Collective vs individual goals, and a quick look at Reign

Traditional RPGs typically have a pre-defined common goal, set by the GM, that the players are working towards. This could be very concrete: “You are all going to root out the evil in the Keep on the Shadowfell. Go!”, or more vague “Several people have been found dead with strange chest wounds near Arkham university. What are you going to do about it?”. The goal can come in the form of a published scenario. So why are the characters doing this? Often some character motivations are retrofitted once you know what the scenario is (e.g., using the “character hooks” in D&D adventure books).

Another type of RPG gaming starts with the characters and their individual motivations and goals, and the “adventure” builds from there. In the extreme, you would have parallel stories, one for each player, which do not coincide at all. (I don’t know if this extreme exists. Let me know in the Comments if you have experienced this kind of play).

So we have two extremes: GM-set collective goals, and player-set individual goals. Most games try to mix both, because neither extreme is very satisfying. One game that is very explicit about this mix is Mouse Guard. There is a GM’s turn which is about the GM-set, collective goals, and a Players’ turn, which is about individual player-set goals.

Another way of mixing the two is to encourage players to have individual goals which drive towards the same collective “thing”. For example, in Burning Wheel, each character has three Beliefs. Advice on the Burning Wheel forums is that all characters have one belief about a common “thing”. The other two beliefs are individual. The “common belief” still does not have to be the same for each character. In our current Burning Wheel game, the common thing was a Prophet who has appeared as a possible source of salvation or damnation, depending on your point of view. Each character has a belief about the Prophet, but they are widely different. The nun-turned-prostitute wants to kill him because he raped her in the past. The priest wants to bring him in for questioning concerning possible heresy. The insurrectionists want to recruit him to their cause of bringing down the ruling noble class.

The “common thing” is still often introduced by the GM. It is the concept behind the game. The GM says, “anybody want to play a game about a group of Ilviran priests trying to start a new temple in Tashal?” (this was the idea behind Jim Chokey’s Red Domes campaign that I played in), and the players take it from there.

This brings me to the question: If there are GM-set collective goals, and player-set individual goals, could there also be other combinations? In other words, player-set collective goals, or GM-set individual goals? I don’t know about the latter, but player-set collective goals is an interesting possibility. It is interesting to me because often players are not as involved in a story that someone else (the GM) created as they are in their own story. There are a couple of caveats. One is that this assumes that the players can all get excited about the same thing. However, this also applies to GM-set goals. Another is that the GM may feel left out! The GM is a player too, after all, and should have some control of the story, just like the other players. Personally I’m not too worried about this. The GM will always have plenty to do in terms of bringing in interesting opposition against the players.

Assuming that player-set, collective goals are a good idea, it would perhaps be nice to have some rules that support this and gives some structure to it. This is what brings me to the Reign RPG.

I’m not going to review Reign as a whole here. As usual, see rpg.net for that. I also want to point out that I haven’t played the game; my thoughts here are just based on reading the rule book.

Anyway, the part I am interested in here is the Company mechanics in Reign. A company is any kind of organization that has a goal. It could be a country, a thieves’ guild, an insurrection, a merchant company, or what have you. PCs are assumed to all be members of the same company. They could be the leaders of the company, or lowly pawns trying to work their way up. The company goal serves the function of collective goal, and the company is created by the players together during character creation! The company even has its own “character sheet” with a number of stats (Might, Treasure, Influence, Sovereignty, and Territory). The PCs perform actions which can give substantial (but usually temporary) bonuses to the company’s stats. Then the company as a whole can do things, like attack other territories with its military might, conduct espionage, etc. The players can even use their own experience points (XPs) to increase the company’s stats!

One nice effect of this that is pointed out in the rules is that PC death is not that bad — the company lives on! Just roll up a new company member. But more importantly, it gives the game a really nice, player-created common goal.

Neat.

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