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Absolutely. I’ve never seen that.
I have, and it was excellent.

The start of my current campaign consisted of a Bard and his Cavalier buddy roaming up-country, with the Bard telling ludicrous tales of the foes he'd defeated (oh, and the Cavalier was there too) and was going to defeat once he (they) got to the mountains where the bad things were; asking all the while if anyone was willing to risk life and limb to help him.

In this way, going village to village, he recruited the party that started the campaign.
 

Oh I've done 1st level PCs with big backstories. :)

Take an existing high level character I played before that I want to continue playing in a new campaign. They have lots of fun backstory and I can go right into playing them as a narratively developed character already.

D&D energy drainers and multiple planes provide easy reasons to be someplace new at 1st level with almost no resources.
I played a “20th level” Druid - a living legend - who fell in love with a dryad and went off to the feywild with them. Nobody knew what happened to this powerful protector of the woods. A century later he found himself lost in a forest, not knowing who he was or why he got there. Every time he leveled, I skinned it as him ‘remembering’ a bit of his past. Had a bit of fun with the DM coming up with the story of ‘what happened’ over the course of the game.
 



Here's my opinion on C v F temperature and the one thing that F has going for it is its granularity.

Baking is a very precise cooking style. Therefore, more granular temperatures would seem to benefit American baking. However, French bread, croissants, and pastries seem to be making the case ALL ON THEIR OWN that Celsius is the better measure of temperature

(real talk though - converting between C and F is the WORST - add 32 then divide by 5/9ths or something? booo)
 



You glean some very interesting worldbuilding insights by playing a game I like to call "what two concepts are virtually identical in real folklore, and completely unrelated in D&D?" And then just... make them related.

For instance, wandering priest-judge-poets with supernatural powers of persuasion?

Of course, forty-some years of D&D history have taught us this is the Celtic Bard, thought "priest" and "judge" have fallen off along the way. It's a good archetype.

In Arabic, I would have just described the sha'ir. And what does it tell you about your world, if you take the D&D version of the Celtic Bard and the D&D version of Arabic Sha'ir and you decide they've really been the same thing all along?
I love this.


Absolutely. I’ve never seen that. Only the players who earnestly hand over an 8-page backstory of all the cool things they’ve done despite being 1st level and having 0 XP.
I’ve never seen anything like that.
I have never seen this happen, or even heard of it happening to anyone I know IRL. At most, I have had folks be secret heirs or have great destinies.
Same. I’ve also seen characters with big shoes to fill, or a grudge that drives them to gain power, or to spend weeks before the game starts hashing out a culture and home town and family, or the tradition in which the character is trained, etc.

The largest backstory I’ve seen was a character I made, but when we started play he had the story of his ship’s crew getting killed by a necromancer, instigating his seeking out master of sword fighting and spellcraft, and a lot of family/culture/region/history stuff we worked out together.

And then we continued to fill stuff in as we played.
 


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