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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DDK" data-source="post: 582331" data-attributes="member: 6469">I've had the problem before many times. I demand a decent background story however I've come to several conclusions through experience. First of all, you have to set perimeters for what can and can't be done in the background. For instance, I now say that you have to pay particular attention to what actions were undertaken. Anything that would normally net you XP, is simply not allowed. That eliminates most fo the problems. Another problem is travel. Some people want to play monks however it's sometimes simply unreasonable to do so due to travel distance and so you simply have to say no or make the player somehow justify how he travelled so far without gaining any experience.Also, I've found that working with the player helps a lot with character backgrounds. If you're there during the process, answering questions, providing suggestions, etc. then you can easily develop a rich history whilst avoiding all the pitfalls of doing so. This also has the added benefit of you being able to incorporate the history much more thoroughly into your world and therefore the characters long-term gaming options are much broader and more interesting. An example would be that it's all very well to say that you're the cousin of a duke, but to say you're the cousin of Duke Amion of House Garesteth, a house dishonoured during a time of reformation but which has slowly reclaimed it's lost honour over the years, is far more interesting than the former.I'd post an example of a rich character history that avoids the pitfalls of XP gain, however it's rather long (2,500 words) so I doubt it'd be appreciated here <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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