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Modern roleplaying games often have "goals" or "bonds" or other such things in their character generation rules, that serve to provide tangible reminders that player characters are meant to be personalities, rather than just a bunch of combat stats.
Back in the good old (or bad old, depending on your point of view) days, players actually had to remember for themselves that their characters might have desires and motivations, and then remember to play them that way. With the inevitable consequence that often players didn't remember, and their characters ended up fairly bland and generic.
The modern trend is a good thing, because it helps promote a richer and more socially engaging experience for the players who appreciate this sort of thing, and it can also easily be ignored by gamers who enjoy stat-crunching and combat optimisation without all that "roleplaying" stuff.
[Reminder: Our guest commentators have not seen Rogue One. Part of the fun is seeing how their untainted impressions re-interpret the movie through the lens of our comic.]
Hey, we've hit a milestone!
This is the 100th strip of the Rogue One arc, and my 100th annotation written. Cool!
And here we see Jim still struggling a bit with the roleplaying. He's having difficulty getting motivations without quests. Annie helps out though, by showing him how to extrapolate from his main quest (not to mention get Jim to stay on track with the party).
Which means Jim can now concoct a plan to blow something up! This will be good.
Oh, and after 100 strips I'm finally starting to appreciate Cassian a little more. He's become slightly more useful, and isn't a half-bad leader.
— aurilee
[This is actually the 101st strip of Rogue One. Looks like aurilee made a fencepost error. —Ed]
What's someone to do when their quests, their motivations are gone?
That's a serious question even in real life. I've seen that question raised in various works, various books and stories, with no clear consistent answer.
I love how Jim/Bria regards helping the rest of the party as, "Naah".
Still, deciding they can go and blow up the Peace Moon - I'll give them credit. Unfortunately, if you remember, this was supposed to be a one-off adventure, being run because one of their players was not available. In such a situation, the "sideline adventure" can't make major changes in the campaign world; doing so would void out the whole reason for not running the main campaign.
So you know, this plan is destined to fail. The players should try something different, less likely to change the whole campaign. You know, getting the plans to the main characters in the main campaign. That's something they might actually succeed at.
Oh, riiight...
— Keybounce
Transcript
Bria: But now that my father's dead, all my character quests are over. I don't have any motivation to do anything.
Cassian: You can have motivations without having quests.
Chirrut: Yeah. You could help us with our quests.
Bria: Naah, that's not one of my goals.
Cassian: Look at it this way. Maybe you can't kill Galen... but you can still destroy his life's work.
Bria: Ooooh. You mean his presentations?
Cassian: The Peace Moon!
Bria: Oh, that. Yeah, I suppose so.
Bria: Okay. Let's go there and blow it up!