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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5479030" data-attributes="member: 42582">Interesting. I tend to take the opposite approach: I often have the players create backgrounds for their PCs that aren't separate, and I very often use backgrounds as the basis for building adventures (I think of it as the players giving me adventure hooks) - especially in the early stages of a campaign, but even as the campaign unfolds I expect the PC backgrounds to develop and become more elaborate as well, creating new opportunities to build adventures around them.Fully agreed.I think this goes to Barastrondo's point about "sticking with the theme". In my current campaign, my instructions to the players at the start of the game were to come up with PCs who were 4e legal, and who had a reason to be ready to fight goblins. I also explained that the game would be set in the default 4e world. One of my players came up with a wizard PC who was from a northern city that had been destroyed by humanoid raiders, and who had since been wandering and making a living as a pastry chef. The PC had at one time been an initiate of the Raven Queen, although that relationship had waned a bit since.Towards the culmination of the first, goblin-fighting, arc of the campaign I introduced this PC's mother as a slave of the goblins. The PCs had a chance to rescue her, but chose a course of action which left her exposed to goblin danger - and when they came back to find her, she was dead. (I would be cautious about doing this in a context where the player himself had had some sort of serious family trauma, but I've been friends with the player in question for many years.) This didn't contradict or upset the background the player had come up with - it reinforced it. (And the PC has subsequently done some very ruthless things to goblins and hobgoblins.)It's to avoid this sort of situation that (in the example above) I stuck the PC's mother in the goblin fortress, as a slave whom the PCs encountered then and there. More generally, I think background is much more powerful as an integral element of the situation with which the players are engaged (via their PCs), rather than as a hook or lure to some new situation.Which brings me to:Once background becomes an integral element of a current situation, it is part of play. But it's a part of play that's been seeded by the player rather than the GM, which (in my experience) often gives it a greater emotional pulling power for the player(s) in question.This hasn't come up. But I have allowed a player to invent an elven secret society (and his PC's membership in it) on the spur of the moment, and then to give the secret hand signal of that society to see if any of the elven NPCs the party was hanging out with were members of that society. He was hoping that the leader of the elvish band was a member; I explained that the leader seemed not to recognise that signal, but another (lesser) NPC did.I'm not an improv performer, so don't know "yes, and . . ." outside the context of RPGs. But what I've just described seems like a fairly straightforward example of "yes, and . . .".I think I'm closer to Janx on this one. Of course, I prefer it when the players (non-passively) describe how they are seeking out NPCs who they believe have reason to be sympathetic to them (as per the above example of sending a secret hand-sign).</blockquote>

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