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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5411932" data-attributes="member: 26473">Haltherrion/marcq, forgive me for slicing-an-dicing your post; I want to combine some like thoughts, so I'm reordering things a bit. If I end up distorting your post, please understand that it's not intentional.Let's dispose of this first.Nowhere do I draw such a conclusion or make such an argument nor does the fact that von Moltke was a meticulous planner in any way change his own conclusion that the best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men gang aft agley.Now let's move on to the heart of our difference.The fundamental difference between us is that you keep referrring to story and plot and movies and books and "literary endeavours" and I'm talking about playing a game.It is perfectly feasible to play a roleplaying game without ever addressing anything an adventurer did before the game began.One of the characters in the Flashing Blades campaign I'm running began with a one-sentence backstory. By the end of the first night of actual play, he rescued a young acrobat and earned the gratitude of a troupe of commedia dell'arte players, was befriended by a popular courtier and playwright, flirted with a wealthy noblewoman, chased off three dandies who were creating a ruckus, and brought himself to the attention of a pair of nefarious duelists. His sole personality feature specified at the beginning of the game (through a character Secret selected during chargen) is that he has weakness for the ladies, which came into play when he decided to flirt with the noblewoman - everything else flowed from the decisions the player made for the character in the course of actual play.The character is enmeshed in the game-world not because of his background, but because of what transpired by playing the game. He made choices which have consequences, some potentially beneficial, some potentially perilous, which will carry forward when we sit down to play again in a couple of weeks. This didn't take him writing out a lengthy background or me plotting a story.What I enjoy most about roleplaying games are the ways in which they are different from stories and movies, so my emphasis is not on what makes a good story, but what makes a good game.As I already noted in a previous post, players are welcome to write as much or as little backstory as they like if it helps them roleplay - a character's backstory is the player's tool for running the character.Where I see a bright line is creating conflicts which extend from the character's backstory forward into the game. There will be plenty of conflicts which arise from playing the game, conflicts in which all of the players and their characters share.If the characters want to create something in the game-world, they can do it in-character in actual play. They can add to or change anything in the game-world through their characters, provided they possess or gain the necessary resources and skills and are favored with a little bit of (or, depending on how foolhardy they are, a lot of) luck. They can, and should, respond to the conflicts their actions create in the game-world; they'll make friends, make enemies, join groups, found groups, or whatever in-character, and those are the ones which matter ecause they are part of playing the game together and the shared experience which comes from that.So what did that fighter or wizard do for those first years of their fictional lives? As much or as little as the player likes, provided there is a clear distinction between the fiction created whole-cloth by the player before the game starts and the events of the game played by all the players and the referee together at the table. My advice to players is that what your character is going to do is much more important than what your character's done - goals are great, but keep them general at the start, and let them evolve as the game unfolds - and that the most interesting things in your character's life are ahead of her, not behind her.This is why I switched the order of the posts around: if I'm understanding you correctly, your focus on story and literature makes fiction about a character as 'real' as what happens in actual play with a group of players. But I don't equate playing a roleplaying game with literature. I don't believe that an extensive (or any, really) character background is necessary to enjoy the game; I do believe, on the other hand, that the experiences of playing the game serve to define a character better than a bit of fiction created out-of-game, in large part because those in-character, in-play experiences are 'real.'</blockquote>

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