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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5415038" data-attributes="member: 18253">In many ways, I agree with this. Some words about what the character did before the game started and some incidents that should or should not motivate them don't mean anything to the game if they don't actually cause observable behaviour in-game. But, there are plenty of good players who can write a background AND act on it. There are also many players who will play their character with a more distinctive personality having crafted a background first to set the stage. I'm one of them to be honest but the best roleplayers at my table are also the ones who create background. Maybe this whole issue is one of semantics but I think there is more to it. Per your earlier "wishful thinking" comment, you seem to be saying that a background can't help a player play their character, that it doesn't change how they act. I think that is demonstrably wrong. I have players at my table still acting on motivations introduced by their backgrounds 12 sessions later and I don't expect that to stop by session 24. Will it be modified by in-game events, maybe even some day completely superceded if they resolve all background items? Possibly. But these characters are certainly the sum of their backgrounds and their in-game actions. My group has 4 core players. In this pool even the weakest player, from an RP point of view, at least makes use of his character's parentage and such written into his background. The rest make heavy to very heavy use of their backgrounds. As a gaming group, few of us would contemplate creating a PC without a background. Separate of how a background shapes a player's RP of his PC, I simply find them useful as a list of things of interest to the PC. THere are times as a ref I like having that information. Does a background need to be 20 pages? No, three to five paragraphs work pretty well, a half page to a page or so. Because of how we do PC creation, backgrounds are not optional for my group's campaigns (whether or not I ref). A background is needed to explain some of the "oddities" introduced in our draft process. However, in a more typical starting session, I would not hold it against a player if they didn't have a background. I think a good player can still do a good job with a PC without it but I also think any player can do a better job with it.</blockquote>

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