D&D 5E Players railroading dungeonmasters

[Maxperson]

I do encourage my players to create backstories (I love the tables in Xanathar to help with this), but after we had an instance where a player wrote a 3-page background only to have the same character die in the first session - well, let’s just say for both sides of the table’s sanity I ask backstories to be on the brief side.

Yeah. Half a page takes a fairly short amount of time to write. When I create a background for my PC, it takes me all of 5-15 minutes to write up half a page to a page of stuff. 3 pages would be considerably more work, because you're adding a lot more to the background while still keeping it hopefully coherent.

 

[Ovinomancer]

This seems to outline two different issues. The first is the ownership issue -- who owns the fiction, is it entirely the GM or do the players also have some ownership? Let's call this Fiction Control. The most common approach here is heavily weighted to the GM having full and complete ownership of all fiction outside of the character, including external elements of any character background. You see this quite often in complaints about the PCs pushing new things not planned on into the fiction of the world and in statements about veto authority over background fiction introduction. On the other end of this is being perfectly okay with players introducing new elements into the game and having the authority to do so. This approach is very uncommon in the D&D community, though, although it does exist.

The second issue is what kind of game is being played? Let's call this Plot/No Plot. Is it a plot driven game, where the play is expected to be about a specific plotline or element (adventure path play being a prime example of this? Or, is the game driven by what the characters do, and the next moment emerges from this and isn't tied to a plotline? The latter is becoming less common in D&D, but is characterized by the dungeon crawl, where the goal is to solve the dungeon but not adhere to any particular path or plot while doing so.

These combine in interesting ways. If he'll forgive me, @iserith seems to be on the permissive end of fiction control for backstories, and then a non-plot driven game in the second issue, so the first doesn't really impact the second unless the players make it so -- the GM doesn't care. Games that are heavy GM fiction control and heavy plot are very adverse to players introducing new elements into background. To pick on him, @iserith just above posted a good example of a game where the player have significant fiction control to introduce new material in their backstory paired with a strong plot play. So, these can mix and match, but most answers to this fall along these two main axis.

I used to be strong GM fiction control, strong plot, but now am more player fiction control and weak plot to no plot. Well, except that I am running an AP right now, so my most recent 5e game is strong plot. My last few haven't been.

 

[Jaegermonstrous]

Yeah, or consider the plight of the DM who prepares a campaign based on backstories then a player leaves the group. Depending on how much the campaign (or part of it) hinged on their character being there, the DM now has a potential problem. It's not insurmountable, but it's also completely avoidable in the first place.

I work on two fronts with this problem.
On the one hand, I try to have an over-arching campaign that's slightly independent of the PC's backstories. The Big Bad is doing The Bad Thing that the PCs will eventually get roped into, but I also allow for the PC's backstories to have an effect on it. The barbarian's crappy mom is supporting the Big Bad, and that will eventually be a big multi-part adventure for them to deal with.
On the other hand, I've had players leave the group after a lot of parts of their backstory have been put into motion. Instead of erasing them, I leave them in place. The now-dead warlock who royally pissed off his patron? That patron is still pissed, and still doing damage, and the PCs now have to figure out how to resolve that without the warlock. Some of it I'll allow to drop. The monk whose player ghosted? Well, their character did too. The PCs followed up on it a little, then got distracted by Jeff the Throwaway NPC and rather than railroad them into dealing with it I let it go. The things I built into the world for the monk are still there, but now they just add to the world. If the PCs ever get around to visiting the city that monk is from, they'll find a lot of neat things and side quests there.

 

[jmartkdr2]

This seems to outline two different issues. The first is the ownership issue -- who owns the fiction, is it entirely the GM or do the players also have some ownership? Let's call this Fiction Control. The most common approach here is heavily weighted to the GM having full and complete ownership of all fiction outside of the character, including external elements of any character background. You see this quite often in complaints about the PCs pushing new things not planned on into the fiction of the world and in statements about veto authority over background fiction introduction. On the other end of this is being perfectly okay with players introducing new elements into the game and having the authority to do so. This approach is very uncommon in the D&D community, though, although it does exist.

The second issue is what kind of game is being played? Let's call this Plot/No Plot. Is it a plot driven game, where the play is expected to be about a specific plotline or element (adventure path play being a prime example of this? Or, is the game driven by what the characters do, and the next moment emerges from this and isn't tied to a plotline? The latter is becoming less common in D&D, but is characterized by the dungeon crawl, where the goal is to solve the dungeon but not adhere to any particular path or plot while doing so.

These combine in interesting ways. If he'll forgive me, @iserith seems to be on the permissive end of fiction control for backstories, and then a non-plot driven game in the second issue, so the first doesn't really impact the second unless the players make it so -- the GM doesn't care. Games that are heavy GM fiction control and heavy plot are very adverse to players introducing new elements into background. To pick on him, @iserith just above posted a good example of a game where the player have significant fiction control to introduce new material in their backstory paired with a strong plot play. So, these can mix and match, but most answers to this fall along these two main axis.

I used to be strong GM fiction control, strong plot, but now am more player fiction control and weak plot to no plot. Well, except that I am running an AP right now, so my most recent 5e game is strong plot. My last few haven't been.

If we imagine this as a matrix, there's one box that's just harder to do than the other three: open fiction control + strong plot. It's just hard to keep everyone going in the same direction like that unless you have a very structured game or everyone has good storytelling instincts (that is, you all know and understand plot structure). This is, IME, an unusual situation.

With strong gm fiction control plots are easy enough to impose (the classic "dm-driven" game) so long as the players are having fun within the lane you've provided. If you're not going for particular structure at all, then letting the players have more fictional control is simpler (or, has less complications) and can often be helpful (as the player can ensure that the world will work for their character as they see them).

 

[iserith]

These combine in interesting ways. If he'll forgive me, @iserith seems to be on the permissive end of fiction control for backstories, and then a non-plot driven game in the second issue, so the first doesn't really impact the second unless the players make it so -- the GM doesn't care. Games that are heavy GM fiction control and heavy plot are very adverse to players introducing new elements into background. To pick on him, @iserith just above posted a good example of a game where the player have significant fiction control to introduce new material in their backstory paired with a strong plot play. So, these can mix and match, but most answers to this fall along these two main axis.

Yep. As another example, in my current hexcrawl game, the characters have randomly generated personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. One of the characters (a gnome wizard) has the bond, "Ruthless pirates murdered my captain and crewmates, plundered our ship, and left me to die. Vengeance will be mine."

As it happens there's the wreck of a ship as a point of interest/challenge in the hexcrawl and when the characters found out about it, the player was like "Yeah, that's the ship I was on!" The shipwreck occurred 30 years prior to the campaign, but the character is a gnome which doesn't contradict anything in that area. So a little "Yes, and..." from me and boom instant tie-in. This allowed him to help resolve a social interaction challenge with the ghost of the captain later, plus any new details that I revealed he could say, "That's right, how could I have forgotten!"

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Thing is, you and @DEFCON 1 are both right. 1st-level characters are pretty much nobodies at the moment, and this works just fine for Humans and Part-Orcs and Hobbits, but a new-to-adventuring Elf* might have several centuries of prior life to account for (including prior adventuring!) and this runs hard aground on game mechanics.

* - to a lesser extent this can also apply to Gnomes and Dwarves, depending how long-lived one has them in one's setting.

An assumption the game makes, kind of, is that levels once gained stay with you for life. There's no mechanic (and never has been) for what I call "rotting skills", where the abilities gained with adventuring levels slowly fade over time due to disuse. Were there such a mechanic then yes, that 250-year old 1st-level Elf Rogue could have been the 14th-level Fighter who led the Elves into the Battle of Bonbai 184 years ago shortly after singlehandedly slaying Fintixxa the Green Dragon; and who after Bonbai gave up fighting and let those skills rot and memories fade. Now she's trying to start over, and away we go.

Why do they have to be nobodies? One of my characters’s backstories was he was an arch Druid who was ensorcelled by a powerful fey. He went missing 100 years previously only to come back as an old man trying to remember his a past and slowly regaining the memories (and levels) he lost.

the fact that the most powerful and influential npcs in 5e (like lords and nobles and kings and influential merchants) don’t have class levels makes it perfectly reasonable for a player to say, “I’m a famous artisan renown for my paintings”.

they put down their brush and are experiencing the world through adventuring to give themselves inspiration.

It’s not a game breaker that they have renown or are influential.

 

[Oofta]

Confession time: I finally got around to watching the entire video.

Doesn't change my opinion mind you, but I can at least say that I'm confident that I disagree with most things they say about background. Well, not necessarily disagree, but think there are plenty of other alternatives and this is not one I would use.

While I like limiting choices, I just do it by making it clear that no background can bypass class restrictions, that no matter what your connections are there has to be a reason you're risking your neck as an adventurer, why you can't just go run to Mom and Dad if you get into trouble and so on.

On the other hand if someone is an orphan or has no history I reserve the right to make it up. So if your entire village was wiped out by raiders while you were out hunting, surprise! your sister is really alive. But how did she survive? Is it really her?

As far as having "a plot revolving around a player's background"? It doesn't matter for me. I run a very event based game. If one of the events is that the sister is really a vampire? Guess what? She's still a vampire even if Joe moves to Oregon. Maybe she killed off Joe's character and his PC is now one of her thralls ... which could be something the rest of the party is interested in or maybe they thought Joe's PC was a pain in the ass and deserved his fate. It will always be up to the remaining player's PCs to decide what to do.

At most it's a speed bump while I readjust if someone leaves. Meanwhile, I enjoy PCs having some connection to the world around them. Whether that's a paragraph or a short story I don't care.

 

[iserith]

If we imagine this as a matrix, there's one box that's just harder to do than the other three: open fiction control + strong plot. It's just hard to keep everyone going in the same direction like that unless you have a very structured game or everyone has good storytelling instincts (that is, you all know and understand plot structure). This is, IME, an unusual situation.

Having a strong plot makes the game so much harder to run (comparatively speaking) for no gain that I can't really justify it anymore. I get why people do it - it's way less prep. But I'd rather do more prep and have no plot than do less prep and plot because it's easier and more flexible during actual play which is my focus anyway.

 

[Blue]

I have absolutely seen cases were players try to influence the game, at essentially a meta level, with backstories.

Is that a bad thing? Players try to influence the game with the actions of their characters. And the only win condition is "have fun" - it's not zero sum. So is it a bad thing to influence the setting towards one a player want more with backstory?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Right now I have a player with a 250 year old dwarf, that started as a level 1 cleric. We simply explained it that he was in effect a priest without any special powers granted by his deity. Now he's serving in a different fashion and gaining levels as a chosen of his god.

Doesn't ignore his background it's just that not every cleric is granted spells, or at least not spells granted to a 1st level cleric. Another party member has also been around for a while but before they were pulled into the adventuring life they were just a blacksmith. There are plenty of careers that don't involve adventurer levels.

That's very true, and I'd venture a guess that's how most players have always thought about it over the years. To me though it still feels artificial and implausible merely because of how fast characters can (and oftentimes do) go from "powerless" to "superpowered".

In the case of your dwarf... they were a priest for 100+ years getting nothing whatsoever in terms of power (whether that be spells or fighting skill or health etc.). But then for whatever reason they acquire those abilities because they become an "adventurer"-- they go traipsing through a series of caves killing a bunch of rats and wolves-- and now suddenly not only do they now have all this new power, that power essentially begins increasing massively over a matter of hours, days, and weeks. 100 years of leading prayers and doing research and helping townsfolk and healing the sick in the clanhold gives them nothing... but becoming an adventurer and killing a bunch of wild animals and maybe a couple goblins and they're suddenly superpowered compared to everyone else around them.

That's the kind of thing that I see as illogical story progression and why I choose not to use the game mechanics of leveling to indicate anything about who characters are and what characters have done in the past. It just doesn't make any sense.