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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9848755" data-attributes="member: 6750908">I had a player pull that on me once-- his PC was amnesiac and being hunted by enemies from his past-- so I rolled with it, tied his enemies into the story the other PCs were pursuing and the game ended. Good DM, right?Started a new campaign, he did it again. So I rolled with it again, only I made his PC a lieutenant of the BBEG who had been defeated by the other PC's allies, in charge of some of the BBEG's dirtiest work. The player played the PC as being shocked and horrified about what he'd done before he lost his memory, and died in a blaze of glory during the final confrontation to give his allies the chance to finish it.He did it again. I twisted every knife I could think of.His next character pitch was-- wait for it-- an amnesiac.I broke down and finally asked him why he didn't want to make up his own backstories anymore. He said he enjoyed the game more when he was trying to figure out what I was doing to him, and especially when I was using hints and little clues to tease him (the player) about it and make the PC writhe in moral agony. So I let him play another amnesiac character, and really put the screws to him. His character had been a Paladin when he was alive, he had a flashback to bouncing his son on his knee when he decapitated the Chapter 1 boss, and a fellow PC was the one who'd murdered him. At one point, the party was attacked by his former adventuring party-- noble heroes all-- determined to return him to his peaceful rest. He loved it.I became a better DM before that game even started; my Viking Hat grew three sizes that day.Different players have different needs, so when I say "no backstories", I don't mean that the player characters are all bundles of mechanics wrapped up in a spherical cow. What I mean is that backstories should be flexible and brief, so that I can hook them-- the game the player wants to play-- into the game I'm running for everyone else. And written at the table, so that the players can stick their own hooks in. Every plot development should be logical, predictable, and completely blindside at least one player at the table. If that player is the one whose idea it was in the first place? Even better.When I say "losing is fun", I don't mean TPK every session or the PCs spinning their wheels. I mean fail forward; for every 5-6 victories where the player characters get to carve their names into the Moon with a giant laser, the bad guys should get one that the PCs also have to look at for the rest of the game. Rolling up a new character doesn't hurt, starting over with a new campaign doesn't hurt, and your players need you to hurt them. Not because it makes the tough fights more tense and makes them appreciate their victories more-- though it does that, too-- but because the hurt, itself, is something they need for the experience to be complete.But all of that requires playing the game at the table and letting the other players-- not just the umpire-- control part of what happened to your character before the gameplay proper started.  And that means... beyond the traditional DM prerogatives of running the world, being willing and ready to play a character that is grounded in the same reality everyone else is playing in.I don't do it every time, but I think every controlling DM and every defiant player should play at least one campaign where every "player" does worldbuilding by taking turns either whitelisting or blacklisting everything from ancestries and classes to cultures and organizations and even monsters, and then having to put the pieces back together in order.It's fun way to learn a hard lesson about sharing the table with other people and working within constraints you didn't choose for yourself.</blockquote>

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