the basic idea of codified goals. The design is intended to make the DM’s job of hooking the PC’s and producing adventures a little easier, while simultaneously helping players to feel more empowered to change the world themselves, and to take on challenges eagerly. What do you think? What might be some of the goals, origins, legacies, and steps for characters that you’ve had or DMed? Let me know down in the comments!
