Backstories obviously have to be shared with the DM (which I pretty much am 100% of the time). If someone doesn't tell me as a DM their backstory and tries to "conveniently" to try to get some bs benefit the backstory is not canon. I don't need backstories to be fully fleshed out before he first session, but it needs to be shared with me before its mentioned in game. As a player I'd tell the DM my backstory, and depending on what the backstory is, I will either tell the other players, or I won't depending on if I want their characters to know.
The problem with "going about it the way Critical Role" does is that Critical Role is a show. They have an audience of thousands. They keep the backgrounds a secret to keep the audience entertained and guessing, primarily. They know that each character will have fans... that some of the fans will "ship" characters... and so on. They have to be responsive to the audience's needs or no one will watch the show, and they lose their income source. Furthermore, although I didn't watch series 1 and only watched some of series 2 long after it launched, I'm sure that in between the 2 campaigns, there was tons of fan speculation about which new characters each one would play and the players therefore had to keep their characters generally a secret (though of course, not really from each other). The fans derived a source of fun out of predicting what character Sam or Travis or Laura would play next, and so the players were not just unveiling their characters to each other, but more so, to the audience.
Because, again, Critical Role is a show.
If you're not playing to an audience, there's really no need to keep your character's background, class, race, etc., secret from the group. If your group finds it fun, great. But in general, the only person who cares about your character at the table, is you. There are no "fans" of your character watching, and the other players are more interested in their own characters than in yours.
Do what your table finds fun. If Critical Role has good ideas, by all means steal them.
But don't just blindly do what the people on Critical Role do at the D&D table, because a large percentage of what they do is playing to the audience, because it's a show. There's nothing wrong with that, but what you are doing has no audience, and if you do the "play to the audience" stuff, who in the world is going to see it?
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The problem with "going about it the way Critical Role" does is that Critical Role is a show.
I wouldn't call that a problem. In my experience, anecdotal as it may be, it's in the same ballpark as most of my long-term groups: players will tell each other at least something, if only to avoid "if I'd know someone else was going to play X, I'd have gone with something else" arguments, but not everything. How much they tell each other and what sort of info they keep secret (from other players, not from the DM) varies, but that's the general expectation I have after a couple of decades and a whole lot of groups.
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The "keep my character a secret until play begins" thing kind of baffles me. It's not something my game group generally did.
Some players like to RP out their character meeting and introducing themselves to the party. I never really worried about it either, but some players find that fun. Who am I to tell them their fun is wrong? Especially if it doesn’t hurt anything.
Ditto. Especially if it's a DM and PC secret, then it's sort of like the player and DM are playing a mini game against the party ... which is weird (and probably unconsciously toxic, or toxic leaning).
Just because a particular PC has something going for just themselves that the rest of the party isn’t involved with isn’t such a big deal. Like, back in high school people would regularly grab the DM in the halls to set something up for their characters, PCs would migrate from table to table, etc. Everybody’s character had “secrets” with the DM. But they weren’t “secret secrets,” there was nothing toxic about it, it was just… well, like real life I suppose.
And sometimes a DM wants to set up a cool reveal for the group and asks a player to help with the project. That isn’t really a player and DM playing a mini game against the party.
That’s more like when my mom, aunt, and grandmother would all coordinate to make sure that the presents from family and the presents from Santa didn’t accidentally get wrapped in the same paper. (All the presents from Santa were done in plain wrapping paper, family gifts had printed paper.) That was a way to increase/maintain verisimilitude for my cousins and me.
Campaigns I DM in my semi-ho Mystara have certain things restricted by geography during character creation. So players get slightly different info in their handouts based on those descriptions. Anyone raised by or having livid in an elven comunity would have more detailed info about Elves than the other PCs, and so too therefore do their players. As a DM, I would rather the players with the Elf PCs get to explain those details on Elven culture when they come up than me doing it. Not only does that help reduce my longwinded expositions, it seems more natural from a character standpoint too. So it’s not that I “have secrets with everyone,” just that some PCs know more about certain things than others do.
I guess it all comes down to how much or little the people at the table trust (or distrust) one another. 🤷♂️ I guess I never realized how good I’ve had it that stuff which seems perfectly natural and reasonable to me and the others I play with is apparently “Abby… someone” for lots of folks.
The "problem" I was referring to was not realizing which elements of a show are there because it is a show, and trying to do things the same way at the table, when those elements may serve no useful purpose at the table and may even hinder regular play.
Below I use an example from a different show (Saving Throw), but it's not directly about backgrounds so I will spoilerize it.
Let me take an example from a show I have watched a lot more of: Wildcards, on the Saving Throw channel, where they play Savage Worlds. They are running an East Texas University campaign. In Savage Worlds, each player character starts each session with 3 chips called "bennies" which allow re-rolls of anything but a critical failure, or can be used to ask for limited things from the GM (for example, you might say to the GM, "I'd like to say that my character brought his gun with him," even though you hadn't thought to say it at the appropriate time, and hand the GM a bennie).
Normally in Savage Worlds, players can earn additional bennies the way D&D does Inspiration -- through clever play, teamwork, or RP, whatever the GM decides. Each PC might earn one more bennie that way during the session, maybe 2. This means most characters get, at most 5 re-rolls in a session. AT MOST.
On the show, however, the GM does not hand out any bennies except the base 3. Instead of doing so, they allow the audience to buy them "extra credit" points, which act as a more limited re-roll (you can only re-roll one time with extra credit, whereas you can use all of your bennies to keep re-rolling if you want). There are times when players have been sitting there with a pile of 20 or 30 extra credit re-rolls.
At the end of each season, they do an out of character round-table, and in the 2nd season, they were talking about how they play Savage Worlds. The GM stopped them and talked to the camera for a bit, and explained that a normal game of Savage Worlds does NOT play this way. That GMs should NOT challenge their players with as difficult a set of tasks as he does, because a team of 4 players might have at most 12-16 rerolls for an entire session, whereas his players sometimes have 30 or 40 or more re-rolls they can do. The audience can also unlock special "story rewards" that they know about but the players don't. One night they unlocked a "Christmas bonus" in the middle of a battle and every player got an extra bennie. One night they unlocked a "helpful NPC" and an NPC showed up at the last minute to save the PCs' bacon. These things, the GM pointed out, cannot happen in your private game, so you have to be much different in your GMing approach. The players then all chimed in to say that they take many more risks than they normally would, because of the huge piles of extra credit -- and they know the audience will send them more if they run out. Again, this cannot happen at a normal table.
My point here, using Wildcards and Savage Worlds as an example, is that these are *shows* as well as games. Yes, the Wildcards people are playing Savage Worlds. Yes, the Critical Role people are playing D&D. But they alter how they play because there is an audience, and they do things that don't necessarily translate well to the table when there isn't an audience.
Getting back to secret backgrounds -- keeping characters, classes, races, backgrounds, a secret, is something that works really well when there is an audience, because there are thousands of people to surprise, all of whom are fans, and may have favorite players and characters. At the table, most players in most game groups really only care very much about their own character, and not about the rest of them. I mean, they don't want your character to die, and they might have a mild curiosity about how you got that eye-patch, but they are often not down for 30 minutes of RP about your lost eye, when there are treasures to loot, dragons to fight, and their own RP to do. So we have to be careful not to do things at the table that are designed to work with an audience, but aren't really needed without one.
I tell the other players the character's class, race, and subclass, as well as what they'll do most of the time (tank, snipe, heal, etc.). Everything else I share through roleplaying. The players find out backstory alongside their players.
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All stars fade. Some stars forever fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homebrew (Mostly Outdated):Magic Items,Monsters,Spells,Subclasses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
The "problem" I was referring to was not realizing which elements of a show are there because it is a show, and trying to do things the same way at the table, when those elements may serve no useful purpose at the table and may even hinder regular play.
Below I use an example from a different show (Saving Throw), but it's not directly about backgrounds so I will spoilerize it.
Let me take an example from a show I have watched a lot more of: Wildcards, on the Saving Throw channel, where they play Savage Worlds. They are running an East Texas University campaign. In Savage Worlds, each player character starts each session with 3 chips called "bennies" which allow re-rolls of anything but a critical failure, or can be used to ask for limited things from the GM (for example, you might say to the GM, "I'd like to say that my character brought his gun with him," even though you hadn't thought to say it at the appropriate time, and hand the GM a bennie).
Normally in Savage Worlds, players can earn additional bennies the way D&D does Inspiration -- through clever play, teamwork, or RP, whatever the GM decides. Each PC might earn one more bennie that way during the session, maybe 2. This means most characters get, at most 5 re-rolls in a session. AT MOST.
On the show, however, the GM does not hand out any bennies except the base 3. Instead of doing so, they allow the audience to buy them "extra credit" points, which act as a more limited re-roll (you can only re-roll one time with extra credit, whereas you can use all of your bennies to keep re-rolling if you want). There are times when players have been sitting there with a pile of 20 or 30 extra credit re-rolls.
At the end of each season, they do an out of character round-table, and in the 2nd season, they were talking about how they play Savage Worlds. The GM stopped them and talked to the camera for a bit, and explained that a normal game of Savage Worlds does NOT play this way. That GMs should NOT challenge their players with as difficult a set of tasks as he does, because a team of 4 players might have at most 12-16 rerolls for an entire session, whereas his players sometimes have 30 or 40 or more re-rolls they can do. The audience can also unlock special "story rewards" that they know about but the players don't. One night they unlocked a "Christmas bonus" in the middle of a battle and every player got an extra bennie. One night they unlocked a "helpful NPC" and an NPC showed up at the last minute to save the PCs' bacon. These things, the GM pointed out, cannot happen in your private game, so you have to be much different in your GMing approach. The players then all chimed in to say that they take many more risks than they normally would, because of the huge piles of extra credit -- and they know the audience will send them more if they run out. Again, this cannot happen at a normal table.
My point here, using Wildcards and Savage Worlds as an example, is that these are *shows* as well as games. Yes, the Wildcards people are playing Savage Worlds. Yes, the Critical Role people are playing D&D. But they alter how they play because there is an audience, and they do things that don't necessarily translate well to the table when there isn't an audience.
Getting back to secret backgrounds -- keeping characters, classes, races, backgrounds, a secret, is something that works really well when there is an audience, because there are thousands of people to surprise, all of whom are fans, and may have favorite players and characters. At the table, most players in most game groups really only care very much about their own character, and not about the rest of them. I mean, they don't want your character to die, and they might have a mild curiosity about how you got that eye-patch, but they are often not down for 30 minutes of RP about your lost eye, when there are treasures to loot, dragons to fight, and their own RP to do. So we have to be careful not to do things at the table that are designed to work with an audience, but aren't really needed without one.
Well, we're not talking about elements in general. We're talking about backstories. I don't see anything necessarily bad about not sharing your backstory in its entirety with the other players. It can be, if there are players not creating their character entirely in good faith for instance, but it can also be a good thing. It can be nice to get surprised by the occasional reveal for instance, and if the DM uses a backstory hook for a side venture in the campaign other players not having that metagame info might be better too.
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I think a thing to remember is that other people are often (maybe even usually) not as invested in your character as you are. I know lots of people enjoy the intra-party rp and finding out about other characters that way, and I agree it can be super fun.
But if you expect the rest of the party to work at teasing out your deep, dark secret, a lot of the time you’re going to be disappointed. Having a secret is great, but if you go in expecting everyone else to work for it, that’s not cool. They have their own character, and the BBEG to deal with, don’t expect them to unlock your psyche, too. Unless your backstory becomes plot-necessary, folks might not really care. Obviously, this will vary greatly by group; so I guess the lesson is, know your group.
I think a thing to remember is that other people are often (maybe even usually) not as invested in your character as you are.
^^^ This.
They are almost never as invested in your character as you are. Why would they be? They're invested in their own character.
My impression of many RPG "shows" is that the players make up these deep, involved backstories with secret, mysterious, tragic aspects of the backstory hidden from "the other players" (maybe) but more importantly hidden from the audience. They then slowly unveil their secret mysterious tragic backstory one element at a time at the table. This is done on the various shows (NOT just Critical Role) because there is an audience, and the audience is invested and entertained -- to the audience, this is like a weekly TV show, and so the characters' backstories are written like those of characters from a long-running TV show, unveiled little by little.
But at the table, the other players are unlikely to care about your secret mysterious tragic past. I have seen this happen, where a player has some cool part of their backstory nobody knows, and they reveal it, and the rest of the players are hardly paying attention. They're like, "What? Oh, Darth Vader is your father? Cool, Luke.. um... anyone want some chips while I head to the kitchen?"
Always remember that the other people at the table came to the session to play D&D, not to watch you RP about your backstory.
Again this is a difference with shows. The players know they are on a show, and they know that the audience *is* watching to see the one character's backstory, so they put up with it. At the private table, this may not be the attitude.
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Wow, is it really that rare to care about the back stories of the other player characters? I mean yes, I agree I'm probably more interested in my own character's back story because it's mine, I created it and it's my baby. That being said, I also find the back stories of the other player characters almost as exciting to find out about. They are as much a part of the story as the stuff the DM does. I don't want a ten, or even really five, minute long exposition about it, that's boring, but it's boring because it's screen hogging and slows down the pace of the story, not simply because it's someone else's story. Find some way to incorporate it into the pace of the action and I will be just as rapt learning about that as the next set piece the DM reveals.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
As I prefer characters with nothing interesting in their histories, there's not much to tell, but even if there was, I cannot imagine any of my characters walking up to another character and spilling out a life story unless that was some weird quirk that the character did to everyone, NPCs and BBEGs included.
But what about the other players, out of character? How much do you tell them about your character? Physical description? Class? Backstory?
The other players get what they can see and as appropriate to the situations. The other revelations during the adventures (with help from the DM) are priceless experiences.
Some of my characters never had their whole story told. That's fine. Our games are not about me. They're about us. Making sure everyone knows my character's story would make my character's story all about me and my ability to write a character. That's not why we're there playing in a story together.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Wow, is it really that rare to care about the back stories of the other player characters?
Not in my experience, but this is why I mentioned homebrew campaigns in an earlier post - with published campaigns it's less likely backstories will affect the campaign as much as they might in in a tailor-made one.
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I tell the other players the character's class, race, and subclass, as well as what they'll do most of the time (tank, snipe, heal, etc.). Everything else I share through roleplaying. The players find out backstory alongside their players.
I do the same. How open my characters are about their backstory varies from character to character.
The other players get what they can see and as appropriate to the situations. The other revelations during the adventures (with help from the DM) are priceless experiences.
Some of my characters never had their whole story told. That's fine. Our games are not about me. They're about us. Making sure everyone knows my character's story would make my character's story all about me and my ability to write a character. That's not why we're there playing in a story together.
I respect this, but I'm not sure I understand it. When I come to the table I'm hoping for something like a movie where I get to play a character, but I also am an audience member at the same time. As an audience member I like to be able to see things like explanatory flashbacks and hear internal monologue that gives me context on why a character is acting a particular way. It helps me engage with that character and be more immersed. That's why I play in a story together with my friends. Different strokes, I suppose.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I’m generally a fan of in-game secrets not being secrets IRL. When I’m running/playing in a game I don’t mind all players having access to all character sheets and backgrounds, and trust everyone to effectively role play ignorance of certain things they know about as players but their characters don’t.
In a game I’m DMing, the rogue frequently steals loot before others find it. We RP that openly and all players are aware (and no one is upset by this) but the characters have yet to realize it’s happening. I see how this wouldn’t work in other games (most of my players don’t care about loot and we’re all friends IRL) but it works for us and people laugh at their own character’s ignorance.
Depends on the character. My half-Orc Paladin is a wholesome boi who will tell anyone everything. My Drow on the run ain’t telling anyone shit for fear of word getting to the wrong people and his past coming after him.
if it’s something the character keeps secret, I want to keep it secret from the other players too, until their characters find out.
Wow, is it really that rare to care about the back stories of the other player characters? I mean yes, I agree I'm probably more interested in my own character's back story because it's mine, I created it and it's my baby. That being said, I also find the back stories of the other player characters almost as exciting to find out about. They are as much a part of the story as the stuff the DM does. I don't want a ten, or even really five, minute long exposition about it, that's boring, but it's boring because it's screen hogging and slows down the pace of the story, not simply because it's someone else's story. Find some way to incorporate it into the pace of the action and I will be just as rapt learning about that as the next set piece the DM reveals.
I didn’t mean don’t have backstories or don’t share them when appropriate. I mean don’t expect everyone else to pry some deep dark secret from you (the general you, nothing personal 😁). Don’t be disappointed if the rest of the players don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out what makes one character tick. Offering up some details can be great, but don’t ask others to work for it. Also, and this is a bit cynical but related, most people also overestimate their skill as storytellers; the backstory they invent just isn’t as clever and original as they think. If they’re going to pull me away from the main story, it needs to be interesting.
I didn’t mean don’t have backstories or don’t share them when appropriate. I mean don’t expect everyone else to pry some deep dark secret from you (the general you, nothing personal 😁). Don’t be disappointed if the rest of the players don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out what makes one character tick. Offering up some details can be great, but don’t ask others to work for it. Also, and this is a bit cynical but related, most people also overestimate their skill as storytellers; the backstory they invent just isn’t as clever and original as they think. If they’re going to pull me away from the main story, it needs to be interesting.
Yeah, I think Pangurjan's point about the difference between homebrew campaigns and published modules is on point here, because I was like "what's the difference between the character's story and the main ... ohhh." Since I play mostly in homebrew campaigns, the main story I'm used to IS part of the backstories of all the characters.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I didn’t mean don’t have backstories or don’t share them when appropriate. I mean don’t expect everyone else to pry some deep dark secret from you (the general you, nothing personal 😁). Don’t be disappointed if the rest of the players don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out what makes one character tick. Offering up some details can be great, but don’t ask others to work for it. Also, and this is a bit cynical but related, most people also overestimate their skill as storytellers; the backstory they invent just isn’t as clever and original as they think. If they’re going to pull me away from the main story, it needs to be interesting.
Yeah, I think Pangurjan's point about the difference between homebrew campaigns and published modules is on point here, because I was like "what's the difference between the character's story and the main ... ohhh." Since I play mostly in homebrew campaigns, the main story I'm used to IS part of the backstories of all the characters.
I also only play homebrew. But in those cases, integrating the character specific stories into the main story is going to be up to the skill of the DM, and how well written the backstory is. And this comes back to my earlier point about people thinking their backstory is more interesting and well written than it actually is. Sometimes people think they are giving the DM more to work with than they actually are.
This whole debate kinda mirrors two distinct schools of thought I've seen in DMing circles. Namely:
1.) "The characters aren't important - the story they experience is" This is the "don't bother writing a backstory, I'm not gonna read it" DM thing, where the game looks forward. BioWizard has been speaking mostly to this point - your character exists only as a vessel to allow you-the-player to experience the game. Their past is utterly unimportant, any prior attachments that aren't things which have happened at the table are seen only as annoying distractions at best and showboating, spotlight-hogging primadonnaism at worst. These are the tables who think the absolute coolest part of D&D is finding out what happens next - what's in that ancient ruin we just stumbled across? Is that a dragon; what's in its hoard? Is the King being manipulated by a disguised demon; what can we do about that? The game doesn't have time for your personal issues or your weepy backstory - there's Adventure to be had! Who cares if your parents are dead or how that happened - maybe if you Adventure long enough you'll find something that can bring them back. "Adventure" is what happens when a band of mercenaries wanders out into the world and finds some trouble to get into. Which mercenaries? Doesn't matter - any batch of PCs is as good as the next batch of PCs, which has the upshot(?) of making PC death almost irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what happens next.
2.) "The characters ARE the story - there is no game without the characters." This is the Critical Role-esque table where players and GM work together to create interesting foundations full of tender, juicy plot hooks the GM can yank on all throughout the campaign. Ophidimancer's been good at covering this one, where finding out more about your fellow adventurers is an integral part of The Story. Discovering their pasts, laying low their demons, and coping with foes and threats from Session -1 is where the fun is - "what happens next?" is still the best part of D&D, but in this case it's "what happens to these people next?" The story would be completely different if even one player had a different character, and these games tend to change dramatically with a PC death. This style of play requires characters to have Cool Backstories, and it requires them to not blurt out their backstory the first chance they get, but it's also true that a lot of people have no clue how to build a proper 'Cool Backstory', especially for a low-level character. As such, a lot of folk give this style flak it doesn't really deserve simply because it's unfairly associated with bad hipster ******nozzles who write fifty-page novellas instead of backstories.
I love this second style of game, it's by far my favorite, but I also believe that if you can't keep your backstory on a single page of text (in a normal font size, please), and/or summarize that backstory with at most two paragraphs of concise report, you've got too much shit going on. The point of a pre-crafted backstory is to provide hooks and threads for the GM to pull on, not to cram half a dozen completely resolved adventures into your backstory.
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Backstories obviously have to be shared with the DM (which I pretty much am 100% of the time). If someone doesn't tell me as a DM their backstory and tries to "conveniently" to try to get some bs benefit the backstory is not canon. I don't need backstories to be fully fleshed out before he first session, but it needs to be shared with me before its mentioned in game. As a player I'd tell the DM my backstory, and depending on what the backstory is, I will either tell the other players, or I won't depending on if I want their characters to know.
The problem with "going about it the way Critical Role" does is that Critical Role is a show. They have an audience of thousands. They keep the backgrounds a secret to keep the audience entertained and guessing, primarily. They know that each character will have fans... that some of the fans will "ship" characters... and so on. They have to be responsive to the audience's needs or no one will watch the show, and they lose their income source. Furthermore, although I didn't watch series 1 and only watched some of series 2 long after it launched, I'm sure that in between the 2 campaigns, there was tons of fan speculation about which new characters each one would play and the players therefore had to keep their characters generally a secret (though of course, not really from each other). The fans derived a source of fun out of predicting what character Sam or Travis or Laura would play next, and so the players were not just unveiling their characters to each other, but more so, to the audience.
Because, again, Critical Role is a show.
If you're not playing to an audience, there's really no need to keep your character's background, class, race, etc., secret from the group. If your group finds it fun, great. But in general, the only person who cares about your character at the table, is you. There are no "fans" of your character watching, and the other players are more interested in their own characters than in yours.
Do what your table finds fun. If Critical Role has good ideas, by all means steal them.
But don't just blindly do what the people on Critical Role do at the D&D table, because a large percentage of what they do is playing to the audience, because it's a show. There's nothing wrong with that, but what you are doing has no audience, and if you do the "play to the audience" stuff, who in the world is going to see it?
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I wouldn't call that a problem. In my experience, anecdotal as it may be, it's in the same ballpark as most of my long-term groups: players will tell each other at least something, if only to avoid "if I'd know someone else was going to play X, I'd have gone with something else" arguments, but not everything. How much they tell each other and what sort of info they keep secret (from other players, not from the DM) varies, but that's the general expectation I have after a couple of decades and a whole lot of groups.
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Some players like to RP out their character meeting and introducing themselves to the party. I never really worried about it either, but some players find that fun. Who am I to tell them their fun is wrong? Especially if it doesn’t hurt anything.
Just because a particular PC has something going for just themselves that the rest of the party isn’t involved with isn’t such a big deal. Like, back in high school people would regularly grab the DM in the halls to set something up for their characters, PCs would migrate from table to table, etc. Everybody’s character had “secrets” with the DM. But they weren’t “secret secrets,” there was nothing toxic about it, it was just… well, like real life I suppose.
And sometimes a DM wants to set up a cool reveal for the group and asks a player to help with the project. That isn’t really a player and DM playing a mini game against the party.
That’s more like when my mom, aunt, and grandmother would all coordinate to make sure that the presents from family and the presents from Santa didn’t accidentally get wrapped in the same paper. (All the presents from Santa were done in plain wrapping paper, family gifts had printed paper.) That was a way to increase/maintain verisimilitude for my cousins and me.
Campaigns I DM in my semi-ho Mystara have certain things restricted by geography during character creation. So players get slightly different info in their handouts based on those descriptions. Anyone raised by or having livid in an elven comunity would have more detailed info about Elves than the other PCs, and so too therefore do their players. As a DM, I would rather the players with the Elf PCs get to explain those details on Elven culture when they come up than me doing it. Not only does that help reduce my longwinded expositions, it seems more natural from a character standpoint too. So it’s not that I “have secrets with everyone,” just that some PCs know more about certain things than others do.
I guess it all comes down to how much or little the people at the table trust (or distrust) one another. 🤷♂️ I guess I never realized how good I’ve had it that stuff which seems perfectly natural and reasonable to me and the others I play with is apparently “Abby… someone” for lots of folks.
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The "problem" I was referring to was not realizing which elements of a show are there because it is a show, and trying to do things the same way at the table, when those elements may serve no useful purpose at the table and may even hinder regular play.
Below I use an example from a different show (Saving Throw), but it's not directly about backgrounds so I will spoilerize it.
Let me take an example from a show I have watched a lot more of: Wildcards, on the Saving Throw channel, where they play Savage Worlds. They are running an East Texas University campaign. In Savage Worlds, each player character starts each session with 3 chips called "bennies" which allow re-rolls of anything but a critical failure, or can be used to ask for limited things from the GM (for example, you might say to the GM, "I'd like to say that my character brought his gun with him," even though you hadn't thought to say it at the appropriate time, and hand the GM a bennie).
Normally in Savage Worlds, players can earn additional bennies the way D&D does Inspiration -- through clever play, teamwork, or RP, whatever the GM decides. Each PC might earn one more bennie that way during the session, maybe 2. This means most characters get, at most 5 re-rolls in a session. AT MOST.
On the show, however, the GM does not hand out any bennies except the base 3. Instead of doing so, they allow the audience to buy them "extra credit" points, which act as a more limited re-roll (you can only re-roll one time with extra credit, whereas you can use all of your bennies to keep re-rolling if you want). There are times when players have been sitting there with a pile of 20 or 30 extra credit re-rolls.
At the end of each season, they do an out of character round-table, and in the 2nd season, they were talking about how they play Savage Worlds. The GM stopped them and talked to the camera for a bit, and explained that a normal game of Savage Worlds does NOT play this way. That GMs should NOT challenge their players with as difficult a set of tasks as he does, because a team of 4 players might have at most 12-16 rerolls for an entire session, whereas his players sometimes have 30 or 40 or more re-rolls they can do. The audience can also unlock special "story rewards" that they know about but the players don't. One night they unlocked a "Christmas bonus" in the middle of a battle and every player got an extra bennie. One night they unlocked a "helpful NPC" and an NPC showed up at the last minute to save the PCs' bacon. These things, the GM pointed out, cannot happen in your private game, so you have to be much different in your GMing approach. The players then all chimed in to say that they take many more risks than they normally would, because of the huge piles of extra credit -- and they know the audience will send them more if they run out. Again, this cannot happen at a normal table.
My point here, using Wildcards and Savage Worlds as an example, is that these are *shows* as well as games. Yes, the Wildcards people are playing Savage Worlds. Yes, the Critical Role people are playing D&D. But they alter how they play because there is an audience, and they do things that don't necessarily translate well to the table when there isn't an audience.
Getting back to secret backgrounds -- keeping characters, classes, races, backgrounds, a secret, is something that works really well when there is an audience, because there are thousands of people to surprise, all of whom are fans, and may have favorite players and characters. At the table, most players in most game groups really only care very much about their own character, and not about the rest of them. I mean, they don't want your character to die, and they might have a mild curiosity about how you got that eye-patch, but they are often not down for 30 minutes of RP about your lost eye, when there are treasures to loot, dragons to fight, and their own RP to do. So we have to be careful not to do things at the table that are designed to work with an audience, but aren't really needed without one.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I tell the other players the character's class, race, and subclass, as well as what they'll do most of the time (tank, snipe, heal, etc.). Everything else I share through roleplaying. The players find out backstory alongside their players.
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
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If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
Well, we're not talking about elements in general. We're talking about backstories. I don't see anything necessarily bad about not sharing your backstory in its entirety with the other players. It can be, if there are players not creating their character entirely in good faith for instance, but it can also be a good thing. It can be nice to get surprised by the occasional reveal for instance, and if the DM uses a backstory hook for a side venture in the campaign other players not having that metagame info might be better too.
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I think a thing to remember is that other people are often (maybe even usually) not as invested in your character as you are. I know lots of people enjoy the intra-party rp and finding out about other characters that way, and I agree it can be super fun.
But if you expect the rest of the party to work at teasing out your deep, dark secret, a lot of the time you’re going to be disappointed. Having a secret is great, but if you go in expecting everyone else to work for it, that’s not cool. They have their own character, and the BBEG to deal with, don’t expect them to unlock your psyche, too. Unless your backstory becomes plot-necessary, folks might not really care.
Obviously, this will vary greatly by group; so I guess the lesson is, know your group.
^^^ This.
They are almost never as invested in your character as you are. Why would they be? They're invested in their own character.
My impression of many RPG "shows" is that the players make up these deep, involved backstories with secret, mysterious, tragic aspects of the backstory hidden from "the other players" (maybe) but more importantly hidden from the audience. They then slowly unveil their secret mysterious tragic backstory one element at a time at the table. This is done on the various shows (NOT just Critical Role) because there is an audience, and the audience is invested and entertained -- to the audience, this is like a weekly TV show, and so the characters' backstories are written like those of characters from a long-running TV show, unveiled little by little.
But at the table, the other players are unlikely to care about your secret mysterious tragic past. I have seen this happen, where a player has some cool part of their backstory nobody knows, and they reveal it, and the rest of the players are hardly paying attention. They're like, "What? Oh, Darth Vader is your father? Cool, Luke.. um... anyone want some chips while I head to the kitchen?"
Always remember that the other people at the table came to the session to play D&D, not to watch you RP about your backstory.
Again this is a difference with shows. The players know they are on a show, and they know that the audience *is* watching to see the one character's backstory, so they put up with it. At the private table, this may not be the attitude.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Wow, is it really that rare to care about the back stories of the other player characters? I mean yes, I agree I'm probably more interested in my own character's back story because it's mine, I created it and it's my baby. That being said, I also find the back stories of the other player characters almost as exciting to find out about. They are as much a part of the story as the stuff the DM does. I don't want a ten, or even really five, minute long exposition about it, that's boring, but it's boring because it's screen hogging and slows down the pace of the story, not simply because it's someone else's story. Find some way to incorporate it into the pace of the action and I will be just as rapt learning about that as the next set piece the DM reveals.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
The other players get what they can see and as appropriate to the situations. The other revelations during the adventures (with help from the DM) are priceless experiences.
Some of my characters never had their whole story told. That's fine. Our games are not about me. They're about us. Making sure everyone knows my character's story would make my character's story all about me and my ability to write a character. That's not why we're there playing in a story together.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Not in my experience, but this is why I mentioned homebrew campaigns in an earlier post - with published campaigns it's less likely backstories will affect the campaign as much as they might in in a tailor-made one.
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I do the same. How open my characters are about their backstory varies from character to character.
I respect this, but I'm not sure I understand it. When I come to the table I'm hoping for something like a movie where I get to play a character, but I also am an audience member at the same time. As an audience member I like to be able to see things like explanatory flashbacks and hear internal monologue that gives me context on why a character is acting a particular way. It helps me engage with that character and be more immersed. That's why I play in a story together with my friends. Different strokes, I suppose.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I’m generally a fan of in-game secrets not being secrets IRL. When I’m running/playing in a game I don’t mind all players having access to all character sheets and backgrounds, and trust everyone to effectively role play ignorance of certain things they know about as players but their characters don’t.
In a game I’m DMing, the rogue frequently steals loot before others find it. We RP that openly and all players are aware (and no one is upset by this) but the characters have yet to realize it’s happening. I see how this wouldn’t work in other games (most of my players don’t care about loot and we’re all friends IRL) but it works for us and people laugh at their own character’s ignorance.
Depends on the character. My half-Orc Paladin is a wholesome boi who will tell anyone everything. My Drow on the run ain’t telling anyone shit for fear of word getting to the wrong people and his past coming after him.
if it’s something the character keeps secret, I want to keep it secret from the other players too, until their characters find out.
I didn’t mean don’t have backstories or don’t share them when appropriate. I mean don’t expect everyone else to pry some deep dark secret from you (the general you, nothing personal 😁). Don’t be disappointed if the rest of the players don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out what makes one character tick. Offering up some details can be great, but don’t ask others to work for it.
Also, and this is a bit cynical but related, most people also overestimate their skill as storytellers; the backstory they invent just isn’t as clever and original as they think. If they’re going to pull me away from the main story, it needs to be interesting.
Yeah, I think Pangurjan's point about the difference between homebrew campaigns and published modules is on point here, because I was like "what's the difference between the character's story and the main ... ohhh." Since I play mostly in homebrew campaigns, the main story I'm used to IS part of the backstories of all the characters.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I also only play homebrew. But in those cases, integrating the character specific stories into the main story is going to be up to the skill of the DM, and how well written the backstory is. And this comes back to my earlier point about people thinking their backstory is more interesting and well written than it actually is. Sometimes people think they are giving the DM more to work with than they actually are.
This whole debate kinda mirrors two distinct schools of thought I've seen in DMing circles. Namely:
1.) "The characters aren't important - the story they experience is"
This is the "don't bother writing a backstory, I'm not gonna read it" DM thing, where the game looks forward. BioWizard has been speaking mostly to this point - your character exists only as a vessel to allow you-the-player to experience the game. Their past is utterly unimportant, any prior attachments that aren't things which have happened at the table are seen only as annoying distractions at best and showboating, spotlight-hogging primadonnaism at worst. These are the tables who think the absolute coolest part of D&D is finding out what happens next - what's in that ancient ruin we just stumbled across? Is that a dragon; what's in its hoard? Is the King being manipulated by a disguised demon; what can we do about that? The game doesn't have time for your personal issues or your weepy backstory - there's Adventure to be had! Who cares if your parents are dead or how that happened - maybe if you Adventure long enough you'll find something that can bring them back. "Adventure" is what happens when a band of mercenaries wanders out into the world and finds some trouble to get into. Which mercenaries? Doesn't matter - any batch of PCs is as good as the next batch of PCs, which has the upshot(?) of making PC death almost irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what happens next.
2.) "The characters ARE the story - there is no game without the characters."
This is the Critical Role-esque table where players and GM work together to create interesting foundations full of tender, juicy plot hooks the GM can yank on all throughout the campaign. Ophidimancer's been good at covering this one, where finding out more about your fellow adventurers is an integral part of The Story. Discovering their pasts, laying low their demons, and coping with foes and threats from Session -1 is where the fun is - "what happens next?" is still the best part of D&D, but in this case it's "what happens to these people next?" The story would be completely different if even one player had a different character, and these games tend to change dramatically with a PC death. This style of play requires characters to have Cool Backstories, and it requires them to not blurt out their backstory the first chance they get, but it's also true that a lot of people have no clue how to build a proper 'Cool Backstory', especially for a low-level character. As such, a lot of folk give this style flak it doesn't really deserve simply because it's unfairly associated with bad hipster ******nozzles who write fifty-page novellas instead of backstories.
I love this second style of game, it's by far my favorite, but I also believe that if you can't keep your backstory on a single page of text (in a normal font size, please), and/or summarize that backstory with at most two paragraphs of concise report, you've got too much shit going on. The point of a pre-crafted backstory is to provide hooks and threads for the GM to pull on, not to cram half a dozen completely resolved adventures into your backstory.
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