hawkeyefan
Legend
As mentioned in my post just above, there's a difference between forcing the material into the game (which is bad) and simply using it as background if the game happens to run on to it naturally (which is fine).
What’s the difference? I mean....what do the players in your game run into that you didn’t place?
What makes one thing “forced” and another “discovered”?
Depends on scale, too.
If the party happens to be passing through a PC's hometown and she takes them to introduce to her family, who cares? Roleplay it out, enjoy it, and move on. No extra work for me-as-GM whatsoever.
But when someone's backstory suggests - or forces, or causes a player to expect/demand - one or more entire adventures be centered on that PC, there's trouble a-brewing.
What trouble do you think is brewing?
When I say backstory, I mean something meaningful....a goal or a secret or something else that can contribute to the ongoing story in a meaningful way.
I don’t mean chatting with grandma.
So you think it may be troublesome to focus on a player offered but of backstory. Why? What trouble?
Heh - my problem right now is I've already got too much story* and nowhere near enough time to play through it all.
* - over and above whatever red herrings the players/PCs themselves might introduce and-or follow.
This is one of the reasons I enjoy player offered material....so I don’t have to come up with so much story myself.
Fair enough, if the adventuring takes place in the same general region as where the character's background is set.
No, the background can always matter. Maybe the PC is from a backwoods farm town....this seems to be the default assumption in many cases, and it’s a pretty common trope in fantasy and adventure fiction. Doesn’t that upbringing always matter yo thee character? They go to the big city and are overwhelmed. Then they go to the really big city and realize just how small their town was. Then they encounter entirely different cultures and so on.
Which raises another slight headache: parties of disparate races and-or cultures are quite likely to hail from widely different places - you can only use the "cosmopolitan port town" trope so many times. Which means if the adventuring tends to happen in one area it's not happening in all the others, thus only those PCs who are from the adventuring area are likely to see their backgrounds come into play.
This isn’t remotely true. Again, I’m not talking about stopping by grandma’s farmhouse for some in character banter. I’m talking about goals that can help move the story forward. Maybe the PCs are from all over the place....but maybe they’ve all been wronged by the same person.
It doesn't even need to be that specific. There’s any number of reasons you can come up with to connect a group together. Very often what I’ve seen is a natural “you help me kill the warlord who destroyed my village and I’ll help you recover the lost artifact” kind of bonding.