Motivation, Motivation, Motivation...

io9 ran an interesting article the other day on "creating original superheroes", sounding out several well-known authors on their methods.

Naturally some of this will be of interest to players in superhero roleplaying games - even my own Villains & Vigilantes campaign. Although we've been through the character generation process, who's to say someone's character won't get killed (or worse) and need to be replaced at some point?

While issues like character names - and even origin stories to a degree - aren't usually that much of a problem, the main point the piece brought home for me was its echoing of a subject  I raised before Christmas about the importance of a hero's motivation (sadly the blog I linked to at the time now appears to have blogfaded into oblivion).

The io9 article makes the point that the motivation comes from the origin story saying: "as [Gail] Simone [writer of Birds of Prey and Secret Six] puts it, the point of the origin story isn't really to explain how the hero got his/her powers, it's to explain 'what they most desire, what they most fear. The best origins, like Spider-man's, Batman's, and the like, encapsulate the character's reason to exist. The worst merely explain that a drum of radioactive waste fell on their head and now they can fly.'"