DM "adding" to your PC's background?

[Heathen72]

[*** Redacted Per Order of Homeland Security. ***]

One example is building upon a given background, the other changes it.

The Auld Grump

Now that you have explained it, yes(!), and it sounds perfectly reasonable.

Um, are you actually a little grumpy, or am I misreading your tone?

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Hmm... I'm beginning to suspect the guy a couple pages ago who guessed that you had been traumatized by bad GMs in the past was hitting pretty close to the mark. It's the only explanation I have for why the only two options you see are "gotcha!" and "characters from my past will never appear in the game session".



I guess we're in the same boat, because I'm not sure what that ridiculous strawmanning you're doing there is supposed to be accomplishing.



(looks over your character sheet)

Hmm... You say here that your PC is from the kingdom of Scaramouche. Let's see, Mr. Player... Is that your name filled in next to the words "Dungeon Master"? No? Then anything you do with my campaign world had damned well better be with my permission, or I will be calling someone else "Mr. Player". Capiche? Now go back and rewrite your character. And make sure you do it without assuming anything about my campaign world.

...

Oh. You noticed that your character has to be born and that, in itself, assumes something about my campaign world? Clever boy. Now, go find a different game to play in. You've just realized that you've disqualified yourself from mine.

I just don't have time for that type of crap at my table.

No, in fact Mr. Ex Dungeonmaster, it says I was born in Hansor, and you went and wrote in Scaramouche, in crayon, with a smiley face in the 'o'. And now you have no players, have cement blocks on your feet and are looking up from the bottom of the Thames. (Hey, if you feel free to rewrite what I said then I am perfectly at home returning the favor.) I have no time for DMs who try that sort of crap.

Capiche?

If you are the kind of DM who rewrites my character's history because you think that it will fit better into your game then you will never have to worry about my ever wanting to play in your game. I had my fill of 'storytelling' DMs who felt that rewriting PC histories was fine, since it told a 'story'. They did not stay DMs very long.

What is in my backgrounds is what I put into them, not what some DM who wants to write plays feels should be on the sheet. If I write 'Hansor' then I mean 'Hansor', not 'Scaramouche' and I don't want that changed because the DM wants all the PCs to take the railroad to Scaramouche.

If, on the other hand, I had written Scaramouche then we can dance the Fandango - it will have been written in for a reason. It is when the DM rewrites the PC histories that I have complaints. If the DM is building on what I wrote then it is perfectly reasonable - no complaints.

If I wrote that my parents were traveling players who left me on the stairs to the Church of St. Beadle in Hansor then it perfectly fine to discover an aged bard who claims to have been my father, even if the scoundrel is lying through his teeth and cut down my parents in cold blood - it builds on what was written, neither made from whole cloth nor changing what I wrote.

Finding out that I am fourth son of the Baron Scaramouche, fourth of that name, and raised to be his trained assassin, when my character sheet says that I was the child of traveling players and born in Hansor, on the other hand, gets you a character sheet jammed in your craw.

If it turns out that the traveling player who was my father was actually Baron Scaramouche in disguise, who then abandoned both me and my mother, who left me on the church steps.... I will probably look at you funny, but not complain over much, it still builds on what I wrote in my background, though it is reaching, more than a bit.

It is perfectly reasonable for the DM to give input on what he wants to see in my background - if he tells me before I write my background that he wants me to come from Scaramouche, and tells me a bit about why and about the town itself, then we can deal. He is being courteous, I can be the same.

It is reasonable for the DM to look at my sheet and say 'I don't want your character to come from Hansor, there are plot reasons, and I don't want you to know too much about the town', then I will be willing to cross out Hansor and put in another town, one that the DM has no plot reasons to deny.

Not reasonable would be the DM changing my background without my permission.

The Auld Grump

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Now that you have explained it, yes(!), and it sounds perfectly reasonable.

Um, are you actually a little grumpy, or am I misreading your tone?

Right at the moment I am feeling more than a bit grumpy, even for someone who calls himself a 'Grump'. So I really should apologize. (And edit out the part that I find objectionable on rereading.) The term I might use is 'short'.

Part of it is insomnia, part of it is thinking I was being funnier than I actually was, and part of it is that I had a GM who did rewrite PC histories, and refused to understand why this was a problem. He was one of the worst 'Railroad GMs' that I have ever met. (In a Vampire game he also never allowed the PCs to spend XP, when the players complained he explained that if the PCs spent their XP when they wanted to then he would have to be less generous with XP. He was giving less than half the recommended XP at the time.... His campaign ended when none of his players showed up for the game.)

The Auld Grump, bein' a bit short, he is.

 

[DEFCON 1]

One example is building upon a given background, the other changes it.

Oh, okay. Then that makes sense, and I also agree with your statements. Your first post had just seemed so laser-straight that I couldn't tell how hard-lined you were on background material you actually were okay with seeing played out (especially when shown against the other posters who also didn't want backgrounds dealt with). That's why I asked. Thanks for clarifying!

 

[Heathen72]

Right at the moment I am feeling more than a bit grumpy, even for someone who calls himself a 'Grump'. So I really should apologize. (And edit out the part that I find objectionable on rereading.) The term I might use is 'short'.

Part of it is insomnia, part of it is thinking I was being funnier than I actually was, and part of it is that I had a GM who did rewrite PC histories, and refused to understand why this was a problem. He was one of the worst 'Railroad GMs' that I have ever met. (In a Vampire game he also never allowed the PCs to spend XP, when the players complained he explained that if the PCs spent their XP when they wanted to then he would have to be less generous with XP. He was giving less than half the recommended XP at the time.... His campaign ended when none of his players showed up for the game.)

The Auld Grump, bein' a bit short, he is.

No problem at all Auld Grump! I guessed it was probably unintentional, which is why I commented. Such is the nature of written communication.

I too am a wee bit grumpy - an 8 month old son dealing simultaneously with a nasty cold and teeth coming through will certainly keep you up at night! And then I caught his cold, too, so I certainly sympathise with you when it comes to lack of sleep...

When I get grumpy I tend to turn into a bit of a smarty pants. I am less able to simply ignore the people who piss me off, but instead of confronting them I choose this odd middle ground of 'taking the piss'

I usually manage it okay, but right now I feel a little bit trippy...

 

[Jhaelen]

Of course this varies according to players, but is your view? How would you feel?

Imho, it's generally a bad idea unless each of the following applies:
- the player invited you to do it
- you make sure the player is fine with your ideas

Myself, I make it a point to leave gaps in my background for the DM to use as starting points for adventures or to give him some material to create interesting roleplaying encounters. But I would certainly lose trust in my DM and stop doing it, if she abused this to subvert my character concept.

It's fine to confront me with difficult decisions, it's not fine to use my character's past to dictate my future.

 

[The Shaman]

Hmm... I'm beginning to suspect the guy a couple pages ago who guessed that you had been traumatized by bad GMs in the past was hitting pretty close to the mark.

Not even close, actually - most of the referees with whom I've played were pretty good.

It's the only explanation I have for why the only two options you see are "gotcha!" and "characters from my past will never appear in the game session".

Except that those aren't the only two options under discussion - see my reply to Janx and Barastrondo, for example.

I guess we're in the same boat, because I'm not sure what that ridiculous strawmanning you're doing there is supposed to be accomplishing.

 

[Abraxas]

I wouldn't in my D&D* game. There are a lot of indie games that are much more collaborative-on-the-fly that would be a better fit for it, in my opinion, but YMMV. (If the group established this kind of on-the-fly narrative creation model for the game since the beginning, I wouldn't have an issue with it.)

So it isn't unreasonable that a player might not enjoy a DM making things up that muck with his PC's background.

But, on the other hand, if they were already part of a thieves guild, for instance, they could certainly ask if there were any associates or safe houses around, or the bard, for instance, could try to leverage his fame. (I'm not sure what I'd roll for that, probably bard level + Charisma modifier.)

However, this isn't filling in holes - it's using something already presented - which is fine and dandy - but not what the OP is about.

(I've also had the characters discover that their fame/infamy is already increasing over the course of the campaign, through the vehicle of the "town song" (they're from a village known as "The Town Where Heroes Are Born," and famous incidents are featured in verses of a tavern song of the same name) and people hearing about their past adventures. Given that growing fame is explicitly part of the Midwood campaign, players seeking to leverage that on their own is a pretty obvious move, IMO.)

And this is building on what the PCs have done since character creation - which is my preferred style of play.

 

[The Shaman]

That is awesome when it happens. Yet the trick to Athos is that he has some aspects that are deeply personal, based on events that would logically involve only himself and the GM. I feel that the way to best become Athos would require sufficient one-on-one time that it winds up being very similar to talking backstory over lunch before the game starts.

I look at it this way: the player running Athos didn't set out to run Athos, but that's where the events of the game took him.

(And maybe the referee was being a bit of a stinker by making his wife an ex-con, but if Athos' player didn't bother to check into her background a bit, well, that's all on him. )

I honestly don't see collaboration as passivity: the player's taking as active a stake in the world, it merely takes a more metagaming form than straight-up play. Which has its disadvantages, but for people like me, also clear advantages.

Whereas I try to remove the metagaming element as much as practicable.

Difference of opinion, horse races, and all that.

I happen to like both; the ad-libbing memories of "things that never happened" (which is, I figure, a paintbrush that comes awful close to describing the entirety of roleplaying) flexes a different set of creative muscles, and provides a dialogue that's different than the "I create, you interact" dialogue.

I like the image of stretching different creative muscles. In my experience, by the second or third game-night, conversations with and about events past are already taking place, so I feel that the same muscles have the opportunity to get worked in a different context - call if the difference between free weights and machines.

(And I can hear the slogan already: "Roleplaying! Go for the burn!")

There's nothing that prevents painfully trite 'gotcha!'s from arising when, as you say, the Baron de Bauchery abducts someone you met last week rather than someone you knew of old.

Yeah, I knew that example was going to bite me in the rear.

Believe me, that's one I wrestle with all the time; in the case of cape-and-sword stories, it's a really common feature, so to be true to the genre, it should probably come up at some point during the game; on the other hand, I've got to find a more creative way to introduce it if it does.

It's the context, and possibly the foreshadowing, that makes or breaks each one.

I especially agree on the foreshadowing.

 

[kitsune9]

I guess many of you are the same, or do you always have detailed backgrounds in D&D? But anyways let's get to the point: What if I fill in the missing pieces as a surprise-element for a plot and suddenly a long-lost brother appears or mom is kidnapped or a rich uncle gives his niece a sizeable donation?

My philosophy with PC backgrounds is that I like to use them to integrate them somehow into the campaign, either as a side story or a driving plot device for an adventure or two. So I'm definitely into filling in between the lines or introducing a twist; however, I don't believe in screwing my players over if they write a background that has no real bad consequences. For example, if my player writes that he was told by his paladin order to go out into the world and right wrongs, I won't come back and say it was because they hated him and essentially exiled him.

Here's a couple of backstories that I worked in my own details and my players had no issues with them. Of course, I did run it by them at first because if they weren't on board with the ideas, then I wasn't going to run with it.

PC's Story: My player was the daughter of a baroness who is out in the world seeking to prove herself worthy of the future title in taking over the duties of the barony. The barony has fallen on hard times to due lost feud with a hated barony that has managed to usurp much of the fortunes that rightfully belongs to us.

DM's Notes: The current baroness, the mother of the PC, adds to the misfortunes of the barony by trying to live the lifestyle they once had. Lavish parties, opulent clothes, feasts for kings and queens, and servants galore are the rule of the day. Now the barony is heavy in debt and the heir to the barony not only must prove herself capable, but keep the creditors at bay.

PC's Story: My player fled his community because of the wanderlust within him and he didn't want the responsibilities of home.

DM's Notes: He fled because of the arranged marriage his mother and prospective wife wanted for him.