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.
For me, personally, it's all in good fun so I don't put my literary judge hat on. As long as it's not problematic and uncomfortable.
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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 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.
Agreed. One brilliant guideline someone posted about a year ago that I saw and have adopted is that a PC’s backstory should have a number of paragraphs up to the PC’s starting PB+1 (minimum PB). So for 1st-4th level campaign starts, each PC would have a 2-3 paragraphs backstory, a 9th-12th level start would be call for a 4-5 paragraph backstory. (A paragraph being 3-7 sentences.)
Yes, I do think a back story is important, but a well written one should be concise and contains seeds for coolness rather than outright coolness. All the coolest stuff in a character's story should happen after the back story, but for me it's all the cooler if it involves the character rather than just being inflicted upon the character. I truly enjoy the collaborative nature of the story even, or rather especially, when I'm running the game.
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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!
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.
This is an interesting take. I wonder if its a generational thing. Those of us who started back in the days of 1e had characters with a life expectancy of about 1.5 sessions, so writing a backstory at all was kind of a waste of time. Heck, I got to a point where I didn't even name a character until it hit 3rd level.
I like to think I've evolved with the times, and I really do enjoy the storytelling that the more modern versions of the game allow, but I guess there's some of those older sensibilities still kicking around. That said, I often write excessively long backstories, but they're mostly for me to help me sort out the character's personality, and I never expect anyone else to be interested in them.
There's different ways to go about backstory-ing appropriately. I like to write a vignette from the point of view of the character I'm writing for, something told from their eyes and in their voice. It's much longer than the one-paragraph-per-point-of-proficiency thing, but it's also doing more for both me and for the DM (should the DM choose to read it, rather than just the summary) than a bullet-points summary does. But even my vignettes have a strict rule. They all start the same way: [Greeting], [Introduction], [Goal/Motivation], all in one line. A couple of examples (spoiler'd for those who don't care), by way of demonstration and talking point:
"Hey there! The name's Nytra Xyroxi Helnoa Ufeli Bitterclear, of the Hupperdook Bitterclears, and I wanna be a crazy cool adventurer!"
"Hello. My name is Memory, and I wish to find my sister and free her from the torments of the Feywild."
"Hi. I'm Starlight Through Driving Rain, and I want to uncover the secret histories of this world and drag them back into the light."
"Ahoy, jackass! Ya can call me Kherryn Redmane, and I'm here ta get drunk, rich, and powerful! All at the same time'f I can manage it!"
All my backstories start the same way because that single opening line is the only thing a DM needs to know before running a game for that character. If a DM wants nothing but that line and thinks everything else is irrelevant, a'ight. If a DM wants the rest of the story, I can absolutely give it to them, adjust things based on their own ideas of how the world works, and so forth.
If a DM doesn't even want that one line? If I get "I don't care what your motivation for adventuring is, because your actual motivation is 'I wanna play D&D'," then I have an immediate red-flag moment and know to be very skeptical of that campaign and to pay close attention (more than normal, anyways) through Session Zero.
For me, a backstory should boil down to why your character's motivation is what it is. Cool plot hooks are also very nice, and a DM willing to work with the player to invent a hook-rich backstory is an absolute gift, but yeah. If you can't boil it all down to that one sentence, ye should probably rethink your work.
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.
This is an interesting take. I wonder if its a generational thing. Those of us who started back in the days of 1e had characters with a life expectancy of about 1.5 sessions, so writing a backstory at all was kind of a waste of time. Heck, I got to a point where I didn't even name a character until it hit 3rd level.
I like to think I've evolved with the times, and I really do enjoy the storytelling that the more modern versions of the game allow, but I guess there's some of those older sensibilities still kicking around. That said, I often write excessively long backstories, but they're mostly for me to help me sort out the character's personality, and I never expect anyone else to be interested in them.
I like school of thought number 2 the best, and I’m very careful not to get too wordy or too self-absorbed in my backstories.
In my admittedly incomplete experience, experience level in D&D does tend to have something to do with it. Though it honestly strikes me as more of a faultline based on Critical Role - "are you a huge fan of CR and wanna try and make your games more like that (within reason), or are you someone who thinks CR is ruining/warping a generation of new D&D players?"
There's plenty of older players who really love CR and fall neatly within Style 2, and likely were doing so before CR came about. And there's newer players who came into the game through a different avenue (likely gaming) and are all about Style 1 and simply putting themselves into an adventure with an otherwise-disposable Adventurer Skin. The first style of play is usually considered the 'Old School' style, but it's also the 'Video Gamer' style, wherein somebody is there to experience the content with a cool set of superpowers and couldn't care less what the emotions and personal connections of their avatar is.
The second style is also more common with people who spent a great deal of time doing DMless roleplaying, like I have. Where everybody has their own character, and they get shoved into a thread/story that the players all collaboratively figure out as they go without any overarching referee. I have close to twenty years' experience doing that style of game, which is all about tracking specific characters through the saga of their lives, and so my D&D trends strongly towards a focus on characters as well. People with the same twenty years' experience with older versions of D&D where characters died all the time and nobody ever really cared about the saga of Sir Wunder of Bar's life even if it lasted more than two sessions will have a much different expectation, I'd wager.
There's different ways to go about backstory-ing appropriately. I like to write a vignette from the point of view of the character I'm writing for, something told from their eyes and in their voice. It's much longer than the one-paragraph-per-point-of-proficiency thing, but it's also doing more for both me and for the DM (should the DM choose to read it, rather than just the summary) than a bullet-points summary does. But even my vignettes have a strict rule. They all start the same way: [Greeting], [Introduction], [Goal/Motivation], all in one line. A couple of examples (spoiler'd for those who don't care), by way of demonstration and talking point:
"Hey there! The name's Nytra Xyroxi Helnoa Ufeli Bitterclear, of the Hupperdook Bitterclears, and I wanna be a crazy cool adventurer!"
"Hello. My name is Memory, and I wish to find my sister and free her from the torments of the Feywild."
"Hi. I'm Starlight Through Driving Rain, and I want to uncover the secret histories of this world and drag them back into the light."
"Ahoy, jackass! Ya can call me Kherryn Redmane, and I'm here ta get drunk, rich, and powerful! All at the same time'f I can manage it!"
All my backstories start the same way because that single opening line is the only thing a DM needs to know before running a game for that character. If a DM wants nothing but that line and thinks everything else is irrelevant, a'ight. If a DM wants the rest of the story, I can absolutely give it to them, adjust things based on their own ideas of how the world works, and so forth.
If a DM doesn't even want that one line? If I get "I don't care what your motivation for adventuring is, because your actual motivation is 'I wanna play D&D'," then I have an immediate red-flag moment and know to be very skeptical of that campaign and to pay close attention (more than normal, anyways) through Session Zero.
For me, a backstory should boil down to why your character's motivation is what it is. Cool plot hooks are also very nice, and a DM willing to work with the player to invent a hook-rich backstory is an absolute gift, but yeah. If you can't boil it all down to that one sentence, ye should probably rethink your work.
All of those snippets are great and make me want to read the longer versions! I don't think I've ever played in a game where the DM outright didn't want back stories, though I have played in one shots and shorter campaigns where I felt like all I needed was an aesthetic and a personality without necessarily a history.
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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!
Backstories don't have to be full of dark secrets and stunning revelations either. The old standbys of being a younger child of some minor nobles, trying to make your own way in the world because you certainly won't be inheriting or being the lone survivor of a raid by [insert generic evil here] or having a favourite uncle with more tall tales of heroism than toes and fingers (darn frostbite) and little sense of bringing up a child responsibly to instill a powerful wanderlust into you, those all still work and always will. Your character probably has no reason to be tightlipped about this, but might also never have any reason to bring any of it up in conversation. Characters who do have skeletons in their backstory closet likely do have cause not to spill the beans too easily. And that's all perfectly ok. If the campaign doesn't need it and the players aren't curious about it, none of these potential plothooks need to be actively explored. A backstory can be just for you too. But in that case, I don't see a lot of point in everyone sharing their character's early life story with everyone else either. If my PC doesn't care about his companions' histories, sordid or sad or secret or... something, then why should I, the player? If it won't come up in the game and as such certainly won't affect the campaign, do I need to know about it? I mean, I'm not going to complain or think it's weird if another player forwards me their elaborate backstory to read, but the exact same is true if none of the other players do anything like that.
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So I'm old-school in that I'm loathe to even make a backstory until I'm around 3rd level. My preferred method is to make it up as we play (like, if I see an NPC or other game element that I like I ask the DM if I can link my character to it. Or I make up little pieces as we come across in game situations). I'm also open to the DM doing the same.
Most modern GMs don't care for this method, for whatever reason.... I mean, is this a collaborative storytelling game or not? Lol
So I'm old-school in that I'm loathe to even make a backstory until I'm around 3rd level. My preferred method is to make it up as we play (like, if I see an NPC or other game element that I like I ask the DM if I can link my character to it. Or I make up little pieces as we come across in game situations). I'm also open to the DM doing the same.
Most modern GMs don't care for this method, for whatever reason.... I mean, is this a collaborative storytelling game or not? Lol
That’s cool. I’ve never known anybody who did it like that but if I was the DM I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to do that. I’d encourage you to start at 1st level though.
So I'm old-school in that I'm loathe to even make a backstory until I'm around 3rd level. My preferred method is to make it up as we play (like, if I see an NPC or other game element that I like I ask the DM if I can link my character to it. Or I make up little pieces as we come across in game situations). I'm also open to the DM doing the same.
Most modern GMs don't care for this method, for whatever reason.... I mean, is this a collaborative storytelling game or not? Lol
This is a technique used in some of the newer, narrative oriented, games. Games that are not D&D. I think you may actually be ahead of your time rather than behind them.
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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!
Hmm. Never thought of it like that. Most GMs that I've played under seemed to find this technique bothersome. Possibly because they don't feel comfortable with that level of improvisation. Something I've learned in the time I've played the game is that the only planning that really works is planning what happened before the game starts (and that begins to unravel the moment PCs enter the equation). Once the game starts the only thing you can count on is the party being unpredictable.
Oh I meant that I don't start trying to cement things until third level. Before third level my character will probably be all over the place, as I'm trying to figure then out. I don't get too attached to any ideas until they've made 3rd level. Why put in a lot of effort for a character who has a serious chance of dying because the DMs math was a little off during encounter planning.
So I'm old-school in that I'm loathe to even make a backstory until I'm around 3rd level. My preferred method is to make it up as we play (like, if I see an NPC or other game element that I like I ask the DM if I can link my character to it. Or I make up little pieces as we come across in game situations). I'm also open to the DM doing the same.
Most modern GMs don't care for this method, for whatever reason.... I mean, is this a collaborative storytelling game or not? Lol
That’s cool. I’ve never known anybody who did it like that but if I was the DM I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to do that. I’d encourage you to start at 1st level though.
Hmm. Never thought of it like that. Most GMs that I've played under seemed to find this technique bothersome. Possibly because they don't feel comfortable with that level of improvisation. Something I've learned in the time I've played the game is that the only planning that really works is planning what happened before the game starts (and that begins to unravel the moment PCs enter the equation). Once the game starts the only thing you can count on is the party being unpredictable.
Oh I meant that I don't start trying to cement things until third level. Before third level my character will probably be all over the place, as I'm trying to figure then out. I don't get too attached to any ideas until they've made 3rd level. Why put in a lot of effort for a character who has a serious chance of dying because the DMs math was a little off during encounter planning.
I think you're right in line with the way I prefer my players to run things. I prefer running levels 1-3 frankly as "training wheels" anyway. Within that development space, the PCs do things, and part of the fun of playing in that protean space is we can decide _why_ a character made certain choices retroactively. Also since I prefer to play more open ended/free form, this discovering character through play table style gives me a lot of inspiration predicated on the game played rather than preconceptions in character generation.
Someday I'd like a group of my players to land somehow on Abandomium, my broken world as rogue comet whose capital is an as close to exact replica of the Luxor Casino as possible, but the stronger they are the better they'll be for some of the high level Humpty Dumpty reparative work they'll need to do there (plus more likely to survive the Sphyx because it's the Luxor, it's right there!). For now though, they're in relatively lore faithful FR and have gone from Luskan, to the Sea of Moving Ice to Baldur's Gate, where they were going to do an adaptation of "Book of the Raven"which was going to land them into a very modified Tyranny of Dragons, but through the happy accident of a random encounter table may be about to become "reality magic mirror" stars to save a theater in Little Calimsham. All this while, the characters are still figuring themselves out in very much the way I think obeytheFist is describing. One character is a half elf whisper bard, courtier background; but player also wanted an orphan or at least abandoned childhood, who got by on their wits in way that eventually gained the favor of people in corridors of power. That's it. No idea where he was from, etc.
They reached level three on the Sea of Moving Ice. I gave them options. One character is a Tiefling who lived among the Barbarian groups on the glacier by Icewind Dale, there were rumors of winter and darkness falling longer. They had also met a character very much plugged into my idiosyncratic dragon mythology, as well as Tyranny of Dragons and BGDiA (Burney who I've made a big deal in my head canon, in my world, she's loosely responsible for the largest unsolved art heist IRL) who had work for them. They also met the leader in exile of Abandominion who had work for them. They also had a trove of books from the Netheril they figured may get them into Candlekeep to research some of the lore loose ends they've uncovered to date, or could unload to a book trader in one of the Sword Coast's major cities. They opted for a combo of the last two and got passage to Baldur's Gate. Prior to arrival, bard player and I had a conversation where I laid out the social hierarchy of BG and said it's actually a perfect place for a character to come from nothing, rise into a comfortable life through favor of the ruling class, but also a place to develop disillusion with said ruling class setting you out on adventuring instead of working at the top of a wrong system. Player liked the idea of a homecoming to a place "you don't love, but you know" and has a bunch of questions neither of us yet know the answer to but will figure out. So far his local knowledge got the players comfortable with banking with the thieves guild instead of the Patriars, which in turn has got them in this juicy spot where they bank with a guild boss who also is putting the squeeze on the theater they've begun to work for. And it all just sort of happened unplanned (I didn't even know this theater existed and I've played through DiA one and half times, so literally deus ex polyhedral).
Other party's in various stages of establishment. Tabaxi's fine being a fish out of water traveller curious about everything, and her questioning actually has created some fun world building on the fly (like the economics of chocolate and ceviche in the FR, separate conversations). Dragonborn Bard I expected to have a sort ferocious passion for lore and discovery, but didn't pin the character. Instead, while the character is creatively daring and imposing on stage, but when off stage she can be very cautious/anxious in perilous situations, and very much a rule follower. Why is that? Might have something to do with her Dragonborn origins, we're not sure yet but figuring it out. Tiefling fighter is just enjoying the heck out of being the strongest member in the party, nothing really to hearken back other than "grew up on glacier" so takes survival seriously and respects toughness. That leaves a hobgoblin wizard who I did give a backstory to since I rolled the character for the player who simply asked "I want to be a Wizard named Tim, otherwise surprise me." HIs backstory is basically a B plot that could make a thing of the Hobgoblin nation's war machine, which may become a useful alliance or foil if the game goes full into Tyranny of Dragons, but there's enough to leave up in the air.
I guess I'm saying, and I think I've said this a lot when back story comes up, sometimes back story is best developed retroactively. A lot of folks come, to use Yuriel polarity, though it's a useful polarity (even though I think the middling is a very wide space) in with the CR motivated "I have story" to bring to the game. And I think folks see what "real actors" are doing and eat that up ... but what I don't think is often being recognized in the back story drivers is that if you talk to working actors, you'll often here that sure they research backgrounds, or sometimes do such research but a lot of the background is actually realized through performing the character (seriously folks should read _Creating a Role_ and _Building a Character_ by Stanivslaski, the techniques are actually pretty easy to import to TTRPGs) "I'm doing this and I'm realizing it's because "hitherto inarticulate background aspect." Playing is the performance and that's where the character is really clarified and discovered.
[Kinda an aside to The Commode Story sequence in Reservoir Dogs. It's sort of a 7 minute master class in creating a role through repeated performing, Roth's "handler" is arguably the DM, the gangster he eventually convinces are the players at the table. A cop can become a naturalistic convincing drug dealer not so much through biographical factoids, though there's relevance for that, but through just performing the part, the performer owns it after they've left the script. I've actually used this scene to teach both formal interviewing and surreptitious investigation techniques to establish immersion into rapport with a subject]
But yeah, two paragraphish is probably fair. I'd prefer that or nothing at a session 1 than something with a page count.
It varies by character, but in general I don't mind sharing my character's backstory OOC - I'm just not likely to volunteer that information. In general I try to keep it concise - the interesting bits are what happen during the campaign; the backstory is just there to lay out how I got there.
A query, Midnight, as you seem to be in deep with this method.
Does this "discover backstory retroactively in play" method ever affect the course of the story? My usual reticence with the idea of just knowing absolutely shit-nothing about my character going in, beyond not having anything to go on for portraying the character, is that the GM then has nothing to go on for tying the character to the story. The character's background doesn't exist, thus the character's background is immaterial to the story, and thus the character itself is also immaterial to the story. There's a test one can run to see if their character matters to the tale they're running - ask yourself if the story being told at your table would change at all if your character woke up one day as something completely different. If you're playing an elven abjuration wizard of the Sage background, and you woke up one morning as a goliath Lycan order blood hunter of the Soldier background (and nobody went 'WHAT THE **** HAPPENED?' but simply accepted it), would anything at all in the course of your game change?
If the answer is "No", then your character doesn't matter to the story you're telling, and I wonder why you're playing that game at all.
I maintain that a good backstory poses questions the GM can use as plot hooks, decides your motivation for adventuring, and gives you a seed to start with. Anything more is usually overdoing it and generally has to be at GM discretion, but anything less generally means your character doesn't matter to the game at all. Some old school players are about to post "yeah, so? That's the point!" at me, and sure - some people like knowing they can play a disposable hero with no relevance to the world that they can socket in a replacement for in a matter of minutes should that character die.
But man...that seems like a lonely and unpleasant way to play to me.
I watch a group where 3 of the characters have deep hooks in the lore, 1 might have hooks, and 1 doesn't.
The 3 characters mentioned are well established and most of their history was known far prior to the first session. The last 1 mentioned could be (and could easily end up being) replaced with no real consequence. The unknown one seems to have more importance through little events that have happened. Those last 2 know little about the first three and vice-versa. Those last 2 know little about each other, too.
Yet, the DM said many times that he knows all their backstories.
It's a strange but entertaining dynamic between the players. They only know what their characters know.
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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.
I did vote, but I was wondering: how do you make a poll on this site? I've had a couple of topics I'd like to make polls on, but I don't know how. Please help.
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For me, personally, it's all in good fun so I don't put my literary judge hat on. As long as it's not problematic and uncomfortable.
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!
Agreed. One brilliant guideline someone posted about a year ago that I saw and have adopted is that a PC’s backstory should have a number of paragraphs up to the PC’s starting PB+1 (minimum PB). So for 1st-4th level campaign starts, each PC would have a 2-3 paragraphs backstory, a 9th-12th level start would be call for a 4-5 paragraph backstory. (A paragraph being 3-7 sentences.)
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Yes, I do think a back story is important, but a well written one should be concise and contains seeds for coolness rather than outright coolness. All the coolest stuff in a character's story should happen after the back story, but for me it's all the cooler if it involves the character rather than just being inflicted upon the character. I truly enjoy the collaborative nature of the story even, or rather especially, when I'm running the game.
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!
This is an interesting take. I wonder if its a generational thing. Those of us who started back in the days of 1e had characters with a life expectancy of about 1.5 sessions, so writing a backstory at all was kind of a waste of time. Heck, I got to a point where I didn't even name a character until it hit 3rd level.
I like to think I've evolved with the times, and I really do enjoy the storytelling that the more modern versions of the game allow, but I guess there's some of those older sensibilities still kicking around. That said, I often write excessively long backstories, but they're mostly for me to help me sort out the character's personality, and I never expect anyone else to be interested in them.
There's different ways to go about backstory-ing appropriately. I like to write a vignette from the point of view of the character I'm writing for, something told from their eyes and in their voice. It's much longer than the one-paragraph-per-point-of-proficiency thing, but it's also doing more for both me and for the DM (should the DM choose to read it, rather than just the summary) than a bullet-points summary does. But even my vignettes have a strict rule. They all start the same way: [Greeting], [Introduction], [Goal/Motivation], all in one line. A couple of examples (spoiler'd for those who don't care), by way of demonstration and talking point:
"Hey there! The name's Nytra Xyroxi Helnoa Ufeli Bitterclear, of the Hupperdook Bitterclears, and I wanna be a crazy cool adventurer!"
"Hello. My name is Memory, and I wish to find my sister and free her from the torments of the Feywild."
"Hi. I'm Starlight Through Driving Rain, and I want to uncover the secret histories of this world and drag them back into the light."
"Ahoy, jackass! Ya can call me Kherryn Redmane, and I'm here ta get drunk, rich, and powerful! All at the same time'f I can manage it!"
All my backstories start the same way because that single opening line is the only thing a DM needs to know before running a game for that character. If a DM wants nothing but that line and thinks everything else is irrelevant, a'ight. If a DM wants the rest of the story, I can absolutely give it to them, adjust things based on their own ideas of how the world works, and so forth.
If a DM doesn't even want that one line? If I get "I don't care what your motivation for adventuring is, because your actual motivation is 'I wanna play D&D'," then I have an immediate red-flag moment and know to be very skeptical of that campaign and to pay close attention (more than normal, anyways) through Session Zero.
For me, a backstory should boil down to why your character's motivation is what it is. Cool plot hooks are also very nice, and a DM willing to work with the player to invent a hook-rich backstory is an absolute gift, but yeah. If you can't boil it all down to that one sentence, ye should probably rethink your work.
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I like school of thought number 2 the best, and I’m very careful not to get too wordy or too self-absorbed in my backstories.
In my admittedly incomplete experience, experience level in D&D does tend to have something to do with it. Though it honestly strikes me as more of a faultline based on Critical Role - "are you a huge fan of CR and wanna try and make your games more like that (within reason), or are you someone who thinks CR is ruining/warping a generation of new D&D players?"
There's plenty of older players who really love CR and fall neatly within Style 2, and likely were doing so before CR came about. And there's newer players who came into the game through a different avenue (likely gaming) and are all about Style 1 and simply putting themselves into an adventure with an otherwise-disposable Adventurer Skin. The first style of play is usually considered the 'Old School' style, but it's also the 'Video Gamer' style, wherein somebody is there to experience the content with a cool set of superpowers and couldn't care less what the emotions and personal connections of their avatar is.
The second style is also more common with people who spent a great deal of time doing DMless roleplaying, like I have. Where everybody has their own character, and they get shoved into a thread/story that the players all collaboratively figure out as they go without any overarching referee. I have close to twenty years' experience doing that style of game, which is all about tracking specific characters through the saga of their lives, and so my D&D trends strongly towards a focus on characters as well. People with the same twenty years' experience with older versions of D&D where characters died all the time and nobody ever really cared about the saga of Sir Wunder of Bar's life even if it lasted more than two sessions will have a much different expectation, I'd wager.
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All of those snippets are great and make me want to read the longer versions! I don't think I've ever played in a game where the DM outright didn't want back stories, though I have played in one shots and shorter campaigns where I felt like all I needed was an aesthetic and a personality without necessarily a history.
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!
Backstories don't have to be full of dark secrets and stunning revelations either. The old standbys of being a younger child of some minor nobles, trying to make your own way in the world because you certainly won't be inheriting or being the lone survivor of a raid by [insert generic evil here] or having a favourite uncle with more tall tales of heroism than toes and fingers (darn frostbite) and little sense of bringing up a child responsibly to instill a powerful wanderlust into you, those all still work and always will. Your character probably has no reason to be tightlipped about this, but might also never have any reason to bring any of it up in conversation. Characters who do have skeletons in their backstory closet likely do have cause not to spill the beans too easily. And that's all perfectly ok. If the campaign doesn't need it and the players aren't curious about it, none of these potential plothooks need to be actively explored. A backstory can be just for you too. But in that case, I don't see a lot of point in everyone sharing their character's early life story with everyone else either. If my PC doesn't care about his companions' histories, sordid or sad or secret or... something, then why should I, the player? If it won't come up in the game and as such certainly won't affect the campaign, do I need to know about it? I mean, I'm not going to complain or think it's weird if another player forwards me their elaborate backstory to read, but the exact same is true if none of the other players do anything like that.
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So I'm old-school in that I'm loathe to even make a backstory until I'm around 3rd level. My preferred method is to make it up as we play (like, if I see an NPC or other game element that I like I ask the DM if I can link my character to it. Or I make up little pieces as we come across in game situations). I'm also open to the DM doing the same.
Most modern GMs don't care for this method, for whatever reason.... I mean, is this a collaborative storytelling game or not? Lol
That’s cool. I’ve never known anybody who did it like that but if I was the DM I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to do that. I’d encourage you to start at 1st level though.
This is a technique used in some of the newer, narrative oriented, games. Games that are not D&D. I think you may actually be ahead of your time rather than behind them.
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!
Hmm. Never thought of it like that. Most GMs that I've played under seemed to find this technique bothersome. Possibly because they don't feel comfortable with that level of improvisation. Something I've learned in the time I've played the game is that the only planning that really works is planning what happened before the game starts (and that begins to unravel the moment PCs enter the equation). Once the game starts the only thing you can count on is the party being unpredictable.
Oh I meant that I don't start trying to cement things until third level. Before third level my character will probably be all over the place, as I'm trying to figure then out. I don't get too attached to any ideas until they've made 3rd level. Why put in a lot of effort for a character who has a serious chance of dying because the DMs math was a little off during encounter planning.
I think you're right in line with the way I prefer my players to run things. I prefer running levels 1-3 frankly as "training wheels" anyway. Within that development space, the PCs do things, and part of the fun of playing in that protean space is we can decide _why_ a character made certain choices retroactively. Also since I prefer to play more open ended/free form, this discovering character through play table style gives me a lot of inspiration predicated on the game played rather than preconceptions in character generation.
Someday I'd like a group of my players to land somehow on Abandomium, my broken world as rogue comet whose capital is an as close to exact replica of the Luxor Casino as possible, but the stronger they are the better they'll be for some of the high level Humpty Dumpty reparative work they'll need to do there (plus more likely to survive the Sphyx because it's the Luxor, it's right there!). For now though, they're in relatively lore faithful FR and have gone from Luskan, to the Sea of Moving Ice to Baldur's Gate, where they were going to do an adaptation of "Book of the Raven"which was going to land them into a very modified Tyranny of Dragons, but through the happy accident of a random encounter table may be about to become "reality magic mirror" stars to save a theater in Little Calimsham. All this while, the characters are still figuring themselves out in very much the way I think obeytheFist is describing. One character is a half elf whisper bard, courtier background; but player also wanted an orphan or at least abandoned childhood, who got by on their wits in way that eventually gained the favor of people in corridors of power. That's it. No idea where he was from, etc.
They reached level three on the Sea of Moving Ice. I gave them options. One character is a Tiefling who lived among the Barbarian groups on the glacier by Icewind Dale, there were rumors of winter and darkness falling longer. They had also met a character very much plugged into my idiosyncratic dragon mythology, as well as Tyranny of Dragons and BGDiA (Burney who I've made a big deal in my head canon, in my world, she's loosely responsible for the largest unsolved art heist IRL) who had work for them. They also met the leader in exile of Abandominion who had work for them. They also had a trove of books from the Netheril they figured may get them into Candlekeep to research some of the lore loose ends they've uncovered to date, or could unload to a book trader in one of the Sword Coast's major cities. They opted for a combo of the last two and got passage to Baldur's Gate. Prior to arrival, bard player and I had a conversation where I laid out the social hierarchy of BG and said it's actually a perfect place for a character to come from nothing, rise into a comfortable life through favor of the ruling class, but also a place to develop disillusion with said ruling class setting you out on adventuring instead of working at the top of a wrong system. Player liked the idea of a homecoming to a place "you don't love, but you know" and has a bunch of questions neither of us yet know the answer to but will figure out. So far his local knowledge got the players comfortable with banking with the thieves guild instead of the Patriars, which in turn has got them in this juicy spot where they bank with a guild boss who also is putting the squeeze on the theater they've begun to work for. And it all just sort of happened unplanned (I didn't even know this theater existed and I've played through DiA one and half times, so literally deus ex polyhedral).
Other party's in various stages of establishment. Tabaxi's fine being a fish out of water traveller curious about everything, and her questioning actually has created some fun world building on the fly (like the economics of chocolate and ceviche in the FR, separate conversations). Dragonborn Bard I expected to have a sort ferocious passion for lore and discovery, but didn't pin the character. Instead, while the character is creatively daring and imposing on stage, but when off stage she can be very cautious/anxious in perilous situations, and very much a rule follower. Why is that? Might have something to do with her Dragonborn origins, we're not sure yet but figuring it out. Tiefling fighter is just enjoying the heck out of being the strongest member in the party, nothing really to hearken back other than "grew up on glacier" so takes survival seriously and respects toughness. That leaves a hobgoblin wizard who I did give a backstory to since I rolled the character for the player who simply asked "I want to be a Wizard named Tim, otherwise surprise me." HIs backstory is basically a B plot that could make a thing of the Hobgoblin nation's war machine, which may become a useful alliance or foil if the game goes full into Tyranny of Dragons, but there's enough to leave up in the air.
I guess I'm saying, and I think I've said this a lot when back story comes up, sometimes back story is best developed retroactively. A lot of folks come, to use Yuriel polarity, though it's a useful polarity (even though I think the middling is a very wide space) in with the CR motivated "I have story" to bring to the game. And I think folks see what "real actors" are doing and eat that up ... but what I don't think is often being recognized in the back story drivers is that if you talk to working actors, you'll often here that sure they research backgrounds, or sometimes do such research but a lot of the background is actually realized through performing the character (seriously folks should read _Creating a Role_ and _Building a Character_ by Stanivslaski, the techniques are actually pretty easy to import to TTRPGs) "I'm doing this and I'm realizing it's because "hitherto inarticulate background aspect." Playing is the performance and that's where the character is really clarified and discovered.
[Kinda an aside to The Commode Story sequence in Reservoir Dogs. It's sort of a 7 minute master class in creating a role through repeated performing, Roth's "handler" is arguably the DM, the gangster he eventually convinces are the players at the table. A cop can become a naturalistic convincing drug dealer not so much through biographical factoids, though there's relevance for that, but through just performing the part, the performer owns it after they've left the script. I've actually used this scene to teach both formal interviewing and surreptitious investigation techniques to establish immersion into rapport with a subject]
But yeah, two paragraphish is probably fair. I'd prefer that or nothing at a session 1 than something with a page count.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
It varies by character, but in general I don't mind sharing my character's backstory OOC - I'm just not likely to volunteer that information. In general I try to keep it concise - the interesting bits are what happen during the campaign; the backstory is just there to lay out how I got there.
We write up our backstories and email it to each other. No need to keep secrets unless you're planning something detrimental to the group.
A query, Midnight, as you seem to be in deep with this method.
Does this "discover backstory retroactively in play" method ever affect the course of the story? My usual reticence with the idea of just knowing absolutely shit-nothing about my character going in, beyond not having anything to go on for portraying the character, is that the GM then has nothing to go on for tying the character to the story. The character's background doesn't exist, thus the character's background is immaterial to the story, and thus the character itself is also immaterial to the story. There's a test one can run to see if their character matters to the tale they're running - ask yourself if the story being told at your table would change at all if your character woke up one day as something completely different. If you're playing an elven abjuration wizard of the Sage background, and you woke up one morning as a goliath Lycan order blood hunter of the Soldier background (and nobody went 'WHAT THE **** HAPPENED?' but simply accepted it), would anything at all in the course of your game change?
If the answer is "No", then your character doesn't matter to the story you're telling, and I wonder why you're playing that game at all.
I maintain that a good backstory poses questions the GM can use as plot hooks, decides your motivation for adventuring, and gives you a seed to start with. Anything more is usually overdoing it and generally has to be at GM discretion, but anything less generally means your character doesn't matter to the game at all. Some old school players are about to post "yeah, so? That's the point!" at me, and sure - some people like knowing they can play a disposable hero with no relevance to the world that they can socket in a replacement for in a matter of minutes should that character die.
But man...that seems like a lonely and unpleasant way to play to me.
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I watch a group where 3 of the characters have deep hooks in the lore, 1 might have hooks, and 1 doesn't.
The 3 characters mentioned are well established and most of their history was known far prior to the first session. The last 1 mentioned could be (and could easily end up being) replaced with no real consequence. The unknown one seems to have more importance through little events that have happened. Those last 2 know little about the first three and vice-versa. Those last 2 know little about each other, too.
Yet, the DM said many times that he knows all their backstories.
It's a strange but entertaining dynamic between the players. They only know what their characters know.
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.
I did vote, but I was wondering: how do you make a poll on this site? I've had a couple of topics I'd like to make polls on, but I don't know how. Please help.