The conversation has really been an interesting read so far. I would like to add in my own perspective again, this time on whether long backstories are good and whether past trauma is necessary.
I do not personally think either fit into good/bad or necessary/unnecessary categories. I have had characters with almost no backstory to speak of and some with several pages. The thing I kept in mind when doing both was that my character was merely a level 1 (or in one case, a level 3) PC. I believe the backstory serves two purposes: to help the player understand their character and to provide the DM with some optional hooks. Sometimes that is helpful, sometimes it is not.
I once had an NPC from a game I was DMing whose backstory was that she had abandoned her husband and child to live a life as a con-artist and that she feels guilt over this choice. She also feels guilt that given the chance, she would not have chosen differently. That was it. The party loved her and adopted her into the group. She went on a few adventures as the face and eventually went her own way when the time was right. Later when the same group of players started a new campaign with someone else as the DM, they wanted to know what happened to the NPC, so I brought her in as my PC. Nothing was added to her backstory though, and the DM and I developed that as we went.
I believe that people should be a little more flexible on this long/short/trauma/normal life business. There really isn't a linear path to adventuring and not every PC will have the same motivators. What matters is what works for the story the party is there to play and that everyone is enjoying their time at the table.
I am utterly blown away by the overwhelming response to my thread. When I posted a topic asking for help improving my boring backstory, I didn’t envision that it would get so many responses or go so deep, but I am glad it did. I have enjoyed reading every one of your comments and replies to comments immensely.
To everyone who has taking the time to post a reply be it good, bad or ugly, thank you!
As a DM I hate pages of player backstory, I mean the opening description of my world at campaign start is usually 10-12 short bullet points so having a player present me war and peace before they have inhabited the world, inhabited that character is always an alarm bell. The number of times we have got to session 5 and the player is telling me there character is actually very very different and so they want to rework the history.
To give an example let me give you the background I was given by 2 players for my most recent campaign before the campaign began.
Satyr Sorceror, 120 years old. As a baby barely 5 months old abandoned at a brothel, the madame and other working girls and guys brought me up. I don’t care who my parents are, where I came from, I have seen no other satyr in all my life. All I care about is my family, the women and men I live with and the madame, my mother, who raised me, had me educated, gave me every opportunity but then, when I decided to follow her into this life, supported and loved me. I care about the outsider, the abandoned and, while I make a lot of money for my services I always plough what I earn back into my family and those around me in need.
That was it, no names, no details, just that paragraph. Over time we have fleshed out details in and out of game. Her “mother’s” race and name came out in session 8, the name of the house she works at session 5. But I have loads to work with and, as a DM that is great, I know who her parents are, I know why she was abandoned, although that has changed 3 times and will change 6 times more until/if she decides to go looking. I very much stick to the idea that as a DM my players know what there characters know, the rest is for me to define.
Minotaur Barbarian Criminal. My father is the head of a Russian mafia type family. We have a code and rules that define us, but we are criminals focussed on smuggling, extortion and protection. My father has been imprisoned, I don’t know why yet, my uncle has told me to get away from the area until the dust settles so I am traveling waiting to hear that it is safe to return.
Again that was all I needed for session 1, in fact it’s all I needed really for tier 1, levels 1-5 are all about forming the party and learning the world, backstories might get drip fed in the background but at level 6+ for me is when my players start to get to explore and resolve those things.
Little late to the show here but OP is still checking on this thread so I’ll add. The four questions I consider about my character when making a backstory are: Who are they? Where are they from? What do they want? Why can’t they have it?
For example: My character for CoS, Bugs, is a monk (who thinks he’s a rogue) from Waterdeep who wants to go home to his (crime) family but he can’t; he’s stuck in Barovia. My character for STK, Roisin, is a divine soul Sorcerer from a small town near Parnast who wants to live a quiet, peaceful life raising a family but she can’t; a bunch of giants trashed the place and are marauding throughout the land.
That’s enough information for the DM and other players to play with the characters. I could say a lot more about both of them but there’s no need unless solicited, like if the DM is looking for hooks or one of the other characters wants to have gone to school with mine, that sort of thing. Most everything else I know about them, which is a lot—I created a whole crime syndicate for Bugs and populated an entire town for Roisin—is for my edification and used to inform their behaviours and my decision-making during the game rather than written for my DM, who’s got enough reading to do already.
Hemingway would've written terrible character backstories. His stories are all connect-the-dots puzzles -- an image here, a scrap of dialogue there -- and forced the reader to do all the work, rather than spelling things out clearly.
And that, in a nutshell, encapsulates the typical "new" D&D player. "I don't want to think, make it easy for me."
You keep setting up your strawman in different parts of the thread, but it remains a strawman all the same. Just gotta take any opportunity you can get to say "darn those young folk" dontcha?
The dude who touts "I left home at 18 to seek fame and fortune" as the perfect backstory thinks it's other people who are making it easy on themselves by putting more detail into their pre-adventuring lives. Priceless.
By the way, do you think if I posted a picture of the shelf with all my beat-up old AD&D books, O******* Adventures and all, next to some Ars Magica stuff and whatever other random TTRPG crap has survived umpteen moves, Dennis might figure out I'm probably about his age?
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Hemingway would've written terrible character backstories. His stories are all connect-the-dots puzzles -- an image here, a scrap of dialogue there -- and forced the reader to do all the work, rather than spelling things out clearly.
And that, in a nutshell, encapsulates the typical "new" D&D player. "I don't want to think, make it easy for me."
You keep setting up your strawman in different parts of the thread, but it remains a strawman all the same. Just gotta take any opportunity you can get to say "darn those young folk" dontcha?
The dude who touts "I left home at 18 to seek fame and fortune" as the perfect backstory thinks it's other people who are making it easy on themselves by putting more detail into their pre-adventuring lives. Priceless.
By the way, do you think if I posted a picture of the shelf with all my beat-up old AD&D books, O******* Adventures and all, next to some Ars Magica stuff and whatever other random TTRPG crap has survived umpteen moves, Dennis might figure out I'm probably about his age?
Would it matter? I’m 40, have been playing D&D for almost 30 years, and started back w/ 2e (and a little OD&D). And even though I keep showing them how easy it is to make a more detailed backstory in as few as 3 sentences I’m just as wrong as you are.
Since we've offering examples, here's the backstory for a character I didn't get to play in a Dark Domain-ish campaign that would've started at level 3: Dane Brightburrow, a Rogue 1/GOO Warlock 2 halfling. (I would have given him a fairly big, Shatner-esque personality and delivery, all dramatic pauses and sudden volume changes, and the King In Yellow-ish riff in the nature of the pact is quite intentional.)
This is a pretty typical backstory for me in terms of content: a few paragraphs on who they were, where they got their skills/any special items from their background or whatever, and how they came to be out in the world doing what they do. I always try to weave in some NPCs and unanswered questions or mysteries for the DM to pick up or leave alone as they wish.
Born in Secomber in the Western Heartlands of Faerun, Dane wasn’t cut out to be a farmer, fisherman or shop keeper. His quick wit and tongue often got him in trouble, and he left home at a young age to head to the big city, Baldur’s Gate. He never made it, instead falling in with a group of travelling performers who welcomed him with open arms, especially once he showed some aptitude for acting and oration. While that life offered him the freedom he craved, Dane had bigger dreams for himself, and soon he began learning the skills of a rogue from Bardra, the head of the troupe. Bardra and her new apprentice used their performances to scout out well-to-do members of the audience, then robbed or burgled them just before the troupe left town.
As performers, the group eventually gained a little renown for their talent (while avoiding association with Bardra and Dane’s crimes), and they were invited to entertain at a nobleman’s celebration for the marriage of his daughter. While mingling with the crowd afterward, Dane struck up a conversation with a guest who casually mentioned his collection of rare and forbidden tomes. Seeing an opportunity to prove he could handle jobs on his own, Dane broke into the man’s house two nights later. In a secret compartment in the wall of the library, behind an oddly disquieting landscape painting, he found a folio for a play called The Scabrous Masquerade and an amulet carved out of a strange material. Flipping through the folio, he discovered it was about a man who entered into a Faustian bargain with an entity known only as Oghi’uul, a cloaked figure who (per the stage directions) was depicted as wearing a series of increasingly horrific masks. As Dane kept reading, a mist crept into the room and he passed out…
He came to, not in the library, but in a strange clearing in an unfamiliar woods reminiscent of the scene depicted in the painting. To his horror, Dane discovered that *he* was now entered into a bargain with Oghi’uul, and that his memories were jumbled with others who had fallen prey to the entity over the years (Dark Gift: Echoing Soul). The bargain gave him strange new powers, particularly when using the amulet (Dark Shard Amulet) which had remained clutched in his hand, but the folio was gone when he awoke. He began to search for another copy of the play so that he might finish reading it and find a way to get out of the bargain, or at least know what his fate might be if he couldn’t.
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
You know why the "old way" hung around so long? Because it worked, and still works. The amount of decent, let alone good, novelists and actors has not changed per capita since, well forever. The talent needed to actually entertain a group of D&D players by an individual player, or actually an individual player and the DM, with some story that the player concocted has also not changed in the last 5, 10, or 40 years. It is still incredibly rare, next to zero.
There are thousands of pages written supporting the complexity of the structure of the game. There are exceedingly few on "how to write backstories like Frank Herbert or Tolkien" and "how to act like Olivier and McKellen as D&D char". And the reason for that is obvious.
I love how you state that the "old way" works and then complain when itturns out that it obviously doesn't which is why so many people have changed it up. I also think it's kind of hilarious that your only argument is basically "well I have never seen anything else done well so therefor nothing else can work" when you get a bunch of people saying that "yes, yes it does work, look at all these examples". The best thing about your rants is this little gem though:
"My favourite char right how had this as a backstory: "He and his cousin sell his cousin's creations in a nearby city. They were robbed one night while they had a little too much to drink in the inn. They decided to track down the thieves." That's it. No big bad trauma."
The reason for that character to go on adventures is literally the trauma of being robbed. Sure, it's not as big a trauma as, say forced marriage or a dead family (or both) but if your "favourite" backstory of all the characters of all the games you are in is literally "trauma happened, need to fix that" then maybe you should take a moment to think things through?
In any case, you are completely off topic with your rants.
Hey, if you have some need as an unfulfilled novelist, write some long involved backstory that nobody will ever read or care about, by all means. No other players care about the backstory of another player's char, no matter how much you say otherwise. And if you hand your DM some monster document describing the motivations and risks your char faces, well, said DM will smile wanly, then more than likely ditch the whole thing. You may also look up the term "executive summary".
But you want to get back on point with the OP's about how to make backstories less boring? Easy: Don't write one, or keep it to less than 3 lines. Like I said, the vast vast majority of people simply do not have the talent to write a good story, no matter what they think of themselves. That is simple reality. You can say otherwise, but the amount of manuscripts that are are actually published each year, compared to the amount created, that says it all. So when a DM demands a story from the players, or when a player forces such a thing on the DM, both of those actions are completely unreasonable.
Literally no one said to write a novel. One person said three sentences was enough, to which you still objected. Good that you're coming around, though.
As a DM I hate pages of player backstory, I mean the opening description of my world at campaign start is usually 10-12 short bullet points so having a player present me war and peace before they have inhabited the world, inhabited that character is always an alarm bell. The number of times we have got to session 5 and the player is telling me there character is actually very very different and so they want to rework the history.
To give an example let me give you the background I was given by 2 players for my most recent campaign before the campaign began.
Satyr Sorceror, 120 years old. As a baby barely 5 months old abandoned at a brothel, the madame and other working girls and guys brought me up. I don’t care who my parents are, where I came from, I have seen no other satyr in all my life. All I care about is my family, the women and men I live with and the madame, my mother, who raised me, had me educated, gave me every opportunity but then, when I decided to follow her into this life, supported and loved me. I care about the outsider, the abandoned and, while I make a lot of money for my services I always plough what I earn back into my family and those around me in need.
That was it, no names, no details, just that paragraph. Over time we have fleshed out details in and out of game. Her “mother’s” race and name came out in session 8, the name of the house she works at session 5. But I have loads to work with and, as a DM that is great, I know who her parents are, I know why she was abandoned, although that has changed 3 times and will change 6 times more until/if she decides to go looking. I very much stick to the idea that as a DM my players know what there characters know, the rest is for me to define.
Minotaur Barbarian Criminal. My father is the head of a Russian mafia type family. We have a code and rules that define us, but we are criminals focussed on smuggling, extortion and protection. My father has been imprisoned, I don’t know why yet, my uncle has told me to get away from the area until the dust settles so I am traveling waiting to hear that it is safe to return.
Again that was all I needed for session 1, in fact it’s all I needed really for tier 1, levels 1-5 are all about forming the party and learning the world, backstories might get drip fed in the background but at level 6+ for me is when my players start to get to explore and resolve those things.
Nobody's making you read more than you want to, simply because nobody can. If you find someone's backstory hard to digest, ask for a CliffsNotes version.
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Hey, cool, since this has turned into the share your backstory thread, here's my character's.
They have none. Not that they know of, anyway. Yeah, I did an amnesia character. But I did have some discussion with my DM that they were made from the wood of some sacred tree. They're a warforged. My DM came up with more details. Part of the fun of the campaign for me has been discovering them. Apparently they were built as a war machine to fight demons. Later they were awakened and adopted by a druid circle.
Does this matter for the main plot of the campaign? Not really. And I don't hog the spotlight. One time I visited the grove where I came from since I found out about it and we happened to be nearby. One time we encountered the people who previously controlled my character because they were working for the BBEG and it was integral to the plot. These were opportunities presented by the DM.
But cool character moments have happened, like when another party member discovered he was a tiefling, and was wrestling with whether that made him evil. We had an in character chat about how I thought my character's actions defined them, not who made them or programmed them or awakened them.
It's funny how Dennis turned out to be the real edgelord of this thread, with his edgy extreme straw men and his tragic backstory as an old-skool gamer.
The IamSposta character, who is a GM of roleplaying games, 3-sentence background:
I'm 40 years old. I have been playing D&D for almost 30 years. I started back with 2/e, and a little OD&D.
Done!
We're mostly teasing each other but here is the point: That would be all either of us would need to RP this character in something like a d20 modern RPG in which the characters are gamers. With those 3 short sentences, I would be capable of developing the character during play, and so would Sposta.
Not that either if us would "play ourselves" in an RPG, probably... but the point is, you don't need pages or long paragraphs. Everyone reading those 3 sentences probably has a good idea of what kind of DM this person is, and possibly what kind of character in a party of gamers that maybe also includes one guy who is a video gamer, one who is into old school board games, and one who likes to play 5e but never played older editions.
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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.
Agreed. You don’t need a novella. It doesn’t take much to put a little something unique on a character. Although, that doesn’t really tell me anything about the character’s “home life,” there is not a “significant event” listed, nor the all important “why I become an adventurer?” So I would probably add a couple more sentences to that. But the maximum would still be my 15 sentences.
I will say it one more time. If I had to choose between a player who said "I am just starting out as an adventurer", but knows the rules cold, and realizes their char is there to complement the group's objectives, versus someone who gives me a 2 page treatise on the injustices against their family, how they are actually royalty, "here is a picture of my char", but does not know the rules of the game, I know which one I would take every time.
Hell, even if they knew the rules equally well, I would still take the player not interested in a background for their char. That person seems to be me more invested in the group as a whole as opposed to the other one throwing up flags that say "I will need me-time in the game".
I will say it one more time. Who the **** asked for two gorram pages?!? I don’t want 2 ******* pages.
All I asked for was 3 little sentences.
One little sentence. Two little sentences. Three little sentences. Ha ha ha….
(It’s the same number of sentences as the number of licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop.)
Agreed. You don’t need a novella. It doesn’t take much to put a little something unique on a character. Although, that doesn’t really tell me anything about the character’s home life, there is not a “significant event” listed, nor the all important “why become an adventurer?” So I would probably add a couple more sentences to that. But the maximum would still be my 15 sentences.
Nobody ever gets any "me-time" in Dennis' games? Nobody ever has a big moment? Nobody has a specific role that allows them to shine? No side quests where one character takes the lead for a session or two?
Is Dennis part of a hive mind? Wait...
I'm 40 years old. I have been playing D&D for almost 30 years and I started back with 2/e, and a little OD&D. I am secretly an illithid on an undercover mission to learn about "games".
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
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The conversation has really been an interesting read so far. I would like to add in my own perspective again, this time on whether long backstories are good and whether past trauma is necessary.
I do not personally think either fit into good/bad or necessary/unnecessary categories. I have had characters with almost no backstory to speak of and some with several pages. The thing I kept in mind when doing both was that my character was merely a level 1 (or in one case, a level 3) PC. I believe the backstory serves two purposes: to help the player understand their character and to provide the DM with some optional hooks. Sometimes that is helpful, sometimes it is not.
I once had an NPC from a game I was DMing whose backstory was that she had abandoned her husband and child to live a life as a con-artist and that she feels guilt over this choice. She also feels guilt that given the chance, she would not have chosen differently. That was it. The party loved her and adopted her into the group. She went on a few adventures as the face and eventually went her own way when the time was right. Later when the same group of players started a new campaign with someone else as the DM, they wanted to know what happened to the NPC, so I brought her in as my PC. Nothing was added to her backstory though, and the DM and I developed that as we went.
I believe that people should be a little more flexible on this long/short/trauma/normal life business. There really isn't a linear path to adventuring and not every PC will have the same motivators. What matters is what works for the story the party is there to play and that everyone is enjoying their time at the table.
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I am utterly blown away by the overwhelming response to my thread. When I posted a topic asking for help improving my boring backstory, I didn’t envision that it would get so many responses or go so deep, but I am glad it did. I have enjoyed reading every one of your comments and replies to comments immensely.
To everyone who has taking the time to post a reply be it good, bad or ugly, thank you!
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As a DM I hate pages of player backstory, I mean the opening description of my world at campaign start is usually 10-12 short bullet points so having a player present me war and peace before they have inhabited the world, inhabited that character is always an alarm bell. The number of times we have got to session 5 and the player is telling me there character is actually very very different and so they want to rework the history.
To give an example let me give you the background I was given by 2 players for my most recent campaign before the campaign began.
Satyr Sorceror, 120 years old.
As a baby barely 5 months old abandoned at a brothel, the madame and other working girls and guys brought me up. I don’t care who my parents are, where I came from, I have seen no other satyr in all my life. All I care about is my family, the women and men I live with and the madame, my mother, who raised me, had me educated, gave me every opportunity but then, when I decided to follow her into this life, supported and loved me. I care about the outsider, the abandoned and, while I make a lot of money for my services I always plough what I earn back into my family and those around me in need.
That was it, no names, no details, just that paragraph. Over time we have fleshed out details in and out of game. Her “mother’s” race and name came out in session 8, the name of the house she works at session 5. But I have loads to work with and, as a DM that is great, I know who her parents are, I know why she was abandoned, although that has changed 3 times and will change 6 times more until/if she decides to go looking. I very much stick to the idea that as a DM my players know what there characters know, the rest is for me to define.
Minotaur Barbarian Criminal.
My father is the head of a Russian mafia type family. We have a code and rules that define us, but we are criminals focussed on smuggling, extortion and protection.
My father has been imprisoned, I don’t know why yet, my uncle has told me to get away from the area until the dust settles so I am traveling waiting to hear that it is safe to return.
Again that was all I needed for session 1, in fact it’s all I needed really for tier 1, levels 1-5 are all about forming the party and learning the world, backstories might get drip fed in the background but at level 6+ for me is when my players start to get to explore and resolve those things.
Little late to the show here but OP is still checking on this thread so I’ll add. The four questions I consider about my character when making a backstory are: Who are they? Where are they from? What do they want? Why can’t they have it?
For example: My character for CoS, Bugs, is a monk (who thinks he’s a rogue) from Waterdeep who wants to go home to his (crime) family but he can’t; he’s stuck in Barovia. My character for STK, Roisin, is a divine soul Sorcerer from a small town near Parnast who wants to live a quiet, peaceful life raising a family but she can’t; a bunch of giants trashed the place and are marauding throughout the land.
That’s enough information for the DM and other players to play with the characters. I could say a lot more about both of them but there’s no need unless solicited, like if the DM is looking for hooks or one of the other characters wants to have gone to school with mine, that sort of thing. Most everything else I know about them, which is a lot—I created a whole crime syndicate for Bugs and populated an entire town for Roisin—is for my edification and used to inform their behaviours and my decision-making during the game rather than written for my DM, who’s got enough reading to do already.
The dude who touts "I left home at 18 to seek fame and fortune" as the perfect backstory thinks it's other people who are making it easy on themselves by putting more detail into their pre-adventuring lives. Priceless.
By the way, do you think if I posted a picture of the shelf with all my beat-up old AD&D books, O******* Adventures and all, next to some Ars Magica stuff and whatever other random TTRPG crap has survived umpteen moves, Dennis might figure out I'm probably about his age?
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Would it matter? I’m 40, have been playing D&D for almost 30 years, and started back w/ 2e (and a little OD&D). And even though I keep showing them how easy it is to make a more detailed backstory in as few as 3 sentences I’m just as wrong as you are.
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Since we've offering examples, here's the backstory for a character I didn't get to play in a Dark Domain-ish campaign that would've started at level 3: Dane Brightburrow, a Rogue 1/GOO Warlock 2 halfling. (I would have given him a fairly big, Shatner-esque personality and delivery, all dramatic pauses and sudden volume changes, and the King In Yellow-ish riff in the nature of the pact is quite intentional.)
This is a pretty typical backstory for me in terms of content: a few paragraphs on who they were, where they got their skills/any special items from their background or whatever, and how they came to be out in the world doing what they do. I always try to weave in some NPCs and unanswered questions or mysteries for the DM to pick up or leave alone as they wish.
Born in Secomber in the Western Heartlands of Faerun, Dane wasn’t cut out to be a farmer, fisherman or shop keeper. His quick wit and tongue often got him in trouble, and he left home at a young age to head to the big city, Baldur’s Gate. He never made it, instead falling in with a group of travelling performers who welcomed him with open arms, especially once he showed some aptitude for acting and oration. While that life offered him the freedom he craved, Dane had bigger dreams for himself, and soon he began learning the skills of a rogue from Bardra, the head of the troupe. Bardra and her new apprentice used their performances to scout out well-to-do members of the audience, then robbed or burgled them just before the troupe left town.
As performers, the group eventually gained a little renown for their talent (while avoiding association with Bardra and Dane’s crimes), and they were invited to entertain at a nobleman’s celebration for the marriage of his daughter. While mingling with the crowd afterward, Dane struck up a conversation with a guest who casually mentioned his collection of rare and forbidden tomes. Seeing an opportunity to prove he could handle jobs on his own, Dane broke into the man’s house two nights later. In a secret compartment in the wall of the library, behind an oddly disquieting landscape painting, he found a folio for a play called The Scabrous Masquerade and an amulet carved out of a strange material. Flipping through the folio, he discovered it was about a man who entered into a Faustian bargain with an entity known only as Oghi’uul, a cloaked figure who (per the stage directions) was depicted as wearing a series of increasingly horrific masks. As Dane kept reading, a mist crept into the room and he passed out…
He came to, not in the library, but in a strange clearing in an unfamiliar woods reminiscent of the scene depicted in the painting. To his horror, Dane discovered that *he* was now entered into a bargain with Oghi’uul, and that his memories were jumbled with others who had fallen prey to the entity over the years (Dark Gift: Echoing Soul). The bargain gave him strange new powers, particularly when using the amulet (Dark Shard Amulet) which had remained clutched in his hand, but the folio was gone when he awoke. He began to search for another copy of the play so that he might finish reading it and find a way to get out of the bargain, or at least know what his fate might be if he couldn’t.
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Literally no one said to write a novel. One person said three sentences was enough, to which you still objected. Good that you're coming around, though.
Nobody's making you read more than you want to, simply because nobody can. If you find someone's backstory hard to digest, ask for a CliffsNotes version.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Hey, cool, since this has turned into the share your backstory thread, here's my character's.
They have none. Not that they know of, anyway. Yeah, I did an amnesia character. But I did have some discussion with my DM that they were made from the wood of some sacred tree. They're a warforged. My DM came up with more details. Part of the fun of the campaign for me has been discovering them. Apparently they were built as a war machine to fight demons. Later they were awakened and adopted by a druid circle.
Does this matter for the main plot of the campaign? Not really. And I don't hog the spotlight. One time I visited the grove where I came from since I found out about it and we happened to be nearby. One time we encountered the people who previously controlled my character because they were working for the BBEG and it was integral to the plot. These were opportunities presented by the DM.
But cool character moments have happened, like when another party member discovered he was a tiefling, and was wrestling with whether that made him evil. We had an in character chat about how I thought my character's actions defined them, not who made them or programmed them or awakened them.
It's funny how Dennis turned out to be the real edgelord of this thread, with his edgy extreme straw men and his tragic backstory as an old-skool gamer.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/off-topic/forum-games/118709-three-sentence-backstory
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And this... is all the backstory you need for a character who is a GM of roleplaying games.
Just to pick at the scab a little. Heheh.
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.
Nope, that’s only one sentence, I would need two more. 🙃
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The IamSposta character, who is a GM of roleplaying games, 3-sentence background:
Done!
We're mostly teasing each other but here is the point: That would be all either of us would need to RP this character in something like a d20 modern RPG in which the characters are gamers. With those 3 short sentences, I would be capable of developing the character during play, and so would Sposta.
Not that either if us would "play ourselves" in an RPG, probably... but the point is, you don't need pages or long paragraphs. Everyone reading those 3 sentences probably has a good idea of what kind of DM this person is, and possibly what kind of character in a party of gamers that maybe also includes one guy who is a video gamer, one who is into old school board games, and one who likes to play 5e but never played older editions.
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.
BioWiz,
Agreed. You don’t need a novella. It doesn’t take much to put a little something unique on a character. Although, that doesn’t really tell me anything about the character’s “home life,” there is not a “significant event” listed, nor the all important “why I become an adventurer?” So I would probably add a couple more sentences to that. But the maximum would still be my 15 sentences.
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I will say it one more time. Who the **** asked for two gorram pages?!? I don’t want 2 ******* pages.
All I asked for was 3 little sentences.
One little sentence. Two little sentences. Three little sentences. Ha ha ha….
(It’s the same number of sentences as the number of licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop.)
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Why? He was an NPC, they don’t need backstories.
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Unless we start at 5th level. Then I want three sentences that got you to 1st level, and three more that got you from 1st to 5th level. 😜
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Nobody ever gets any "me-time" in Dennis' games? Nobody ever has a big moment? Nobody has a specific role that allows them to shine? No side quests where one character takes the lead for a session or two?
Is Dennis part of a hive mind? Wait...
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)