Coming up with character backgrounds

[Eldorian]

I find it impossible to get a decent background out of my players. Most the characters define themselves by thier actions in the game, so that might be the problem, but I think it is most likely laziness. They think I'm giving them homework, and they don't want to do it. Perhaps if I wrote up a simple questionare and had them fill it out, it would work much better. I'll have to try that. Maybe it will have optional questions with a reward writen next to it, ya know, give an answer of suffecient length, get the bonus. Maybe starting gold, bonus luck points.

I keep a track of what I flub, and if you have negative luck, I flub out of your favor, if you have positive luck, I flub in your favor, works well for keeping the party alive but still allowing me to hurt them occasionally. Each bad flub gives luck, each good flub losses it. You can lose luck for missing games, distracting the game, but you can gain it for doing game related favors and good RP.

Bonus questions like: Pick a relative and give him a strange tale. Write about a childhood adventure.

Eldorian Antar

 

[Hand of Evil]

Interaction is the key. The DM should help the player build the background of the character. This can be done just by asking questions, simple ones.

Examples...
Where were you born, town or city, country side, barn (DM gives name)?
What is mom and dad like? Are they alive?
Brothers/sisters? Are they alive?
Who was you best friend while growing up? Lets hear one of your adventures with them?
Why did you become an adventurer?

This also gives the DM the ability to use the background in his stories.

 

[Drawmack]

Examples...
Where were you born, town or city, country side, barn (DM gives name)?
What is mom and dad like? Are they alive?
Brothers/sisters? Are they alive?
Who was you best friend while growing up? Lets hear one of your adventures with them?
Why did you become an adventurer?

This pretty much is the background outline I hand to the players verbatim. I wrote up an entire article on creating a character background using this outline. I don't have a copy handy but I think I know someone who does.

 

[Zappo]

I just have to comment on how GOD AWFUL the character background generation system in Cyberpunk is:

Ok, Rich, this is what I want to play: He's heir apparent to a wealthy oil tycoon who had his fortune waylayed by a lean placed on the company by...

*Rich rolls dice*
Nope. You're a buvarian nomad with dwarfism who lost two brothers and an uncle to malaria, you were imprisoned by...someone for 3 years and the left side of your face is deformed. *looks up* What are you putting your coat on for? Are you leaving already?

I'm resisting the urge to shove this pencil through your eye socket.

The problem here isn't the system, it's just that you don't want to roll the background randomly. All Cyberpunk GMs that I've known only use the random generation for people who can't or won't come up with a decent background. In those cases, I've found it pretty useful; it quickly produces a bunch of hooks and seeds which you can easily link and detail to make something interesting.

 

[ejja_1]

Character Backgrounds

My players are pretty good about writing up backgrounds, but that probably has something to do with the fact that I award exp for being creative. It's never more than 50exp, but it makes the players happy. As far as working the backgrounds into the storyline, thats never really been a problem. In my homebrew I usually have it occur on another plain of existance, that way you can have characters hailing from Fearune, Grayhawk or wherever else without it clashing with the storyline.

 

[JohnClark]

I usually make a character background based off of the character I want to play in that game. For instance, in our star wars game I knew I wanted to play a jedi guardian, and I found the draethos race to be pretty interesting. So once I had that I did the stats and such and then wrote up the background based on that.