One of the power fantasies that D&D allows for is self-sufficient characters who answer to no one, who improve their own skills by slaying their own monsters and never need anyone else. They come into town from Elsewhere, on some impossible mission, looking for only gold or glory, and leave just as suddenly, attached to no one, without responsibility or background.
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As a DM, I see a character like this enter my games, and I kind of sigh and shrug. "Well, I guess we've got another one for the pile of empty ciphers who talk in funny voices, whose goal doesn't go beyond 'kill the bad guys.'"
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I feel like most players don't come up with characters like this intentionally, but rather through an odd combination of design accident and system assumptions, they arrive here.
If you read Gygax's PHB (especially the introductory pages - I think around p 7) and his DMG (especially the discussion of "The First Dungeon Adventure") you will see that he describes a single motive for PCs: acquiring fame and fortune. Furthermore, there is no suggestion to the GM that s/he might incorporate PC backgrounds into scenario or world design.
I think this will naturally tend towards the creation of "rootless vagabond" PCs, of the more-or-less Conan-esque sort.
Moldvay Basic is different from Gygax in this respect - in chapter 8 on GMing advice, in discussing the creation of dungeons and dungeon adventures, Moldvay says that "the GM should always give the players a reason to be adventuring". I think what is meant is that there should be some ingame reason, other than the more-or-less metagame ones of gaining XP by killing and looting, for the PCs to engage in the adventure.
But this idea is not elaborated at all.
So the practical outcome for many tables I think will be not that different from Gygax.
I've never liked rootless vagabonds, and pretty much never saw them in games from OD&D onwards - we were always running and playing in campaigns, and getting involved in the society was always one of the objectives. I don't really remember anyone wanting to play 'the man with no name', everybody wanted to build their castle/tower/temple, and rise in status in the society.
I think that OD&D and AD&D definitely supported and encouraged this kind of play - it was right there in the name level benefits after all!
This is about the creation of social connections during play. But that doesn't necessarily depart from the rootless vagabond, Conan-esque archetype. Nor does it remove self-aggrandisement as a principal character motivation.
But it
does require the GM to permit the players, via their PCs, to make permanent changes to the campaign world. I think some GMs who don't want that to happen might even succeed in discouraging this self-aggrandising, Conan-style form of social connectedness.
There's another issue as well. Miscommunication between the DM and players. Say the player takes a character who has lots of ties to a local town, he's been defending that town from invading armies and has now set out to join forces with a larger army to try to protect his town. But, the DM's campaign then moves the party several month's journey away from that town, which means all that background is basically pointless since it cannot be leveraged at all.
I have seen this happen not just through miscommunication, but through a deliberate decision by the GM to remove the PCs from a situation in which the players might exercise leverage over the campaign world in virtue of their PCs' social connections.
Which is a version of the GMing that I just described in reply to Plane Sailing - not wanting the players to be able to exercise any sort of enduring control over the campaign world. I think the idea of invested players playing invested PCs isn't a good fit with the idea of unilateral GM control over the content of the shared fiction.
I think some of the problem can be tied to players' lack of setting knowledge. When you don't have perfect knowledge of the world, it can be a little hard to tie yourself to the Order of Ebony or the Justicar's Guild when all the information you have on these things is a paragraph in your DM's setting bible. My players, at least, aren't the type to create an organization as part of their background (despite my encouragement), and don't want to tie themselves to something that may come back later to bite them on the behind.
These days I start my campaigns by sitting down with the players and make a relationship map.
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Everybody is allowed to invent NPCs, and I encourage all to invent at least one or two that are important to their charactes.
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Together we build a social background and web. Drawing lines between them all that fit.
I like the player generation approach to backstory. I've never done it in the style that Henrix describes - I tend to work with individual players, in conversation or via email as we are preparing for a new campaign, and then in an ad hoc way at the table for the first session. But as part of this I'm happy to help the PCs develop connections to one another, develop the NPCs they need, etc.
In my last RM campaign two of the PCs were members of the same samurai clan, and a third was a warrior-mage from a non-samurai background whose family's money had bought him a position as a warrior with that clan. Another PC started out as a fox spirit who had raised himself (via discipline and training) into human form, but otherwise having little connection to the other PCs (he served as their guide on the first adventure). But a little while into the campaign - as the importance of the spirit world and cosmological matters became more evident - the player decided that he was really some sort of animal spirit outcast from the Celestial courts. This connected that PC very strongly into the unfolding events of the campaign, and the decision by the other PCs to side with their fox friend against the constables of Heaven who came to arrest him was one of their first steps in what turned out to be a struggle against the dictates of Heaven and of the Lords of Karma that was focal to the latter part of the campaign and its resolution.
In my current 4e campaign, I told each player that his/her 1st level PC had to have a loyalty to someone or something. For a couple of players this was a loyalty to a god that was already established (via the rulebooks) as part of the campaign world, but one player created a basic outline of dwarven society to give context to his dwarf PC, another created a backstory around a sacked city and his family in exile, and a third created a secret society that works among the elves and the drow and is dedicated to undoing the sundering of the elves by freeing the drow from the tyranny of Lolth and bringing them back into communion with Corellon.
These provided starting points that are then built on in play.
In the Rolemaster campaign I mentioned the players did maintain a relationship map, but mostly so that they could keep track of the many and various NPCs and factions introduced into the campaign over the course of play, and their relationships to one another and to the PCs.
