D&D 5E I Am SO Over The "Rootless Vagabond" Archetype

[Henrix]

What I have done for the past couple of decades is basically state to every new player at the table "Give me something on your characters background. Nothing extravagant, but a half page to a page is good.

I hate writing back story. It is boring and gives little reward, in particular if only the GM gets to see it.
I want feedback at once, and not do it in a vacuum.

Do it together, mesh it together. Talk it through.
Everybody has the gist of the other characters just as if they knew them.
That makes the characters part of each other and the world.

And don't put it all up front. Make a little, enough to get you going, and add more later as it goes along and is needed.
That way you don't end up with a half page of back story for a character that died half way to level two.


But that's me. I want to play the game at the table, with others.

 

[Gadget]

Having only read the first page of this thread, it seems to me that nobody is addressing one of Kamikaze Midget's main points - that players may be gun-shy of playing a character with "attachments" and that the loner-PC may be a reaction to something.

I find that this is very true. There are many DMs (or were, in older more-adversarial DMing style days) who delight in using ANY tie the PC forms with the world as a way of messing with him. Make a friend? He'll get kidnapped. Have a girlfriend? She's gonna be the evil-high-priest's choice of sacrificial victim. Want to marry? She/he will turn out to be a succubus/fiend in disguise, or his/her parent will be a vampire or a demon. If you're the child of a noble, you'll end up being the long-lost heir to some curse/throne/power that will have everyone in the kingdom wanting either a piece of your hide or your blessing on their cause.

So players learned. No friend, no lover, no spouse, no parent, and you couldn't get abused, dragged along, forced to do what you didn't want, etc...

Ahem. I believe I mentioned this very thing up thread. Besides, coming up with a backstory cold turkey, even with a "DM setting primer" on hand, feels too much like homework. I like to have just general or vague idea and then develop a character organically as play progresses.

Another thought: how does the Traits, Flaws, and Bonds system handle this? Wouldn't this be an area of 5e that bears further scrutiny in this context.

 

[Hussar]

Having only read the first page of this thread, it seems to me that nobody is addressing one of Kamikaze Midget's main points - that players may be gun-shy of playing a character with "attachments" and that the loner-PC may be a reaction to something.

I find that this is very true. There are many DMs (or were, in older more-adversarial DMing style days) who delight in using ANY tie the PC forms with the world as a way of messing with him. Make a friend? He'll get kidnapped. Have a girlfriend? She's gonna be the evil-high-priest's choice of sacrificial victim. Want to marry? She/he will turn out to be a succubus/fiend in disguise, or his/her parent will be a vampire or a demon. If you're the child of a noble, you'll end up being the long-lost heir to some curse/throne/power that will have everyone in the kingdom wanting either a piece of your hide or your blessing on their cause.

So players learned. No friend, no lover, no spouse, no parent, and you couldn't get abused, dragged along, forced to do what you didn't want, etc...

This, IMO, is probably the biggest culprit. All it really takes is one experience like this to make players really gun shy about tying themselves to anything. If everything you add to your character is going to be a Monkey's Paw, then why would you take anything?

One mechanic from a game I read a few years back, whose name escapes me - you play 11th century Monks playing a Modern (i.e. 11th C) RPG really helps here. Kinda indie, game within a game thing. Looked like fine. The mechanic was called Background, but, the meaning was different. The player could put up to three things about that character in the Background and it would be true, but, whatever goes into that Background cannot be used by the DM. So, if my Background was, Big Family, then I have this big family and maybe I can get free lodging whenever I go to a city. But, my family never becomes part of the main story, it remains in the Background. Cool way to tie the character to the setting while keeping the player happy that he's not handing the levers to his character to the DM.

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. If the player had spent significant time developing that town, family, whatever, it might be pretty discouraging to see all that work basically swirl around the drain in the first two sessions. Or maybe the player's merchant family enterprise get's destroyed in the first session of the game, and his entire family, barring a small number that get introduced later, is killed. Again, might be a bit of a discouragement to create character background the next time around.

 

[I'm A Banana]

That's the crux of it for many players I've seen. I think it can stem from a lot of different causes: fear of losing agency, preference for power fantasy, expectation of an DM-adversarial playstyle, and even sometimes an unwillingness to push the spotlight away from the (for them) fun element of dungeon crawling.

As a player, I haven't seen much reward in making a lot of connection; it's likely to get ignored in game. A church character can usually keep up with his church, but anything else seemed likely to just get ignored in game.

It would be rather annoying to make up a lot of information, only to find out that none of it actually comes up in the campaign

I think I should be clear that my goal with this is to get to more dungeon crawling, but to have the characters more invested in the goal of that dungeon crawling than "gold and fame and I've got a Good alignment so I'd help." I want them to have a more personal and more interesting stake in the outcomes of the dungeon crawl.

So, like, if every dwarf character has to pick from a list of dwarf-specific plot hooks that are about dwarves in the world (including maybe an item like "One of my cousins was involved in the Lost Mine of Deepmurk, where it was said that they dug so deep they entered the Abyss"), that would then lead to fightin' and explorin' and interactin', related to that hook. As opposed to just dropping that dungeon there and saying "Um, it might be evil, and there's a lot of treasure there."

And it's not back story per se, but rather connections to the world that I'm looking for. Back story is a good way to handle that a lot of the time, but I want stuff that comes up in play, not just interesting past-tense tidbits.

Having only read the first page of this thread, it seems to me that nobody is addressing one of Kamikaze Midget's main points - that players may be gun-shy of playing a character with "attachments" and that the loner-PC may be a reaction to something.

I find that this is very true. There are many DMs (or were, in older more-adversarial DMing style days) who delight in using ANY tie the PC forms with the world as a way of messing with him. Make a friend? He'll get kidnapped. Have a girlfriend? She's gonna be the evil-high-priest's choice of sacrificial victim. Want to marry? She/he will turn out to be a succubus/fiend in disguise, or his/her parent will be a vampire or a demon. If you're the child of a noble, you'll end up being the long-lost heir to some curse/throne/power that will have everyone in the kingdom wanting either a piece of your hide or your blessing on their cause.

So players learned. No friend, no lover, no spouse, no parent, and you couldn't get abused, dragged along, forced to do what you didn't want, etc...

I'm kind of on the fence about this one.

One the one side, if you are signing up to play a game of heroic action and adventure why is it a problem if the things your character values are threatened? I mean, you play a character who willingly undertakes life-threatening dungeon exploration, and presumably your character values their own life, so you're signing up to have things your character values threatened by the DM. It's all just part of the story. "Save your lover from the evil dragon" is a cliche, yeah, but if you're going to save the world from evil demons, yeah, your dad or whatever might be a part of that. Exposing your character to risk is part and parcel of playing the game, after all!

On the other side, the DM killing your dad by fiat can be a little like the DM ruling that you are beat up and stripped naked and thrown into a jail cell by fiat. It screws with how you see your character and MAKES players want to limit possibilities like that.

This is part of why I'm looking for systems that handle stuff like this. SOMETIMES it's a good story, SOMETIMES it's just the DM screwing with you, and it's hard to know when it's column A and when it's column B -- when you as a player should expect to be challenged, and when you as a player should have reasonable confidence of security. And there's a tension there between "It shouldn't be useless" and "It shouldn't be a disadvantage." It would seem like making these purely advantageous would help?
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] 's idea, or something similar, seems a viable way to make these distinctions.

Of course, this doesn't quite explain why someone would be gun-shy about joining an in-world organization or some other campaign group. The Thief's Guild probably isn't going anywhere, so why, when the offer is extended to the party thief to join, do they decline?

Hmmmmm.........

 

[Lerysh]

I have no problem with A lone wolf PC. One of my friends always plays (almost always...90% or so) the "lone wolf" character because he really likes the combat aspect of the game and all the story, NPC, and "role-playing" stuff serves as nothing more than back story to his characters. We all accept this and we all have a great time.

However, as I posted above, when you have a group of characters being a TN Tiefling Warlock, a CG Human Ranger, a CN Human Druid (with god-like stats!), and a CE Dwarven Barbarian...all more or less "lone wolves", you end up with TPK's in short order. They were no longer "lone wolves", they were an actual, roving band of murderhobos. They were only semi-together...most of the time I had three groups; the Warlock staying at one inn, the Ranger at another, the Barbarian and Druid just outside of town. I had to basically run 'three groups' almost every session, with each more or less doing what they felt their character would do. They only came together when I "hand waved" the roleplaying part: "Ok, you all wake up in the morning, have breakfast, and meet up at the crossroads just south of the ruined temple of Wee Jas. You all hear a rather vitriolic sermon going on, presided by priests of Wastri, who have taken over the ruined temple for their own.". If I hadn't done that, each 'group' would have been doing something completely different on their own.

Anyway...as Psikerlord# said, "one per party" is fine, but most/all of a party? No longer a party and just a grouping of people who just happen to be in the same general vicinity of the others...not much fun from a DM'ing perspective, that's for sure. Well, except for watching the inevitable outcome of party implosion....that's good for a laugh (but usually the end to the campaign).

^_^

Paul L. Ming

This party would work out fine with some small nudges in the right direction. After all, the thing to remember is at some level every player volunteered to sit down and play this game right? So you have a couple dark and brooding shadowy figures in your party. You need to give them an outlet to dump that angst that isn't a PC or the party. Let them camp seperately for a while, but then have a camp attacked by Orcs one night or something. He will wish his buddies could have responded in less than 30 rounds I bet. Then, if they aren't following up on the Wee Jas temple thing, have cultists start playing the murderhobos instead. Dissapearances start happening. If only some heroes would investigate.

Also, set up some kind of foil NPC for them, the happy sunshine smiles version of their dark brooding anti-hero shtick. Every player wants the play the PC in their heads their way. If there isn't a way for them to be all lone wolf on an NPC, they will take it out on the other PCs. By contrast, if the PC can tell the halfling fundraiser for homeless orphan veterans fund to take a long walk off a short pier as he walks from breakfast to his band of brothers then you can unite them all in their wolf mentality.

For inspiration, look at The Expendables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xD0junWlFc - Lone Wolves will form a pack if you give them a common enemy and an outlet for their loner attitudes.

 

[BigVanVader]

This party would work out fine with some small nudges in the right direction. After all, the thing to remember is at some level every player volunteered to sit down and play this game right? So you have a couple dark and brooding shadowy figures in your party. You need to give them an outlet to dump that angst that isn't a PC or the party. Let them camp seperately for a while, but then have a camp attacked by Orcs one night or something. He will wish his buddies could have responded in less than 30 rounds I bet. Then, if they aren't following up on the Wee Jas temple thing, have cultists start playing the murderhobos instead. Dissapearances start happening. If only some heroes would investigate.

Also, set up some kind of foil NPC for them, the happy sunshine smiles version of their dark brooding anti-hero shtick. Every player wants the play the PC in their heads their way. If there isn't a way for them to be all lone wolf on an NPC, they will take it out on the other PCs. By contrast, if the PC can tell the halfling fundraiser for homeless orphan veterans fund to take a long walk off a short pier as he walks from breakfast to his band of brothers then you can unite them all in their wolf mentality.

For inspiration, look at The Expendables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xD0junWlFc - Lone Wolves will form a pack if you give them a common enemy and an outlet for their loner attitudes.

I'm not gonna lie, I think the Expendables are fantastic, and I've always wanted to see a campaign based on that team. Running around, gunning everything down, mumbling pre-ass-kicking-one-liners at mooks...it would be great.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

I'm not gonna lie, I think the Expendables are fantastic, and I've always wanted to see a campaign based on that team. Running around, gunning everything down, mumbling pre-ass-kicking-one-liners at mooks...it would be great.

Sounds like every D&D campaign.

 

[innerdude]

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. They are orphans or outcasts or otherwise abandoned souls who needed no one and answer to only themselves. They are Rootless Vagabonds, self-contained engines of freewheeling semi-heroism.

YAWN.

These days, I tend to find such characters taxing, cliche, and a little annoying. They're bland. They have no arc, no growth, no origin, no fate. no goals. They exist to slot into some excuse to slay monsters and then leave, as indistinct and irrelevant as the rest.

...snip...

Which isn't to say that those characters are BAD per se. Just that I'm tired of them. Bored of them, even. They join no organizations, help NPC's as only mercenaries do, want only the most materialistic of things. XP and GP, GP and XP, one more fight, one more goblin, one more MacGuffin. They have nothing external that they value, nothing they're committed to beyond their own empowerment. That's all well and good for one character in a party, or an entire party here or there, to explore those angles, but probably 90% of the characters I've seen in D&D fall into this camp: no connections, no alliances, no memberships, no relationships, and no investigation of how or why that might be weird.

I don't necessarily just blame the players, here. 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. 5e's background charts help a bit, but they've got little in the way of lasting effects, and they're easy to ignore.

Anyway, I float this thread because it sometimes seems like an oddly controversial idea in D&D, to leverage these connections in play. I've seen players try to create characters with "no strings attached," or who resist things like training NPC's or joining organizations on the idea that they don't want to commit to anything. I've heard players say, when pressed for background, that they don't want to give the DM any "fodder" by having things like living parents or family members, or things they value that aren't their swords and their spellbooks.

I've had some success in turning these players around in practice, but the initial resistance always surprises me, and my initial reaction is usually along the lines of "Why do you want to be SO. FREAKIN'. BORING?" But I bet there's plenty of legit reasons why some players are gun-shy about that.


Curious about what you folks might say!

I don't know what it is, but unless I as a GM give my players SPECIFIC instructions to the contrary, this is nearly always how my PCs turn out. It's almost certainly a remnant of days gone by, where power-hungry, railroad-y GMs used any character with a background as a blunt instrument against them. It's also something to do with the escapist nature of RPGs in general---who wants their character to be beholden to anything, or anyone, that might get in the way of "the fun"?

It is baffling to me how difficult it is for some players to decide that it's okay for their PC to actually CARE about something or someone within the game world.

It's also, IMHO, based in a desire to play from pawn stance as much as possible. If a character actually has motivations and connections to the world--heaven forbid!--the player might have to actually ACCOUNT for it in the PC's actions. And who wants to TRY to base a character's actions on their inner motivations when it's just so much easier easier to avoid all that extra thought process, and just play a colorless, cliche cipher from pawn stance?

I'm basically to the point now where unless the player REALLY puts some thought into it, and comes up with a good, compelling reason for his or her character's "Lone Wolf" backstory, I basically don't allow it. I'll present one of several factions in the game world and say, "All of you must belong to one of the following: Faction A, B, or C." Frankly, I've found campaigns seem to work best when all of the players belong to the same faction, or at the very least their chosen factions have compelling reasons to work together, at least temporarily.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Having only read the first page of this thread, it seems to me that nobody is addressing one of Kamikaze Midget's main points - that players may be gun-shy of playing a character with "attachments" and that the loner-PC may be a reaction to something.

I find that this is very true. There are many DMs (or were, in older more-adversarial DMing style days) who delight in using ANY tie the PC forms with the world as a way of messing with him. Make a friend? He'll get kidnapped. Have a girlfriend? She's gonna be the evil-high-priest's choice of sacrificial victim. Want to marry? She/he will turn out to be a succubus/fiend in disguise, or his/her parent will be a vampire or a demon. If you're the child of a noble, you'll end up being the long-lost heir to some curse/throne/power that will have everyone in the kingdom wanting either a piece of your hide or your blessing on their cause.

So players learned. No friend, no lover, no spouse, no parent, and you couldn't get abused, dragged along, forced to do what you didn't want, etc...

No doubt this is true at some level. I myself have used PC backgrounds as "leverage" to move a PC in a particular direction. However, I don't always use that leverage in negative ways, and I think that is key.

In in one campaign, a PC had a written background that included the fact that she had been abandoned at an orphanage, and had only a few clues as to her true origins. I took some of the clues the player provided and introduced a storyline that included some possible links to her mysterious past. The player jumped all over that.

IMHO, a good background can be as much carrot as stick.

 

[Kristivas]

I've heard players say, when pressed for background, that they don't want to give the DM any "fodder" by having things like living parents or family members, or things they value that aren't their swords and their spellbooks.

It depends on the DM, but I understand that outlook. There are two distinct scenarios where I worry about having a character with too many attachments written into the back story.


1. The "Mary Jane". It's the most obvious. Why did Spider-Man wait so long to get with MJ in the Tobey Maguire version? Why the reluctance? If people found out about it, villains would be kidnapping and trying to kill her pretty much all the time. You know, exactly how it turned out in 2 (with Doctor Octopus) and 3 (with James Franco blackmailing her AND "Venom" at the end). I'm loathe to want to write a character into my guy's back story only for it to be in constant danger from a DM who goes to that well too many times. Who will try to rob you of every smart, tactical decision by dangling your cousin Tom, who has a bum leg but a +8 to woodworking and a generous spirit, right over the open pit if your character doesn't do what they're told.

I would never want to suggest to a DM that my characters attachments remain off limits, or suggest that if they were ever threatened, he would just stop forming those attachments and simply be a murder hobo.

A good DM, to me, will not constantly try and pull the Mary Jane on their players in order to maneuver them into his scheme. If they do it, they'll do it once or twice, and it will either be a fantastically epic save or a tragic moment for the character. I'm good with either, but after the 3rd or 4th kidnapping, I'm just going to have to let them toss cousin Tom to the gators, avenge his death later, and then toast to his memory.


2. Doesn't matter. No matter what you write or come up with, none of it is ever mentioned by the DM again. The DM has a storyline and cousin Tom is completely irrelevant.


Of course, in spirit, I agree with the OP. I would rather see characters with detailed back stories with richer interactions.