How much back story for a low-level PC?

[Mallus]

Make an enemy or an ally in play, not on your character sheet. Join an organization, or found one, in actual play, not before the game.

While I certainly agree that players are more engaged by enemies/accomplishments made during play than those created outside of it, both have their place in my campaigns.

Then again, my group sees RPG's as both games and a kind of collaborative fiction, so I neither mind a player traipsing into the author-space to create some proper nouns (people! places! things!), nor do they mind if I enter player-space and muck around with their PC's background fiction. Rather, there's the expectation that the line between player and DM will blur.

Re: exploration... it's important to me as well, and in a way, my group's heavily collaborative approach facilitates exploration.

If you want something for your character, awesome, make it a goal and let's roleplay it together, as a group, by playing the game.

This is great suggestion, but sometimes it's just not practical. It's hard to get a group with diverse interests/goals to agree to spend a lot of (real) time and (imaginary) resources on one character's shtick, say like creating a particular Thieves Guild. It's easier to simply 'write it' into existence, outside of actual play. Particularly if the shtick isn't going to be the focus of the campaign, if it's just part of one PC's time in the spotlight.

 

[The Ghost]

You'd be a good fit for the games I like to run.

I've read your campaign wiki. It looks amazing.

This is great suggestion, but sometimes it's just not practical. It's hard to get a group with diverse interests/goals to agree to spend a lot of (real) time and (imaginary) resources on one character's shtick, say like creating a particular Thieves Guild. It's much more practical to just 'write' it into existence, outside of actual play. Particularly if the shtick isn't going to be the focus of the campaign, if it's just part of one PC's time in the spotlight.

Really? For nearly twenty years of gaming the focus of the campaign amongst the people I play with is - "You help me achieve my goals and I will help you achieve yours and together we will have wonderful adventures."

 

[Nagol]

Grrrr... Forgot to add one of the main thrusts of my "argument" here.

Let's take an example. Player comes up with a player concept. He's this guy named "Luke" who's a young farmer kid, apparently orphaned, and raised by his aunt and uncle. He's not satisfied with the boring agrarian life, though, so when he finds out from this old man who lives nearby that his father wasn't just a traveling merchant, but was in fact a mystical warrior charged with protecting the realm from evil, who was murdered by a traitor in their organization, he decides to take up the adventuring life and follow in his father's footsteps.

Fair enough backstory, right?

Well, let's say that the GM later makes this traitor from the backstory a recurring character in the campaign, and that this recurring character claims to the PC that he never murdered his father; in fact he is his father, and that the old man lied to him all along. Big surprise. The player and his group manage to escape the clutches of this villain NPC, and the player decides to confront the old man about the claim. The old man kinda shrugs and says something to the effect of "Well, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view."

If I'm reading y'all right, this is the point where Luke's player is perfectly justified in complaining about the GM "rewriting" his backstory for him, meddling in territory that should be the player's turf, and is engaging in outright DM dickery, right?

If that's your claim, then we are so fundamentally on different pages about this issue that our conversation has basically run it's course. We're just way too different about what we think makes a great game vs. a frustrating one to have much more to add to each other.

:shrug:

Typically, when one of my players wants a twist or to keep part of the the backstory hidden from himself, he'll tell me explicitly.

Again, this is easier and more explicit in games where the backstories have mechanical representation like Hero, Ars Magica, or Pendragon though I've had it happen in D&D over the years.

Star Wars could work as one of two ways in my campaign: the player could write the backstory and the revelation wouldn't shock the player (but perhaps the others) OR the player would provide explicit request/permission regardng changing enough of the backstory in unknown direction.

 

[Crothian]

Yeah - I was up with it until the "turning the mom into a lich" thing. That seems a might bit over the top.

Your character's mom hasn't been introduced into the campaign yet. I think she just might be a Lich now.

I see a little too much paranoia in this thread over back stories. It seems to me DMs have abused their power and ruined campaigns and characters by going over board with things like the mom lich. It is great for DMs to expand on back grounds and do neat and interesting things but when it becomes something the player dreads then the DM has failed.

 

[Desdichado]

Yes, that's about the size of it. RPGs are not novels. Neither are they movies.

Sure, but they share a lot in common with them.

Anyway, I guess we've both drawn our lines in the sand. I do find it interesting that (based on the responses in this thread, anyway, which of course is statistically meaningless) my point of view is scarcer than I thought, and apparently I've been extremely lucky to stumble across literally dozens of gamers in the groups I've been in over the last several years who enjoy playing the way I do and very few who don't.

Anyway, thanks for clarifying. When I subtitled my blog: "Thoughts from the most opinionated guy on the internet" I wasn't kidding, so I probably won't add anymore to this before I get inadvertently drawn into wrangling uselessly over playstyle differences, though.

Really? For nearly twenty years of gaming the focus of the campaign amongst the people I play with is - "You help me achieve my goals and I will help you achieve yours and together we will have wonderful adventures."

Yeah, really. It can take major resources in terms of game time to set up and establish a thieves guild, for example, and make it believable and satisfying. If only one character's interested in that, it's a poor use of all of their time, to say the least, to spend hours and hours to do so with one player while the rest of the group twiddles their thumbs politely. In fact, if I were the one player who were interested in it, I wouldn't want to hog the spotlight like that. I'd compromise and look for some goal that we were all more invested in.

And I'd like to have something on the side that I could have without having to build it "in game" since it isn't likely that we would ever build it in game.

 

[Desdichado]

I see a little too much paranoia in this thread over back stories. It seems to me DMs have abused their power and ruined campaigns and characters by going over board with things like the mom lich. It is great for DMs to expand on back grounds and do neat and interesting things but when it becomes something the player dreads then the DM has failed.

I agree; I find the attitude surprisingly paranoid as well. And surprisingly protectionist and anti-collaborative. I also think that it's vitally important to not identify too much with your PCs. You are not your PCs. If bad things happen to your PCs, you, as the player, are part collaborative creator, but also part audience. The point of bad things happening to your character is to entertain you. The attitude of being really paranoid and protectionist about your PC seems unhealthy to me, and I would find it a crippling environment in which to run a game. Well, of course the GM's going to try and screw your PC. As long as he doesn't screw over the players then, all's well.

Anyway, that's my spiel. Needless to say, regardless of what I think about it, you're also right that if the players are dreading what the GM might do with their backstories, then clearly the GM has failed to take into account the tastes and preferences of his players, and that is indeed a major failing as a GM.

 

[IronWolf]

Your character's mom hasn't been introduced into the campaign yet. I think she just might be a Lich now.

Uh-oh. I am doomed now!

I see a little too much paranoia in this thread over back stories. It seems to me DMs have abused their power and ruined campaigns and characters by going over board with things like the mom lich. It is great for DMs to expand on back grounds and do neat and interesting things but when it becomes something the player dreads then the DM has failed.

I agree with this, despite my comments on thinking the lich mother might be a little over the top. I would say the vast majority of the time I think the DM working with bits of a character's background can turn out well for the game. There are always corner cases to one extreme or other, but the times I have seen a DM make use of a character background later in the campaign it has worked out well for the game.

 

[Barastrondo]

I think of it as a form of mythos-building outside of the role of the players in many (though by no means all) roleplaying games or play-styles...

So, "authorization?" Hmmm. To the extent that it's appropriate to the genre (no ninjas in 17th century France, thanks) and available in more-or-less equal-measure to all the players (rules-bounded), then . . . maybe?

That makes sense. The authority that you prefer players work within is the authority of the game-at-play. The reason I questioned the use of "fanfic" is that in any setup where the GM encourages or even requests backstory, a different form of authority is being explicitly extended.

(I should maybe note that I draw a difference between solicited mythos-building-as-background and unsolicited. I think there's something of an assumption in this thread that it's more often unsolicited than not, which hasn't been my experience -- even though I'll admit that someone providing unsolicited details is much more likely to run into or stir up disappointment somehow.)

Maybe from the twenty-thousand-foot level, but not everyone places a strong emphasis on story in play, only as an artifact resulting from play, so the process and methods bear little resemblance to one another.

The motives are often somewhat similar, I'd argue. They begin with a sort of "what if?" question -- what would happen if I did things my way instead of the way that history, or the author, decreed they would play out? That might be kind of a different philosophy-of-gaming conversation entirely, though...

Our difference is that I prefer to confine that level of editing to the more active collaboration environment of actually playing the game.

I want the players to fold, spindle, and mutilate the setting, to make origami animals or paper dolls of it; my preference, however, is that it happens as a group, in actual play, not on one player's character sheet before the game starts.

Quite understandable. I think I favor the middle region between a player doing solo dictation and a player having minimal impact on the world during the "setting up the terrain" phase. It can happen as a group, but not yet in actual play. The idea of a setting that is partially crafted by the players, to me, poses an interesting challenge as a GM that I'd liken to deriving results from random charts. If a player places a monastery in a world, it's roughly the same intellectual challenge to me that it would be if a die roll had come up "32-33: Monastery". Of course, it's a challenge that comes with more collaboration and negotiation, but I enjoy the process. In a way, it's where I get to cooperate with the players more fully than I do when actual play begins.

Well, I hope I've cleared that up a bit.

You have, thanks!

 

[The Ghost]

Yeah, really. It can take major resources in terms of game time to set up and establish a thieves guild, for example, and make it believable and satisfying. If only one character's interested in that, it's a poor use of all of their time, to say the least, to spend hours and hours to do so with one player while the rest of the group twiddles their thumbs politely. In fact, if I were the one player who were interested in it, I wouldn't want to hog the spotlight like that. I'd compromise and look for some goal that we were all more invested in.

According to who? You? Believable and satisfying are in the eye of the beholder. We have built castles, manors, cities, keeps, wizard's guilds, and yes - thieves' guilds, in my almost twenty years of playing D&D together. It may take you "hours and hours" while the rest of the group "twiddles their thumbs politely" to make it "believable and satisfying"; but don't presume that I, or the guys I play with, are the same.

 

[Crothian]

It may take you "hours and hours" while the rest of the group "twiddles their thumbs politely" to make it "believable and satisfying"; but don't presume that I, or the guys I play with, are the same.

How long does it take you to build a thieves guild then?