D&D General It's Session Zero! How Much Backstory Do You Give Your Character?

[CleverNickName]

How much backstory do you give a brand-new character?

Let's say you and your buddies are starting a new year-long D&D campaign. You've all rolled up your characters, bought your equipment, and filled out your alignment and ideals/traits/bonds/flaws. You're about to begin, and your DM has asked you to share your character's backstory.

Do you pull out a sheaf of paper and dive into a half-hour PowerPoint presentation? Do you skip the backstory altogether? Or are you somewhere in the middle?

 

[John R Davis]

Bullet points, maybe 6.

Forestory>>>>backstory

 

[schneeland]

Depends a bit on the specific group, but typically somewhere in the range of "a bit" and "very little", i.e. a few bullet points for ideas I find interesting. And everything else comes either in or after session zero. I typically also don't roll up a character before session zero - for me, session zero also means bouncing ideas off each other and coming up with some sort of consensus what kind of characters and group we want to play.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

It depends on the campaign. I’ve played in campaigns where a few sentences describing my character was all that was needed, and in others I’ve written many paragraphs describing my characters history, past actions, and connections that would be weaves into the overarching stories of the campaign (along with those of the other characters of course).

 

[Minigiant]

1 paragraph per level is which option?

 

[payn]

About to live the backstory.

Although with a good campaign players guide I might get into the spirit of things. Without? Not wasting my time.

 

[CleverNickName]

I like a good amount of backstory, no matter which side of the DM screen I'm playing from.

When I'm running the campaign, I rely on the players to give me enough info about their characters to "plug them in" to the setting and write little side-quests for them. I can run with just the basics (name, background, alignment) but the more info I get, the less time and effort I need to spend. So I encourage the players to give me as much backstory as possible by giving them little rewards for putting in the effort--one time, I let them have a free healing potion if they gave me 300 words or more.

And when I'm a player, I like complicated characters with detailed backstories. A recovering addict, struggling to put his life back together after a stint in prison...I'm not "learning" new spells; I'm remembering spells that I had forgotten. Or a vampire hunter who made a desperate pact with the Raven Queen to stop the progression of his own vampirism...if I don't find and kill the vampire that sired me before I die, I will become the thing I hate. I get input from the DM and include other characters and NPCs. I go all out.

So I voted for ALL THE BACKSTORY, because I can never have too much, but I don't really do timelines and family trees and such.

 

[CleverNickName]

1 paragraph per level is which option?

"Other," I suppose. Or maybe "I'll write more later when I know more about the world."

That's a popular storytelling device in anime and manga, actually: after a few adventures, one of the characters will say something like "Did I ever tell you about the last time I visited this town? It was ten years ago..." and then launch into a whole flashback scene.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Hold on, I need to copy/paste my 75 page backstory for my fairy vampire godling asamir catgirl warlock who once conquered the world but ran afoul of AO the Overgod and was struck down to level 1.

 

[Tonguez]

3 - 5 Game Aspects stating genre, era and setting traits usually does it
So kinda bullet point paragraph, but each of thise bullets can be invoked