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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5411701" data-attributes="member: 26473">Arguably that would make them like most people in their societies, but let's set that aside for a moment.Instead, let's consider this: nothing you write into your character's background ever happened, either. Nothing happens to your character until the game starts.No, but for purposes of playing a roleplaying game, does it really matter? The experiences of 'Bob the Fighter' during the game become his background. His personality develops in play as a result of reacting to his adventures, his backstory begins with a recounting of what happens to him after he sets out on his adventures.It's not an arbitrary point at all. It's the point at which a group of people sat down to play a game together. It's the point at which playing the game becomes a shared experience.Many referees are fond of citing Helmuth von Moltke - ". . . [N]o plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force," paraphrased almost a century later as, "No plan survives contact with the enemy" - to explain what happens when the adventurers actually interact with the game-world, but I've heard very few players express similar sentiments about their characters. The thing is, in my experience, it's no less true for players and their characters than it is for referees and the game-world, and in my opinion that's exactly how it should be, which is why I highlighted the passage in the quote above.Over the years I've seen players write extensive backstories about their characters which are ignored or become irrelevant after only a few hours of actual play. Your character is what he does in the game. Everything else is wishful thinking.I like characters which develop in play because they are, like Tennyson's Ulysses, 'a part of all they have met.' More importantly, they are a part of all everyone at the table meets. Too much emphasis on what happened in a character's completely fictional 'past' can work against this, in my experience.(A corollary to this is one of the reasons I stopped playing d20 games: too much planning for what a character will be twelve levels from now, which can work against responding to the events of the game right now.)So, there's that.</blockquote>

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