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As a gamemaster, your most important job is keeping the players happy. There are mundane reasons for this: if you don't have happy players, soon you won't have players at all. Ultimately you want to keep the players happy because roleplaying is a recreational activity; whether you're telling a good story or presenting difficult tactical problems, the point is to have fun.

Most players think they know what they define as fun. They'll often tell you in
no uncertain terms, hint at their desires by their actions or include them in their out-of-game conversations with other players. A good game master should be receptive to these direct requests and aware of the more indirect ones - but a great gamemaster knows which ones to listen to and which to disregard.

You see, players who think they know what they want are wrong - or, at the very least, they don't know what will actually make them happy with the game.

Most players say they want two categories of things. They want to play interesting characters, whether they define interesting as powerful, intelligent, emotionally complex, or a host of other things. They also say they want to succeed in their goals, be those goals defeating the bad guys, solving the mystery, or obtaining the magic sword.

Unfortunately, the players generally want immediate gratification on both counts. They want characters who start the game as powerful, interesting or cool; they want to succeed at their goals quickly and assuredly. These are perfectly reasonable things to want! After all, as players, they're extremely invested in their character's success, however they define the term. As a gamemaster, it's your job to create opportunities for character development and narrative challenge, and that means knowing when to stop giving the players what they want and when to start making them work for it.

Let's look at that first category: all players want to play interesting characters. They define "interesting" in different ways, of course. Some players will want to start the game with a character who is good in combat, others will create a very detailed and realistic character, and still others will develop elaborate back-story.

It's tempting to give into the desire for players to start with whatever characters they like, so long as it won't affect the enjoyment of the game for other players. Why shouldn't you let a player who wants their character to be good at combat take five Aspect, six cyber-combat, or seven single weapon? These are extreme values, to be sure, but they are within the fair and balanced limits of character creation. After all, the player has a vision for who their character is at the beginning of the game, and presumably realizing this vision will make them happy, right?

Wrong.

Unless the game is extremely short-term, a player whose character begins as a combat master (or an intellectual giant, or a social diva) is not going to be as satisfied as one whose character becomes that way over the course of the game. Though most players believe they want characters who just plain kick ass, in the long run players are happier when the ass-kicking is part of the character's story arc rather than a bare fact about them.

Here's a typical example from a game I've run: one character began the game with incredible skill at hand to hand combat. This knack was part of their character from the very beginning as, at character creation, he had a high strength and dexterity, a world class fighting skill, and the ability to grow brutally effective claws on his hands. However, as the game progressed, this character had basically no way to advance their primary ability, hand to hand combat. He was simply too good at it! As the game progressed and the character couldn't advance much, the other characters began to catch up in this area of specialty, making the player feel like he was losing what made him unique in the group. Additionally, he could never be offered rewards based on his primary abilities. Instead of having the game's challenges play to his strengths, his limited ability to advance meant the opportunities he gained played to his weaknesses. Not that having a balanced character is a bad thing, of course! But the player didn't feel nearly as happy with the combat aspects of the character as he'd thought he would.

This principle applies to more than just a character's statistics; it applies to their background as well. Consider the almost stereotypical example of the character whose parents were killed by orcs. If this is simply a part of their background, dictated by the player during character creation, it can only have a limited effect on the character. Every time the character meets an orc she will think, "My parents were killed by orcs, attack!" But if the parental death occurs during the game then the player will roleplay out the shock at learning of their parents' death, their horror at the mauled condition of the bodies, and possibly even the stages of grief that they went through. When the character encounters orcs she will be thinking of specific incidents that the player knows vividly because they played them out. The character's rage might even turn out to be fear or renewed grief depending on how the scenes involving their parents' death went. While it might sound like fun to have the death happen in the character's backstory, in the long run there's much more story to be gotten out of it if it happens during the game. Playing this incident out makes the incident more real for the player, and makes it more central to the character.

Now, this advice is great, but obviously you can't make every incident and talent that's part of the character happen after character creation. If you do there won't actually be a character to start the game with. The key is to be the advocate for character development during the game, because the player will almost certainly advocate for character developed-ness at the beginning of the game. Between the two of you, you should be able to create an interesting starting character who still has plenty of abilities to develop and events to experience. This needs to be a collaborative process; if you dictate these changes to your players you are going to end up with some very unhappy players, and that would make the entire exercise irrelevant.

Having a good game isn't simply about creating a character. A character's abilities and background can be fascinating, but the ultimate point is for the character to play through a story. Not only do you, as a game master, need to help the player balance their desires about who the character is, you also need to control what the character can do.

This is the second category of what players think they want: to have their characters succeed at what they attempt. They might want to kill the orc chieftain, get elected president, or insult their rival in public - but no matter which goal they aspire to, they want to see it happen, because that's what's fun, right?

Actually, no: wrong again. Sure, it seems obvious a player who does successfully hack off the orc chieftain's head is going to feel pretty pleased. Assuming you run things well, that moment when sword separates head from shoulders is going to be talked about forever (or at least until you create a story just as good next week).

But the orc-head-hacking itself isn't what will get and keep the players' interest. Walking into camp and decapitating an orc, no matter how well-described, will make the players feel as though the victory has been handed to them, not won by them. What makes things interesting are the obstacles you place between the players and that moment of victory, and especially the times they fail when confronting those obstacles.

There can be, and should be, a thousand hurdles to jump before the orc chieftain is killed, and in fact even before the players attack him. There are guards to defeat, an orc siege to lift, and evil clerics to destroy. Less obvious obstacles might include deserts to cross or secret spells to learn. Each obstacle the players defeat brings them one step closer to killing the final foe and adds to the story of the struggle. Each setback they face adds to the story as well, and makes the foe seem even more worthy. If the players have been defeated in the course of trying to destroy the foe they will savor the eventual victory even more. Prison camps, stolen items, and maimed limbs are just a few sorts of (mostly) temporary setbacks the players can endure as they struggle to defeat their foe. When they finally win they won't just be celebrating because the foe is dead, but because they have endured every challenge and faced down the bleakest odds to achieve victory.

This technique can enhance non-combative play as well. One character in a session I ran recently was involved in a long term social rivalry with a non-player character. The NPC had slightly more social standing than the player character and always seemed to have a witty retort to anything the PC could say.

With some effort the PC was able to discover a rumor about the NPCs political ambitions from outside sources and throw the rumor into conversation in a surprising way. The NPC, quite surprised by this, was stunned into silence. Objectively this barely seems like a victory since the player character didn't really gain much except for an ephemeral social coup - but the players are still talking about the incident. Because the foe was so competent and the player suffered so many defeats before he won, even such a minor victory was seen as a major accomplishment.

Your players will be most rewarded by successes they achieve against the odds and through their own perseverance and intelligence. Don't get afraid to drag your characters through the mud before they get a shot at the Big Bad. In fact, you should be worried if they haven't gone through hell before the denouement of your adventure. Each obstacle you throw in their way makes the climax of the story, and the success they say they want, seem that much more worthwhile.

So often what the players think they want, be it at character creation or during session, is not what they really want. As a gamemaster it's important to be able to tell the difference. Most players would never say so, but they like to be challenged. They don't want to be handed cool powers, an exciting back story, or victory over the villain - they want to earn it. So push your players as hard as you can. Push them so hard that they fail. Force them to develop their characters to the fullest against all odds. Make struggle so common that success is that much more rewarding. Because - whether or not they say so - it's what your players really want.