A modern player will create a 3 page background on all the events of their character's life up to that point, they produce detailed accounts of things they were involved in as well as plot hooks for the DM to use based on those backstories and their is a clear expectation that the DM will take those backstories and infuse it into their setting and into their campaign plots to ensure that character has a pre-ordained purpose in the game. Its even common for players to list magical items they wish to find along their adventures, create NPC's, even entire towns sometimes even entirely new classes, races and cultures to support their characters' backstories.
That sort of thing never existed in old-school D&D and even today the OSR is adamantly opposed to any such concept. This type of approach is just a hard no from old-school gaming. If you don't believe me, pop over to Dragonfoot Forums and suggest it, see what kind of response you get.
Yep. When I decided to look into 5e, I was befuddled as to why so much emphasis was put on backgrounds. Even watching some of the campaign videos on Youtube, the DM's seemed to get some kind of gratification from how robust the players spoke of their background.
Hey. I am a fighter and an Army Veteran. When I get to 9th level Lord, attract followers and build a stronghold, then maybe my background is worth writing about.
So it did exist in old school D&D -- not the revival of it, but the reality of it. But, again, it wasn't as formalized as it is today -- we didn't have a "background" to choose. That had to wait until 2e AD&D -- and I don't know if they ever managed to get it into the BECMI set, that's more your side of things. But we still had those things
Oh, I don't doubt that people wrote backgrounds back in the day, but there was a kind of natural built-in discouragement in the game, especially in BECMI. 1st level characters were basically irrelevant minions, they were never more than a hit away from death, and dying on your first adventure had a pretty high probability. A typical 1e BECMI character would have on average 3-5 hit points, meanwhile, even the weakest monsters were dealing 1d6 to 1d8 damage. BECMI encouraged writing up a short personality and some brief notes on the characters history, but spending a lot of time writing for a character was not worth the effort as the risk of death early on was exceedingly high. If people were writing elaborate backgrounds for 1st level characters, man, they probably spent a lot of time writing backgrounds cause... yeah... death was ..... likely.
With BECMI the game kind of leveled out pretty fast. By the time you were 4th-5th level, an adventuring party made up of 4-5 characters would have an additional 4-5 followers, they would likely have good gear, a few magic items, some wealth and generally be a lot more prepared and harder to kill.
So really the principle of the game was that those first couple of adventures, that was really the act of writing your character's backstory.
In 5e terms, if you go outside of the culture, it kind of works the same way. At 1st level, you "choose a background" and this is kind of a default built-in history for our character and maybe you jot down some notes about their personality. But realistically a 5e character's first adventure or two are going to define them, that's their real backstory and its quite nice that its at that point, when you reach 3rd level when your character's and party's strength comes together you choose your sub-class.
It's under this guiding principle that I published The Book of Backgrounds on the DM Guild. Basically, if you just take the "background concept" in 5e and elaborate on it a bit, give it a bit more flavor, and make it a bit more specific, create some background-specific feats, you can eliminate the need to write a lot of stuff before you play and still have a really well-defined character concept.
Yep. When I decided to look into 5e, I was befuddled as to why so much emphasis was put on backgrounds. Even watching some of the campaign videos on Youtube, the DM's seemed to get some kind of gratification from how robust the players spoke of their background.
Hey. I am a fighter and an Army Veteran. When I get to 9th level Lord, attract followers and build a stronghold, then maybe my background is worth writing about.
Oh, I don't doubt that people wrote backgrounds back in the day, but there was a kind of natural built-in discouragement in the game, especially in BECMI. 1st level characters were basically irrelevant minions, they were never more than a hit away from death, and dying on your first adventure had a pretty high probability. A typical 1e BECMI character would have on average 3-5 hit points, meanwhile, even the weakest monsters were dealing 1d6 to 1d8 damage. BECMI encouraged writing up a short personality and some brief notes on the characters history, but spending a lot of time writing for a character was not worth the effort as the risk of death early on was exceedingly high. If people were writing elaborate backgrounds for 1st level characters, man, they probably spent a lot of time writing backgrounds cause... yeah... death was ..... likely.
With BECMI the game kind of leveled out pretty fast. By the time you were 4th-5th level, an adventuring party made up of 4-5 characters would have an additional 4-5 followers, they would likely have good gear, a few magic items, some wealth and generally be a lot more prepared and harder to kill.
So really the principle of the game was that those first couple of adventures, that was really the act of writing your character's backstory.
In 5e terms, if you go outside of the culture, it kind of works the same way. At 1st level, you "choose a background" and this is kind of a default built-in history for our character and maybe you jot down some notes about their personality. But realistically a 5e character's first adventure or two are going to define them, that's their real backstory and its quite nice that its at that point, when you reach 3rd level when your character's and party's strength comes together you choose your sub-class.
It's under this guiding principle that I published The Book of Backgrounds on the DM Guild. Basically, if you just take the "background concept" in 5e and elaborate on it a bit, give it a bit more flavor, and make it a bit more specific, create some background-specific feats, you can eliminate the need to write a lot of stuff before you play and still have a really well-defined character concept.