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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ptolemy18" data-source="post: 3753278" data-attributes="member: 24970">I agree and disagree. I like playing peons but even with 1st level characters I usually come up with some basics, because I am all into the Character Acting and all. (<a href="http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html" target="_blank">http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html</a>) Unless it's a drop-down con game or something, I always like coming up with stuff for the first 18 years of their life like "he was raised by farmers, this is his mentor's name, he has a psychological trauma caused by being chased by lizard men in his childhood", that kind of thing. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> The idea being that then the DM can say "The old man sitting at the bar in the tavern turns out to be... your old mentor! He says there is a haunted guard tower outside of town" or "The ogres are invading your home village and gonna burn down the family farm" or stuff like that. Your basic background material to give the DM something to work with other than generic adventure hooks.In my experience this is a question of personal preference; some people are into this and some aren't. One of my friends in my old campaign always played a half-orc barbarian, and then the half-orc barbarian's brother who was almost identical, and so on. Some people overdo it and add way too much complicated back story. (Obviously I think my *own* back stories aren't too complicated so it's a matter of taste... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) It doesn't take me long to come up with this kind of stuff so even if my peon character dies horribly, as peons do, I don't consider it a great loss; there's always a new character to make up. Of course, if I lose multiple characters in a row (never a good thing) I find that my character backgrounds get simpler and simpler...Actually, in the one long D&D3.x campaign I played for six years, most of the time I was making higher-than-1st-level characters (high death rate, plus the "build your new character one level lower than the rest of the party so you can catch up" style), so as time went on my backstories got longer and longer... although usually there was always a gray area of "And then he went on adventures for a few years."Thanks for the props on game balance!</blockquote>

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