I think GMs should be free to create plots that are separate from the characters. It's really hard to write a plot that's relevant for four or five completely different individuals, whose characters and backgrounds were all created separately from each other.
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To put it another way, character backgrounds are, IMO, a terrible way for a DM to solicit input. They could try, you know, ASKING the players what would interest them instead.
Interesting. I tend to take the opposite approach: I often have the players create backgrounds for their PCs that aren't separate, and I very often use backgrounds as the basis for building adventures (I think of it as the players giving me adventure hooks) - especially in the early stages of a campaign, but even as the campaign unfolds I expect the PC backgrounds to develop and become more elaborate as well, creating new opportunities to build adventures around them.
Dropping surprises into the backstories of characters is a tricky business, though, and I think it has to be utterly thematic -- which is to say, it has to be in keeping with what the player considers in the themes of his character.
Fully agreed.
I've found that this is largely a reaction to a string of DMs who can't help but look at your character's history and living family members as targeting lists.
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So, as a DM, I'd be really, really careful with how I engage the PCs' histories, and will generally check with them first.
I think this goes to Barastrondo's point about "sticking with the theme". In my current campaign, my instructions to the players at the start of the game were to come up with PCs who were 4e legal, and who had a reason to be ready to fight goblins. I also explained that the game would be set in the default 4e world. One of my players came up with a wizard PC who was from a northern city that had been destroyed by humanoid raiders, and who had since been wandering and making a living as a pastry chef. The PC had at one time been an initiate of the Raven Queen, although that relationship had waned a bit since.
Towards the culmination of the first, goblin-fighting, arc of the campaign I introduced this PC's mother as a slave of the goblins. The PCs had a chance to rescue her, but chose a course of action which left her exposed to goblin danger - and when they came back to find her, she was dead. (I would be cautious about doing this in a context where the player himself had had some sort of serious family trauma, but I've been friends with the player in question for many years.) This didn't contradict or upset the background the player had come up with - it reinforced it. (And the PC has subsequently done some very ruthless things to goblins and hobgoblins.)
Bad: A town is in the way of a rampaging army of gnolls. Your mother, who has never actually come into play before now, lives in that town.
It's to avoid this sort of situation that (in the example above) I stuck the PC's mother
in the goblin fortress, as a slave whom the PCs encountered then and there. More generally, I think background is much more powerful as
an integral element of the situation with which the players are engaged (via their PCs), rather than as a hook or lure to some new situation.
Which brings me to:
Character backstory events never happened - they're whole-cloth fiction created before the game starts.
I think you're generally right that relationships forged in play generally feel stronger for the player. In many cases they're the only relationships that have any reality to them at all. But that means that if you never involve their parents or their siblings or their childhood friends in the game, then those relationships will never exist.
Once background becomes an integral element of a current situation, it
is part of play. But it's a part of play that's been seeded by the player rather than the GM, which (in my experience) often gives it a greater emotional pulling power for the player(s) in question.
I'm curious - do you let players, in the middle of an adventure, declare that they are well known and respected in a town if they hadn't already written it in their background....or create at the spur of the moment an associate who will be willing to hide them in a town when running from the BBEG's men?
This hasn't come up. But I have allowed a player to invent an elven secret society (and his PC's membership in it) on the spur of the moment, and then to give the secret hand signal of that society to see if any of the elven NPCs the party was hanging out with were members of that society. He was hoping that the leader of the elvish band was a member; I explained that the leader seemed not to recognise that signal, but another (lesser) NPC did.
I'm not an improv performer, so don't know "yes, and . . ." outside the context of RPGs. But what I've just described seems like a fairly straightforward example of "yes, and . . .".
I'm not sure why getting away from the player-passivity of, "Do I know anyone in this town?" and moving toward the player-engagement of, "I'm going to get to know the captain of the watch," is so controversial to some people.
I get the feeling, when the example player asks "Do I know anybody in this town?", he'd rather do what I just did, but isn't sure the DM will let him.
I think I'm closer to Janx on this one. Of course, I prefer it when the players (non-passively) describe how they are seeking out NPCs who they believe have reason to be sympathetic to them (as per the above example of sending a secret hand-sign).
