The humble Motivation Hierarchy, a(n almost) system-neutral mechanic for character personalities

 Pretty simple concept, been testing it in a couple of games for about a year now. It's a rule for character motivations (and by extension persuasion etc.) which can be ported into any game which A) doesn't have any rules for character motivations (24XX) or B) does, but they have minimal interactions with other parts of the rules (World of Darkness). In the latter case, you could keep running with both or plug the inputs of this system into the outputs of the other.

Those who've played Exalted may recognize the general shape of this, but it's much simplified and rendered more flexible. That and Delta Green were the primary inspirations.

This post should be about a 15-minute read. If I cut all of the examples, I could have made it MOSAIC-strict, but I think they're helpful so I haven't. Might put out a PDF which is at some point.

The temptation of Buddha by Mara. Buddha has very little interest in the pleasures of life, and acts instead to achieve enlightenment and leave behind the suffering of existence. Thus, he resists.

Here's how it goes:

At character creation, you write down a list of motivations, most important at top. The list must include one entry titled 'Survival', which includes basic fight-flight-flee instincts as well as mid-term planning i.e. not throwing all your money away and starving; and another titled 'Pleasures of Life', which includes all the basic positive sensory inputs (good food, drink, sex and company) that aren't logged anywhere else. Other inputs are things your character believes, wants, enjoys, or the reverse of any of those, consciously or not. Where you put the entries is up to you, but 'Pleasures' should be below 'Survival' unless this person really would die for a good burger.

Example A: Frater RA-GANOS/Mike Smith, aging middle-class Chaos Magician

1. Seek limit and ego-death experiences by whatever means necessary
2. Survival
3. My line manager Gerald is a psychic vampire and reality sink; I need to break free of him
4. Pleasures of life 
5. Make sure others respect my hidden power
6. Love for my wife, Laura
7. Prove that I'm just as much a man as I was in my younger years
8. Free the world from the shackles of mundane reality
9. Love for my daughter, Donna

We can see that Mike will gladly mess around with serious danger to transcend the bounds of his psyche, but otherwise is a fairly cautious guy. He seems pretty bitter and self-absorbed - his primary interpersonal motivation is negative, and he's more bothered about respect and self-gratification than any of his family. (One of the advantages of this system, I've found, is it tends to get people to think about PC family). 

Note that we can get some derived values from all of these, which will practically manifest in play as a result of them without needing to be written down. For example, Mike's probably at least a little progressive on paper - presumably the 'shackles of mundane reality' include some of the social norms that reinforce capitalism and kyriarchy, and he's certainly going to be pro-legalization of drugs given #1. However, he's more concerned about his own masculinity and the respect others show him, so the way he actually acts around marginalized people (especially non-men and non-masculine men), especially if they aren't deferent to him, is likely to reflect some un-examined bigotry. Another derivation: if Laura loves Donna dearly, Mike might act like he loves Donna as much as Laura, even though in reality his concern for her is substantially lesser. Similarly, he likely has a modest number of friends with whom his relationship is contingent on how far they fulfil his other needs - being some combination of affirming, fun to be around and good sources of drugs. He may well be having an affair - if he isn't, he certainly would in the right circumstances, because he values his own pleasure more than any of his family.

Mike could probably do with prioritizing his shadow-work a bit more.

In Play: 

The Basics

Barring specific circumstances, the character always prioritizes the motivations in a top-down order. If it's relevant, the characters actions aim at achieving the top one and as many ones below it as possible. If the fifth and seventh items conflict, they choose the fifth, etc. You may adjust up or down by one if one motivation is confronted in an especially critical or insignificant way. If this would make two values equal, you choose which predominates.

i.e. Mike/Frater RA-GANOS has been invited to the pub by his coven-mate Frater L.K./Ben after a good old fashioned invocation of the Red Queen. However, it's Laura's 50th birthday and he needs to get home to celebrate by watching a movie with her. As Mike doesn't take any particular pleasure in movies, this would normally be prevented by the hierarchy; however, he can go out for a drink any night of the week and this is a very special event for Laura, so he can adjust the former value down by one and the latter up by 1. They're now both at 5. for the purposes of this decision, along with 'make sure others respect my hidden power.' Of the three, Mike chooses to prioritize Laura and promises Ben he'll catch him another time.

In practice, this process is usually much quicker and more subconscious than I've laid out here, once players are used to it. Ultimate discretion rests with players to make decisions about what counts as really significant, and to remember to use their hierarchy - more on this in my discussion of playtesting, below.

Characters acting on a lower motivation due to its specific importance in a given situation are likely to be somewhat distressed about this; this should be roleplayed, and (especially where they're choosing to act on the motivation below 'survival' against survival) might incur penalties due to fear etc.

Changing the Hierarchy

At any time, players may change their motivation hierarchy if they can justify in-fiction why the character would have done so, rearranging it or adding or subtracting elements. Such a decision should not be allowed to be made trivially - for example, if a player would like their character to change so they can take one action, they should not then be allowed to change back immediately afterwards. The motivation hierarchy is intended to reflect the PCs' real internal truths, and if you find players struggling to take this seriously it may not be for your table.

You can never remove 'survival' or 'pleasures of life' as a motivation; however, if it is lowest on the hierarchy then characters will pursue literally any goal over it.

The normal moment to change a hierarchy is after a session; however, if you find that your character 'wants' to act in a way that contradicts it in-play, and you agree with the GM that the change is justified given their development, you can change it mid-session if needed. This allows for some dynamic evolution through play.

Social Influence

Charles Spencelayah, The Political Argument. Different strategies are employed, but the motivations of each party may not have been taken fully into account.

The really beautiful thing about this system is that it gives players levers to pull for social influence purposes without needing any sort of complicated subsystem: information can be manipulated so that certain motivations appear to be relevant/irrelevant/critical/insignificant where this is not in fact the case, or arguments can be made to the effect that one approach rather than another best addresses a particular motivation etc. Of course, in order to do this characters will need to know the motivations of others, whether by intuition, luck, observation or divinatory powers. Then, they can play upon them. Your game already has either visible or invisible rules for such social actions, which should be arbitrated according to their specific nature.

Examples of how to manipulate Mike/Frater RA-GANOS from above:

• Lie to him that Gerald's about to turn up to get him to leave a house party (convincing him that #3 is relevant to overcome #4, bearing in mind that #2 means he doesn't want to be around the guy responsible for his salary whilst drunk). Now if there are serious drugs at the party (invoking #1), he might still decide to stick around...
• Persuade him that that lad who called him old will go down easy, he won't even put a scratch on him, and whilst Laura might have told him not to fight she never has to know about this - unless he thinks he can't handle it? (trying to get him to disregard #2 as relevant and treat #6 as insignificant/#7 as critical so that he'll be able to act on #7)
• Flirt with him so that he'll let you into his coven even though you're clearly more competent than he and risk upstaging him (convince him of the reasonable prospect of fulfilling #4 so he'll act on that over #5 or #7)
• Offer him a free bag of shrooms if he'll just go along with Gerald's new restructuring program and not get in the way and make things harder for everyone (bribery with #1 to overcome #3)
• Explain in his counselling meeting how important parental validation is to teenagers to get him to stop telling Donna to 'transcend her petty emotional bounds' about her recent breakup (using information to demonstrate that #9 is critical to place it on a par with #8 in hopes that he'll choose the latter; let's assume for this example that Laura isn't yet exasperated enough to tell him to cut it out)
• Tell a beautiful and moving story about the value of charity to solicit donations (linking something he's not intrinsically motivated by to #4)

If a lower motivation feels like it would affect a particular attempt but is not the primary thing being invoked (i.e. in the last example above Mike's desire to break people out of their established realities might lead him to desire the alleviation of poverty so they have more time to self-actualize) then you might apply some suitable modifier to the likelihood the attempt succeeds - advantage/disadvantage or something equivalently weighty. 

It might also be possible to change the position of motivations, destroy them altogether, or create new ones. This requires a bit more arbitration, but here are the guidelines I've been using:

• Any given attempt can move a motivation up or down one step. Bigger shifts in opinion take time unless other circumstances or a personal shift in commitments facilitate them.
• Only the lowest motivation can be wholesale destroyed. Survival and pleasures of life can never be destroyed.
• New motivations are created at the bottom of the hierarchy and must subsequently be raised, unless...
• If a new motivation is generated by linking it to a preceding one (usually easier), it is placed one step below it. For example, in the charitable-donations example above you might try to build a long-term motivation for Mike like 'donating to charity feels good' in which case it'd come in at #5 initially and everything else would move down one step.

All of this can be done to PCs as well as NPCs. Just as their characters' bodies can be changed with swords, so too their minds with words. On which note...

Reality, 'Madness' and Trauma

TTRPG 'insanity' mechanics may be unsalvageable, I don't know. The best advice I've seen on the matter is 'if you want to play a character who the medical establishment would slap a DSM label on, do your research to understand the state of mind of real people classified that way and try to play it honestly'. It should be clear that nothing on this hierarchy needs to reflect the normative fictional 'reality'[1] the character inhabits; entries may equally reflect their subjective experiences of the world. For example, is Gerald the line manager really a psychic vampire? Maybe, but in some more grounded genres he may well not be; Mike may be making his soul-destroying working life more exciting by introducing a grand personified threat into his own narrative of it, influenced by narcotic-induced paranoia and extensive self-indoctrination into a worldview that treats the external world as basically untrustworthy. Or it might just be a delusion that he is experiencing for some relatively-inexplicable reason, as has been known to happen.
Similarly, if a character suffers some terrible event in game that changes their view of the world, you can represent this by editing the motivation hierarchy. After being tortured with sensory deprivation, maybe Mike finds he's suddenly scared of stepping beyond the bounds of consciousness and swaps motivations #1 and #2. He might also move #5 and #7 up two each as he strives to reassert his agency over the world, and add a note to #1 Survival that reads 'bright white light or an empty room qualifies as mortal danger'. If he encountered a Great Old One and realized the cosmic insignificance of humanity, he might move #8 to #2, remove #5 and #7 and change #1 to 'transcend my own humanity.' You can imagine the changes these might produce in the character, and how disturbing they might appear to outsiders, but at the same time they're grounded in specific and internally comprehensible responses which make the experience more than 'you looked at Cthulhu, roll on the Phobia Table - oop you're scared of snakes now I guess :)'.[2]

Practical notes from a year of playtesting

My thoughts

• I've run with this system in two campaigns (one FKRish, one of my own D&D-descendent, Tales of Theon) of three and nine months respectively and the response has been pretty universally positive. 
• At no point has it bogged down play; nor has it been ignored, with my players regularly saying some variation of 'in accordance with my motivation of X I'm going to do Y' or 'well, survival is my highest motivation; I don't want to be in this fight, so I'm going to run like hell.' 
• Motivation hierarchies, like any other character personality, need to be built with the campaign's needs in mind, and if there's any concepts you definitely don't want to touch on (i.e. no suicidality, so no moving 'survival' below 'pain avoidance' or w/e) then that needs to be outlined in Session 0 and revised appropriately. None of that is unique to this system. 
• It's succeeded in replicating what I'd consider the core strength of Exalted's (3e, not played earlier eds) Intimacy system, in that it allows for some interaction with specific motivations where characters want to find out what drives other people and then play on those motivations. It's done that without replicating the crunchiness which surrounds that system, where all sorts of other points and scores and so forth play into it. This should run largely on the guidelines given here, whatever system you're using to determine things like 'can I persuade somebody of this thing'.
• Playing villains whose strength is their persuasive ability is hard in many traditional systems because, unless they're just doing mind-control, players have little reason to ever accept their arguments. Whilst this system allows NPCs to make checks (if you're running a game with checks) to influence players, in practice I've rarely needed to because when an antagonist has made a point that hits one of their motivations squarely they've tended to go 'oh yeah, [character]'s quite convinced by this' or at least tried to determine if they're being lied to and then done the same.
• The one big hitch I've hit with it is: how many NPCs get motivation hierarchies? Ideally, as many as possible, because once people are used to using them to get a handle on opponents they're going to be thrown if that doesn't work in every case. Practically, I run sandboxy games and that isn't feasible. Blorbily, I've tried to prep one for every NPC I think is likely to individually be a relevant social challenge or opportunity, and at some point I'd like to make some generic templates for things like 'soldier' or 'merchant' with maybe one free slot to add some personality; in the meantime, when somebody suddenly becomes relevant out of the blue I scribble something down and firm it up post-session.
• Like I implied above, they need players to act in good faith. The system is loose, and really easy to exploit if you want to, so they need to not want to. 
• On the other face of that, whilst it's good to be able to use it to whack people over the head sometimes and go 'hey, you said you cared about gold more than your friends, now follow through on that' in a way that makes the story more interesting, you don't want to be policing people super tightly. There will inevitably be decisions made in play about what counts as relevant and useful, and to some extent the players need to be able to dictate this themselves. You just will not keep everyone's list in your head all the time, apart from anything else. Let the players carry that weight. (Those who advantage themselves by forgetting it, assuming no malicious intent to break the game, are likely also disadvantaging themselves by forgetting their characters' capabilities). 
• The FKR campaign had a question for each motivation - a thing the player should always be asking in a scene, to make sure motivations influenced the way you were interacting with the world. Tales of Theon didn't, and it made sod all difference to how people interacted with the hierarchy. You could do it if you want.

Players' thoughts (from my Tales of Theon campaign)

Players are referred to by their characters' names for anonymity.

JAGO: Does anybody have strong opinions, positive or negative, on motivation hierarchies as a mechanic? I'm writing them up as a system-neutral thing for a blog post and would love to be able to include some comments or distilled thoughts from people who have experience using them

...

CLIO: pretty positive opinions, it sometimes feels difficult to translate character traits to behaviour in game, and motivation heirachies do that in a way that stops you from just acting how you personally would

KIRRIN: what [A] said-- very very good mechanism for distilling a character into a series of principles which are not only actionable but translate very directly to provoking in-game trajectories of action. they force you to translate a character from the conceptual (and to some extent the roleplaying) space to the game-y and actual

CLIO: a second effect i liked, is that it makes spells that make you lose your inhibitions so much more fun

VADIM (formerly playing YVAINE, who was themselves formerly known as ELIODYN[3]): yeah, i agree with the above — not only are they fun to create, and a good way for ensuring you’re acting according to your character’s motivations and not what would be ‘best’ for the game, but they’re also a good way to track character growth. changing a motivation hierarchy feels like a meaningful measure of a character’s growth, positive or negative, and a way their changed priorities have a tangible pseudo-mechanical impact

CLIO: the de-fungusification of clio [a moment when the PC fought back against and defeated the fungal parasite controlling her body] only existed because i had set months ago that clio's primary yet suppressed motivation was bodily autonomy, so i would credit all future character arc around getting free as being rooted the motivation heirachy

GREEPS: I do like them as a guide - especially for creating a more realistic character! I don't think they have as much of a place in a pulpier setting but they are a fun way of explaining a character. RuneQuest's method of tying Runes to personality and motivation is quite fun as well

CLIO (replying to D): (i don't know if you consider your games pulpy) [Jago note: Greeps' player runs a lot of high-octane OSR and adventure type stuff with large player-groups, as I understand it] but i feel for however much i enjoy motivation heirachies in theon, they would be out of place in your games

KIRRIN: I don't know if this is a critique as such, but as an approach I will also note that they tie you to a series of axiomatic statements which are for better or worse never quite capable of mapping the nuances of character mentality, especially for characters who have conflicting/intersecting motivations in their hierarchy. at least for characters who are long-term/more three-dimensional, the most realistic use of the motivation hierarchy in my experience is with a bit of good-faith interpretative freedom as to what motivation will be prioritised at any given time. which is largely how you run them! but it does have implications for how it is used as a mechanic. I think I lost the thread of what I was saying-- to relate it to more practical (and personal) terms, it's a mechanic that gets complicated (not necessarily a bad thing!) esp. when you have a character who consciously believes they have one set and order of priorities but emotionally orders those priorities somewhat differently, if that makes sense? no real person is completely unified and logical in what they want and they don't want, and as a player it's nice to have corresponding freedom in the way we get to interpret and apply the motivation hierarchy. unsure how coherent that is, but yeah

CLIO: I think i agree, as a mechanic it works best when not strictly enforced (exceptions apply re: [a spell that altered motivations] for example) allowing the players to use it as a set of guidelines, not hard and fast rules 

KIRRIN: yeah, that's what I was trying to gesture towards! [That spell, when used in play] was a very fun moment partly because it was out of the normal order of play. I suspect a game that mandated hard and fast adhesion to your motivations exactly as ranked would result in relatively static characters (and players) who weren't inclined towards or expected to reassess those motivations through a longer campaign

JAGO: The way I've largely been expressing it in the document [blog post] is that you've flexibility to move an item up or down a step if a particular instance is especially important/unimportant to you; practically I think this is a pretty good expression of how we've run it in play, I can't think of many examples where people have mucked with their hierarchies more than that in play without changing them wholly as a result. 
[KIRRIN REACTED:] 🩷

JAGO: Practically they have the advantage that if you're regularly breaking one badly, you probably want to change it anyway? At least if you're invested in the character's personality, which all of you folks are

[KIRRIN and ALEXIS REACTED:] ☝

JAGO: Also I have to note - part of the reason I don't need to enforce it is that everyone is really good with using them! I barely ever have to roll for NPC persuasion in a case where people don't necessarily want to be persuaded, for example, because it's quite rare that there is a really marginal case - usually people are happy to go along with offers that align with their motivations even if they aren't net beneficial. There are definitely groups where folks would resist that more.

ALEXIS: Yeah, late to this discussion, but I probably don't have much to add anyway - if I can add one small observation is that apart from 'day-to-day' roleplaying, it's a really good mechanics to both ensure moments in the game come up that feel bigger because of them, and at the same time reflecting back in time makes it easier to quantify/describe what effect the more pivotal moments had on your character.

[ALEXIS REACTED:] ☝

Here the conversation turned to discussion of an NPC's fursona in the context of christian heresy, and the players' comments concluded.

Which concludes our post! If you try out the method in your own games, I'd love to hear about it, especially if you make changes or find problems.

Au revoir,

Jago

[1] I have serious quibbles with the observer/reality divide philosophically speaking, but operating a shared fictional space for gameplay purposes does typically assume a degree of, well, sharedness. Things that mess around with making this less the case, like the DeRo are typically doing so on the assumption that they're representing 'mad' deviations from such a 'reality'. Even though in practical terms, in the RPG-space, the description is all there is and any such underlying truth is definitely only hypothetical (as contrasted with the non-RPG-space where it's only possibly - and indeterminably - hypothetical)

[2] For a great example of this more (internally) comprehensible causative line from cosmic encounter to abnormal behaviour, see the short story 'Tempting Providence,' by Jonathan Thomas, collected in S.T. Joshi's Black Wings of Cthulhu Volume 1.